Hot off the heels of his appearance in last year’s ‘Fire Island’, Zane Phillips is making a Speedo-clad splash in the new ‘Glamorous’ (for anyone seeking a Samantha fix before her ‘And Just Like That’ return cameo). This marks the auspicious first crowning of Phillips as Dazzler of the Day, with more features like to come.
When the Boston Red Sox chose to change their logo for June to incorporate the LGBTQ+ Progressive flag colors I was so enthused that I wrote a simple ‘Thank you’ on the FaceBook post which announced they had switched their profile pic. Almost immediately, that innocuous comment received a pair of middle-finger emojis from someone who never did answer whether they were meant for me, or the Red Sox (as we were both tagged in it).
So if you’re pondering the matter of whether Pride Month is necessary, and whether it means anything anymore, I suggest you take a look at the comments section of almost any LGBTQ+-related social media post today. The world hasn’t changed all that much – they just don’t bother to hide the hate anymore.
It’s no surprise that I’m not keen on doing what everyone else does. Call it a natural defiance, call it a contrariness, call it basic immaturity, I simply don’t like following the masses. That goes to my taste in plants as well. When we were kids, my brother and I got to pick out one plant for each summer planting season. He would also go for something basic but colorful – a marigold or snapdragon – while I would seek out the unknown ones which hadn’t bloomed yet – a portulaca one year and a dahlia another. While those are all pretty common now, my taste for the rare and not commonly-found items stayed with me, and for many years I tried things that weren’t well-known or widely available. That began to subside the older I got and the more reasonable I grew. These days, it’s not uncommon for me to celebrate the most mundane and common plants, appreciating them for all the reasons they became to popular in the first place.
Case in point is this strikingly-vibrant mandevilla – a flowering tropical plant that is basically everywhere these days, and one which I have constantly avoided because of its ubiquity.
I don’t know why I fought such beauty simply because it was so popular. Going against the grain comes with its own efforts and weariness, and when you’re resisting a thing of prettiness it all feels pretty pointless. Hence this pot of mandevilla, currently burning brightly against a cool blue backdrop. Fired up to handle the heat, it’s a powerhouse bloomer, and one which I am kicking myself for not employing until this year. Better late than never… burn, baby, burn.
This morning’s tour of the gardens was so comprehensive that it overflows into this post, with a couple of out-takes featuring Lychnis and the Japanese Aralia ‘Sun King’. Fuchsia and chartreuse will always be one of my favorite pairings. This electric combo exemplifies the summer season, with its bold and bright refusal to bow-down to something subdued. Some of us may wish for something calm, but summer is tricky in how she grants, and doesn’t grant, wishes.
The second night of summer is one of those trickier spots to navigate. Still so new, but not quite as new as yesterday, the second night suffers a bit of the sophomore slump syndrome. Even my muse has admonished, ‘Don’t go for second best, baby!‘ and I always listen to her. Better yet is this song created expressly for this particular date. It screams summer in the most primal form, and still manages to retain an underlying calm, like all that still water at the bottom of a pool.
The moment we have been waiting for since last year is at hand again: summer has arrived. My simple goal for the season is to make at least walk around our little yard each day, examining the gardens and marking each moment. With the daily rush of life, there have been times when I would simply go from home to office and back, without a step outside. That results in a confined, claustrophobic aspect to the day that isn’t always felt immediately, but eventually comes out in agitation and annoyance. Anything to avoid those ‘A’ words is a welcome effort at prevention. And so we walk…
The Japanese iris, which I’d brought back from years of neglect, is beginning a splendid show, a little earlier than usual but who could ever be mad about that?
A beach rose – Rosa rugosa – which I put in when our trips to Ogunquit fell by the wayside for a bit, reminds us of the sea – sweet memories of summer vacations and Maine visits and all of it lovely.
Dangling their blooms like fiery skirts of celebration, these begonias lean over the lip of their pot to provide a stunning show. Hell’s bells indeed.
The evening primrose – Oenothera – is always indicative of the start of summer. They open their blooms at first daylight, then close them as evening approaches. It’s a charming trait, a brave one, to be so openly enamored of the sun. I admire the transparency of that sort of sun love.
This pink version of the butterfly weed (Asclepias) was a volunteer, and I have no idea who or what brought it into the garden. Aptly named as it’s a favorite of butterflies, I decided to keep it, despite its propensity for seeding itself all over the place. We don’t slut shame anyone here.
Our lace-cap hydrangea has just begun to reveal its lacy form. This one started off true-blue, but has shifted into the purple and pink realm. It’s been an interesting transformation, and over the past few years it’s produced varying shades of pink to blue. My preference for blue will require more coffee grounds from Andy to add to the soil, if I decide to so force the issue.
When the walk meanders into the shaded area of the garden, a discernible shift in atmosphere occurs – and a very welcome one. Without a strong showing of sun to fuel any bright flowers, the foliage demands an appreciation of form and architecture, and a more studied view of subtle coloring. A stand of the elegant Lady’s fern (Athyrium filix-femina) sways in the slightest breeze, evoking a calm and tranquility that the brighter sections of garden could never conjure.
The wolf’s eye dogwood doubles its creamy bite with its faux flowers and variegated foliage. A tree that echoes itself is an exercise in beautiful vanity.
From the upper echelon of the garden to the ground, this bright little patch of sedum (I think) provides succulent form and hue, hot and spiky and spreading.
The chartreuse blooms of the lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis) are a hazy bonus for a plant renowned for handsome foliage, and make for a much more interesting filler of bouquets than baby’s freaking breath.
Ferns and foliage offer stunning shades of color, even if they are slightly subdued. Here the maidenhair fern reaches its fingers toward the Japanese painted fern, while a silvery hosta does its best to keep things calm and cool between them.
For our final photo of this fun post, we have reached the front yard, where our hydrangeas are just beginning their performance. A soft pink in color (I gave up on making these blue years ago – there’s just not enough acid or coffee grounds to sustain it) this is the ‘Endless Summer’ variety that swept through garden centers and nurseries a while ago. Blooming on old and new wood, it usually guarantees a decent crop of flowers even for the shorter summers. Hopefully this will not be one of those…
One of the traditions that Andy brought into my life, and one that we have religiously employed for the past twenty three years, has been making a list of seasonal wishes burning them on the first day of a new season. Today we burned our summer wishes, lighting them in the garden and releasing them into the summer sky. To celebrate, I give you a second song for summer (following this morning’s bohemian entry).
The burning of the wishes offers a chance at assessment and aspiration, a chance to maybe manifest our dreams and hope into something that coalesces as a goal. We burn them to set them free as much as we burn them into our minds. The wrinkled carcass of ash soon scatters itself to the summer breeze – the rest is up to us.
Do I believe our wishes turn into something tangible? Not at all. Do I believe they offer the opportunity for something wonderful? Absolutely. There are no fairy godmothers that appear in a puff of smoke and sparkle, granting wishes with a swish of a star-studded wand. There are, however, fairy godfathers who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make such magic happen, to make the summer matter.
Let our wings beat on then, blowing such wishes to the wind, manifesting their results in a different way, in a way we never imagined possible. Summer’s fireflies are all the magic we need. Make your wishes and blow…
Taking the pressure off is a summer habit we learn from our very first summers free from school. Somehow, even with jobs that run year-round, some of us manage to maintain that idea of releasing the pressure in the summer months – the living being easy and everything. Even if it doesn’t involve vacations or beach-trips or even time off, there is a mood and atmosphere to summer that slows everything down. This season, I’m jumping on board and taking things a little easier here too – and that begins with a bohemian theme that is really just an excuse to be lazy and messy and unfocused – the best possible attitude to hold for summer.
Doffing the swim trunks and skinny dipping is a bohemian rite of passage, and a fitting entry into the summer season. When you’ve been bound by pants and belts and shirts and ties since last summer, there is a fundamental freedom in gliding through the water completely unfettered. Summer unfurls in liberating fashion, recalling the heady glory of that last day of school. I remember walking home from a last day of fifth or sixth grade and throwing my pencils up in the air like some graduation commercial.
Summer in these parts has always been coupled with music – and every first day of the season comes with a musical accompaniment. Here are a few of those songs and related posts:
Last summer it was ‘How We Used to Live‘ – a song that went back decades to a summer in Boston. Later that night, it was all about the ‘Summer Wine‘.
A virtual visit to ‘San Remo’ was the musical theme for the summer of 2021, along with an early salvo of ‘Where the Boys Are‘. (The latter also closed out the summer in a slower format.)
In case anyone has forgotten the summer of 2020 (and my how we have all tried) it’s here in a song ~ ‘Vincent: Starry, Starry Night‘ – but it was the ‘Second Night Of Summer‘ that touched me more.
June 2019 feels like a lifetime ago, and in many ways it was one of the last moments of innocence before we all understood what a deadly worldwide pandemic was really like – even if we didn’t want to know. The music was lighter, as were the blog posts, and I’m still looking for the way back there.
‘Don’t Dream It’s Over‘ was the languid shuffler that kicked off the summer of 2018. When this music plays, summer memories are conjured – the certain cadence of musical notes as much a trigger of memory as scent and fragrance. Water hyacinths named by a poet, and the unnamed pain that summer sometimes wrought.
Music and summer are a combustible pairing. Each feeds into the other, and it’s never ‘Too Much’ despite what the Spice Girls might say. The best way to save a summer day is to put it into a song.
As for this summer and its bohemian spirit, I’m going to do my best to keep things relaxed and easy, taking the moments as they come, inhabiting each day whether it’s sunny or rainy or something infuriatingly in-between. Summer should be the least-serious season, and I’m just starting to celebrate that. Swimsuits off!
Earlier this month, Chad Putman turned 48 years old and moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico in an effort to recharge and take advantage of a mid-life opportunity. I like that take on what others have traditionally dismissed as a mid-life crisis, and changing woe-is-me perspectives and feelings of powerlessness are two tenets of Putman’s latest endeavor. His website and mantra of Make Your It Happen is a treasure-trove of inspiration and aspiration, and Putman’s indefatigable spirit is gloriously infectious. That’s not to say he’s lost in the clouds and unaware of the reality of life – quite the opposite – he acknowledges and embraces those trying moments, turning them into lessons and signposts of when and how to change and evolve. He’s taken his years of experience and turned them into a hybrid that may have been his destiny all along, in the form of one triumphant triumvirate: Consultant, Coaching & Project Development. For all of that, Putman earns his first Dazzler of the Day crowning. Check out his website here, and follow the journey on his YouTube channel here.
Norma Desmond may not be the ideal image of a human being aging gracefully, considering she ended up murdering a bloke when confronted with her own age and reality, but the woman who portrayed her so magnificently, Gloria Swanson, had quite a different story. Swanson turned her life after ‘Sunset Boulevard’ into one glorious adventure after another, and while she never matched the once-in-a-lifetime frisson of her portrayal of Ms. Desmond, she went on to live quite a happily-ever-after, and so we take a page out of her 1972 book to revisit these wonderful photographs by Allan Warren (a fuller set of which may be found on Trey Speegle’s exquisite website here). They form the inspirational kick-off for my summer wardrobe, and since caftans forgive the most devilish of middle-age paunches I’m running with it. Aside from the free-flowing form, however, I’m transfixed by the colors – both of her outfit and the surrounding green of her Fifth Avenue apartment.
The idea of summer in New York City has fascinated me, and as much as I attempted to avoid it, there would invariably come a moment when I had to be in the city for something in the middle of summer, and I always wondered how the locals did it for the entire season. When the heat got into absolutely every stationary thing – sidewalk, street, cement, building, subway station, stairwell, and entryway – I wondered how anyone kept their cool. For someone like Ms. Swanson, it appears she stayed chill by keeping her wardrobe vibrant and alive. That brings us to a song from the 1970 musical ‘Applause’ which was a loose musical adaptation of ‘All About Eve’. Flashes of brilliance from the black-and-white past lend a summer sparkle to this last post of spring.
Like Lauren Bacall, who starred in ‘Applause’, Swanson was a show-business survivor. These photos were reportedly taken in her apartment at 4 AM after she finished a performance in one of her shows. I’ve seen an interview where she recalls getting her second wind at 11 PM. As someone who’s typically in bed at that time after sleeping through his first wind, I’m struck by the drive it takes to make one a star, and how that drive never really goes away for some people.
I’m also struck by the idea of a New York City apartment in the 1970’s – this one looks like a quieter cousin of the one held by Diana Vreeland, so boldly soaked in red, red, RED. It conjures the notion of creating little floating hubs of beauty in the midst of a city besieged by heat and humidity and the general stickiness of summer.
Such colorful fabulousness is a much-appreciated jolt in a season that hasn’t given us many hints of warmth in the last few weeks. Perhaps this post will change that as we turn the page to summer proper.
All I wanted to do was pick up a Father’s Day card and get home out of the rain, so I zipped into the Rite Aid parking lot and searched the card stock. While there, I got sidetracked by the nail polish, but thought better of it. As I was checking out, the tapping of my credit card wasn’t good enough, so I slid it into the reader, but that wasn’t working either. The teenybopper cashier peered over the counter.
CASHIER: Oh, flip it.
ME: And reverse it?
CASHIER: Hey! That’s one of my Mom’s favorite songs!
MY INNER VOICE: Shut the fuck up.
MY OUTER VOICE: And that’s how old I am!
CASHIER: Oh I like all the old jams.
MY EYES: Seriously, shut the fuck up.
It’s getting more and more difficult not to choose violence these days.
At the time of this writing, the sky is threatening rain and gloom for the third day in a row, and I hope that Mother Nature is getting all this purgatorial meteorological mayhem out of the way now. Spring has always been a bit dramatic, but it’s getting old. We want sun and fun and heat (and by we I mean my seedlings). On with the last recap of the spring!
It began with this Speedo trap.
I suddenly felt like I’d taken all my clothes off.
Red hot poker? I don’t even know her… and I won’t even grow her.
A bit of an existential crisis was started and finished over a scant three day period.
Happily, the ending merely proved another part of the journey.
Dazzlers of the Day included Sara Bareilles, Matt Rife, Alex Newell, and Jack Smith.
A blazing and brazen hue of the most striking magenta comes courtesy of the Lychnis blooms here. While individually small, they still manage to cry out to be seen from across the yard – so intense and rich is their color. I admire and appreciate such tenacious refusal to be ignored, and it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. These days, however, I find myself equally enchanted by the foliage and stems literally beneath the show.
The lychnis has fuzzy leaves of silvery gray – a stark contrast in form, style and color from the blooms – and these leaves form a blanket of cooling hues to douse the flames of what they carry.
While I will always love bold and unbridled color, I find myself with a growing appreciation and enjoyment of the calmer, more neutral tones, such as the sage-like beauty of this lychnis patch. It has a calming element that appeals to those of us on the hunt for tranquility. The same thing has happened to my assessment and appreciation of the hosta. I’d always considered them dull and lifeless, not taking the time or shifting my perspective to see their beauty.
That bodes well for the lychnis, as the leaves are around for far longer than the flowers. Sometimes beauty is duration – simply surviving, and continuing to move forward, is what makes something beautiful.
There is often a key event in the onset of dementia or Alzheimer’s that clues an onlooker in to the insidious arrival of one of life’s more debilitating conditions. It isn’t always seen until looking back, and it’s often the simplest and smallest of events. Sometimes it is a misplaced item, a key object that has never gone missing before and is suddenly found in the most unlikely of places – car keys in the freezer, socks in the desk drawer, an orange in the medicine cabinet. Sometimes it’s a sentence or phrase that makes no sense, has no relatable context in the conversation, one that forced the listener to pause and check their own hearing and perception because who knows who is losing their faculties first?
The first time I noticed a tangible change in my Dad was five or six years ago. It was a beautiful summer evening, and I’d driven to Amsterdam to drop off something for Mom. She was out somewhere, so I rang the doorbell to Dad wouldn’t be surprised when I walked in. Through the glass door, I could see him walking toward me, with a puzzled look on his face. As my visit was unannounced and unexpected, I first thought that was the reason for his confusion.
His gaze was usually sharp, keen and intently analytical when he focused on something. That night his face held a hazy and somewhat quizzical smile, and for a while I wasn’t sure he knew who I was. It was a large and dramatic leap to make, especially as this was the first time I ever noticed it, but looking back I see it was the beginning of the slow but steady debilitation – the long decline had begun. It pained me more to think maybe it was the first hint of him not knowing who he was, and rather than scare me he fixed a weak smile on his face and let me into the house.
His gaze would return to its sharp stance the next time I saw him, and stay there for a year or two. But it had begun, and slowly the eyes grew gray and faded, losing their focus, losing their recognition, losing the joy we once might have elicited from him.
That first day it happened I think was the hardest. That’s when the grieving for me began, and in the following years it has been a slow and constant grieving, a sorrow I fight against in finding little bits of hope that grow ever more scarce and elusive.
It is the longest goodbye yet it comes with the danger of not having the closure that most endings have. There will likely not be a goodbye of recognizance, at least not one that will be transmitted to those of us left behind. Maybe that’s for the better, maybe that removes the sadness of the occasion for the person transitioning. I don’t know – this is well beyond me, and it will always be beyond me.
As the years progressed, and the days grew dimmer, the space and the world that Dad occupied grew ever-smaller. Before, he had the run of the world – his reach extended as far as his means could take him – and that was entirely around the world. Though he wasn’t big on travel, it was always possible. That was one of the first things to go, as he lost his ability to safely drive. He still had our magnificent house and yard to traverse, and someone was always on hand to bring him to wherever he needed to go. That slowly came to an end, as his ability to make it up and down stairs decreased, limiting him to one floor, and then one room. Soon enough it will be one bed or chair.
Worse than the physical decline was the mental deterioration. Always one of the sharpest people I’d known, Dad was never easily fooled. He saw things and voiced his take on them, not always in the kindest manner, but you always knew where he stood, and he always stood on the side of honesty and bluntness, cushioned by a keen sense of humor, ever ready to laugh at whatever nonsense his sons or the world was throwing at him. Watching those aspects drain from him may be the hardest part of seeing him get older.
As the bad days began to outnumber the good days, and Dad was confined to a single room, I searched for glimmers of hope, any little thing that brought him slowly back to the man I once remembered.
‘Are you in there, Dad?’ I wonder like a little boy, sometimes out loud, contemplating my own decline and wondering at my own sanity. I trust he is, even if he doesn’t say it, even if he doesn’t recognize things, even if we don’t recognize what is happening in his head. There is so much in shadow now, but I still hold onto that belief because it’s all we have.
On Father’s Day, the only way I have of honoring him is to share this in a silly blog post, in words he will never read, in sentiments of love he may never feel, but I will never stop trying, never stop sharing how much I have admired and appreciated him, never stop loving him.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad – I love you.
Was I being ridiculous in the way I was reacting to a glowing profile piece by my favorite local writer? Absolutely, yet my reaction wasn’t a reaction to the story itself, but the earlier parts of my life that were represented here, and on this blog. It was a mirror held not by my own hands, but by someone else; I couldn’t move to re-position the light or shift the angle to my best side. Steve held it, and I was frozen in the reflection. If I saw narcissism and ego there, it wasn’t in the telling of the tale, but in the substance of the story. And to be critical or bothered by that was unfair to Steve, and unfair to myself.
Yes, vanity plays a certain part here, particularly in the early years when vanity was all I had to keep me from completely hating myself. It was my weapon and my wound. It propped me up when there was nothing inside me. It proved a way of pretend that allowed me to work on the serious stuff behind the scenes. Slowly, the inside caught up to the outside, and in a strange way I was going through that same journey in how I was reading and taking in this story.
On the third day after it came out I spoke with the main players who so graciously offered their views for the story. Andy told me I was overreacting; Sherri thought I was overthinking it; Suzie thought it was a fine piece; Skip thought my insecurities were getting the better of me – and they were all correct. I’d written a few messages of thanks to Steve for taking the time and making the effort to write the story, but I wondered whether they were coming across as hollow. That third day, he reached out to ask if I was doing a blog post on it, and if so whether I wanted to flip our roles and interview him about what it was like to write it. I was honored to be asked that by someone I’d always admired, and in order to do that, I would have to read it.
To the backing soundtrack of my favorite Madonna song ever, I sat down alone in the attic and opened the newspaper again, slowly reading and savoring every carefully-chosen word, marveling at the artistry, getting lost in this story of someone I thought I knew so well, seen through the eyes of a relative stranger, seen honestly and critically and somehow affectionately in the way that the best artists and writers are able to view and appreciate the most flawed and awful among us.
He allowed me to get out of my own way and see myself for all the contradictory, ridiculous, worth-while, talented, courageous, scared, and silly things that I was – vanity was just a naughtier word for pride. He showed me what the world had seen then, and what it sees now. He gave me the opportunity to embrace being fabulous and flamboyant in the most authentic and genuine manner possible.
That shouldn’t have to come from someone else for me to believe it, and the fact that it still does is further evidence there is more work for me to do. Much more work – and I’m grateful for that.
The work I put out twenty years ago is infinitely different than the work I put out today. The person I was then was entirely bereft of many of the most salient traits I exhibit now. But that’s what happens in twenty years. I can acknowledge and embrace and decry and condemn all that came before, and at the same time move beyond them for the person I’ve become now. Twenty years of blogging don’t define me anymore than a single profile defines me – and I can celebrate both. Steve gave me that gift, even if it took a while to fully figure it out.
And so it was that learned to accept this celebration no matter what the naysayers and haters might say. After reading the story late that night, I stayed up even later to explain my response to Steve, and include a few interview questions to wrap it all up. What follows are excerpts from that exchange:
ALAN: When I first contacted you to discuss the possibility of a story on the 20th anniversary of my blog, I was genuinely seeking your honest and real thoughts of whether it was a story worth writing. At that time, I wanted you to tell me your honest opinion on whether there was something there, and as we talked it through, it almost felt like you, through your experience at sussing out a compelling angle that most of us couldn’t detect, were carving out a narrative that juxtaposed the creatively flamboyant self-expression of the blog with my equally-long career in the state of New York. By the end of our conversation, it almost felt like you had talked me into doing a profile instead of me having proposed it. How far off is that description and what do you recall of that first phone call?
STEVE: A story needs an angle, a pitch. I don’t go in having decided definitively what the story is, of course: You have to be willing to throw out all of your preconceptions if an interview turns a corner you weren’t expecting. That’s why I prefer to interview in person or on the phone vs. emailing questions: There’s spontaneity in the give-and-take of a conversation, and people are also more likely to roam across subjects when talking than if they’re focused on getting the words and sentences right as they type. For example: If I’d emailed questions to Andy, I highly doubt I’d have gotten the great quote about him not being willing to pay $1,000 even to see the pope in a hula skirt, singing while playing ukulele.
That’s all a preamble for saying that when you pitched the story, I needed some idea why it was worth doing. What’s the peg, the hook? It could be timeliness: This is happening now. So the pitch in January would have been the 20th anniversary of the blog. Knowing it was unlikely to get done by the end of January, I needed another timeliness angle to sell to my editors, and pitching it for the centerpiece of the Unwind lifestyle section on the day of the Albany Pride parade became a natural. (You are gay, right?)
With that settled, it needed to be honed. There are lots of gay people, and lots of gay writers, so why you, and why now? Because it’s Pride month and you’re gay and you have a blog that is 20 years old that you write posts for every day and you have million-a-month traffic and you refuse to make any money from it even though with some effort you could likely double your annual income and your blog is racy and you have a state job in human resources… And I knew I could get a compelling story out of it.
Did I talk you into being profiled? No. I refined the reasons for doing it, so I could make the case to my editors about why [we] should commit resources to a story that, even today, we knew would upset some readers because we’re splashing a flaming homo all over their Sunday newspaper.
ALAN: What were your doubts or stumbling points as you began to solidify ideas for the profile?
STEVE: None, except I knew I’d have to write the hell out of it. Writing about a writer, after all, has its perils. You don’t get paid for writing, but you absolutely are a real writer, and a good one.
ALAN: How did you research and decide where to dig for the previous posts you referenced?
STEVE: You dig until you find something useful to the story you’re trying to tell. Since the blog is at the 20-year mark, it was natural to go back 10 years and see what’s there.
ALAN: Confession: it took me three days to read the story in its entirety. I was just too freaked out by the barrage of what I saw as self-obsession, narcissism and ego – I thought that the Capital Region would hate me – and then my insecurity reached a point where I started to question whether you had intentionally just let me go on with just enough vanity to destroy myself with my own words and images.
STEVE: Oh, good lord…
ALAN: Only after realizing what I had done did I go back and give it a close reading, at the exact time you contacted me about doing a blog on the process of writing the piece, which I took as something significant. Since you reached out about that, what did you most want to convey in this follow-up of sorts? It felt like you might have more to say.
STEVE: You’re still overthinking it. I truly just thought you could get a fun blog out of it. It’s a regular habit — for journalists, anyway, who are always prospecting for new material — to pass along ideas to colleagues.
ALAN: You spoke with four of my favorite people in the world ~ Andy, Suzie, Sherri and Skip. What was your impression of each of them, and how did their responses change or shift the narrative?
STEVE: Each was an excellent interview suggestion and valuable to the finished story. Andy I didn’t know at all. He was funnier than I expected. He was essential for the domestic/relationship angle. Suzie I needed for history. Sherri for professional. Because you described Skip as your blogmaster, he was, I thought, much more heavily involved in the blog than he turned out to be. But I got something much better: The unexpected, unusual and very touching story of a close friendship between a flamboyant gay man and a straight married dad who’s so utterly comfortable in his own skin that he fully embraces the friendship.
ALAN: It is apparent how much work you put into this piece, and I am touched and grateful that you helped make what could have been silly and frivolous into something that was deeper and yet still fun. What are the rewards for yourself when you complete an article about another person?
STEVE: That I’ve used my interviewing, reporting and writing talents to share with my readers an interesting person, whom they otherwise might not know about, in a way that is fair, accurate, compelling and true to that person. I basically wrote your obituary, but you aren’t dead, so it’s a profile.
After our interview/exchange, I thought back on my relationship with Steve. It was a leap of faith for me to entrust a profile to someone I’d known of for years, but didn’t really know at all. After the emotional reckoning that seeing my best and worst aspects in print brought about, I got to see and accept things from his view, and ultimately that was an incredibly valuable gift. I shared a few more private observations about my takes on our limited in-person interactions over the years, and asked that he send me some of his work that was most personal to him.
The first was this touching story about his mom and changing traditions – a story that starts out as a sweet memory of holidays past and evolves into a poignant reminder of loss and grief. Those same themes are present in this post about the unexpected death of a friend, and how the seemingly mundane turns of life – the making and sharing of a meal, the deceptively-insignificant brushes of existence – take on unbearable emotional meaning when the one who once performed them is suddenly gone. Companion pieces of sorts, they form bookends of the somber beauty that can sometimes frame the only way we can make sense of a brutal, ugly world.
Reading his words left me feeling a little closer to him, and made our recent interactions mean more than just the transactional workings of story, subject, and writer. It feels fitting to leave the last words of this post, and this chapter, in the capable hands of Steve himself, and this was his response to my recollection of our previous meetings: “Though we’ve been aware of one another, and read each others’ work, for more than two decades, we’ve met in person only a handful of times. We don’t know one another. I wanted to figure out what makes you tick. And I like the challenge of telling an interesting story for my readers, telling it well, and telling it in a manner that befits the subject.”
It took me three full days before I could bring myself to do a close reading of this excellent profile that Steve Barnes wrote about the 20th anniversary of my blog in the Times Union in its entirety. It was available on newsstands last Saturday, and early that morning I went out scouring the area to pick up a few copies. Not having purchased an actual newspaper in years, I was surprised by how few stores even carried them anymore – I made it in and out of several gas stations, a Stewarts, and a Starbucks before finding a few at Coulsen’s News, and then they didn’t take American Express so I couldn’t even purchase a copy there. I had, however, glimpsed a tantalizing preview of the front page of the ‘Unwind’ section, and its accompanying artwork, the main photo of which I’d sent to Steve just about a week or so prior. It looked impressive at first glance, and while part of me shrank at the exposure – the same part that always shied away whenever anyone proverbially sang my praises or drew attention to me in any way – I still thought it would be wonderful to read, and I’d trusted Steve’s words not to do me dirty.
Finally finding a hefty stash of the local paper at Price Chopper, I picked up several copies out of vanity and excitement, hastening home to feast upon what was surely to be a great, if self-indulgent, read. Unaccustomed to seeing or reading about what anyone other than myself wrote about me, it was a new experience, and an unexpectedly uncomfortable one. As much as I trusted Steve, it dawned on me then, in the panicked realization that it was too late to do anything, that I’d given up complete control over the telling of my story to another person for the first time in my life. All of the perfectionist control-freak tendencies I’d held for over forty years came bubbling to the surface. All of the social anxiety I relatively-recently named and tamed, and was only starting to understand, came rushing back. Perhaps worse, and more damaging than anything else, all of the insecurities and wonder at my own worth came out of hiding in grotesque and frightening fashion, prompting me to begin reading the piece in the mindset of the most critical and trollish reader and jumping to the worst and wildest versions of how I might be viewed.
Such was my suddenly-terror-stricken state of mind when I began (and I would only just begin and do a quick skimming of the article at that time) that after reading a few paragraphs, I put the paper down. A poisonous seed of self-doubt, scattered to a dry wind decades ago and left to languish in inhospitable darkness, had been brought to light and nourishment, fed by the manure of my own neuroses and issues. All the ultimately-false accusations of narcissism and vanity, all the photos from the past twenty years conspired to rope me into a place of despondent paranoia.
My own words, which sometimes felt very grand and powerful as I wrote them out in the quiet environs and privacy of my home, where the only response or reaction was the silent relief at having put them down and out of my head, looked questionable and simplistic. The superficial silliness that dominated the early years and provided salacious click-bait to trick people into visiting the site felt frivolous and indulgent. And still there was more – all those photos submitted by me, and many other pictures culled directly from my site – selfie after selfie after selfie, from a time before anyone even knew what a selfie was – paraded in a way that made me almost sick of myself. (Not a foreign land by any means, and never a fun visit.)
Imagining any of the many strangers who had taken shots at me over the years for vanity and ego, my first thought was that if anyone read this I would be the most hated man in Albany, and it already felt like I’d cracked the top ten a long time ago. Reading the profile in that mindset proved impossible, and so I had to stop. For all the reports of excessive vanity, and for all the accusations of acute narcissism, I genuinely didn’t want to read another word about myself.
When the article reached the homes of all the newspaper subscribers the next day, I began to hear from people – and still I didn’t open my copy or scroll through the online story. Out of respect for the writer, and to outwardly assume a stance of pride, I shared it half-heartedly on my social media feeds. The comments were overwhelmingly kind, but that has never fed into any authentic shift in my own estimation of myself. Years of not feeling like I belonged anywhere would not be forgotten so easily, despite an equal amount of years spent working to correct it.
It had been out for two days, and I still I hadn’t read it in full. Andy encouraged me to give it another go, adamantly expressing that it wasn’t coming across like I thought it was, but for various reasons I couldn’t do it. A testament to its title, I was genuinely too shy to look too closely at it. I went to bed and spent another restless night trying to focus on anything else.
Then, on the third day, the writer himself contacted me and proposed a blog post on it, one in which he welcomed questions on how he went about writing it, turning the interviewer into the interviewee for this subject. I would have to read the story now, and figure out a way to politely decline… the way the truly shy among us have been declining life for years.
{To be continued…}
