Thanksgiving

How I Saved Thanksgiving

So I'm at my local grocery store at 6:00 p.m. the evening before Thanksgiving. I've decided that if I do not make green bean casserole for Thanksgiving the "Great Chain of Being" which holds the universe together will collapse. The grocery store is a mad house. The checkout lines extend way down the aisles. Everyone has put off their Thanksgiving shopping till after work on Wednesday, and two clerks are opening great big boxes of frozen pumpkin pies and just handing them out to customers waiting in line. First, I head to the Oriental food section because my secret ingredient in my green bean cassarole is water chestnuts, which is a pretty cool secret ingredient since they are essentially flavorless. However, they do add texture as they would say on the food network. The entire shelf where the water chesnuts would be (if you roast them on an open fire would they boil?) is empty. I get down on my knees and fine one lonely can way up against the wall. It may have been there three or four years, but I grab it and my first ingredient is safe in my cart. I head to the vegetable aisle for French cut green beans, and once again I see an empty space. However, I know the shoppers in my town. I know that no one ever puts anything back where it belongs, and I begin to scan the aisles for random, misplaced cans. Surely, someone has picked one up and put it down in the wrong place! Sure enough, I find one can in the corn section and another behind two cans of okra. The second ingredient is found. Next I need mushrooms. Suspiciously, they are right where they are suppposed to be and there are plenty of them. Cocky from my string of successes I proceed to the soup aisle for one can of condensed cream of mushroom and one can of condensed cream of chicken. The Campbells soup dispenser is empty. The Hill country fare section is empty. There is no cream of mushrrom or cream of chicken soup! Only cream of celery! Who wants there green beans flavored like celery? Why not just eat celery?

This is the part where I save thanksgiving. I notice there are five abuelita looking ladies, and one harassed looking middle-aged man standing in the aisle in front of where the soup should be with their faces turned to the heavens as if they where praying to the gods from cans of soup to fall from the sky. I follow their gaze and see that they are looking at two cases of soup, still in their cases, still shrink wrapped, on the uppermost, toppermost, shelf. One is cream of mushroom and one is cream of chicken. I elbow my way through the half-circle they have made and, reaching up, standing on my tippy toes, manage to bring down both cases of soup. Gnarled old hands are already snatching for the cans before I even have them completely down. I laid the cases on the floor and grabbed one can each and left them fighting, like vultures over a dead water buffalo carcass, for the rest of the cans.

The rest was simply standing in line and swiping my debit card. Thanksgiving was saved.

The Little Girl Who Was Forgotten

Katy Towell has made several videos in this style. Reminds me of Tim Burton, but she is perhaps even darker.

Proposition 8

I used to be pretty ambivalent about the idea of gay marriage. To me, marriage was a heterosexual institution and the idea of two men or two woman actually having a marriage ceremony seemed almost satirical. At the time, I thought it was making a mockery of both the heterosexual idea of marriage, and that the thought that gays needed to get married at all failed to recognize the possibilities of a committed gay relationship without the support of the state. Who needs cake, tuxedos, and a piece of paper to show they are partners in life? Let the breeders have their gift registries, their photographers, their ringbearers! I'm going to spend that money on something important like....well, apparently, Big Gulps at the local convenience store.

I was also a little hung up on the idea of marriage being a sacrament. In this country, despite our insistence that we separate church and state, we frequently combine a civil ceremony with a religious ceremony. In Mexico, people have one ceremony with the state, and a separate ceremony with the church. They are separate and distinct. I thought, "How can we force a church to accept people to participate in a sacrament when that church disagrees?"

So for a long time I was fine with the idea of civil unions. I thought it would answer all of our needs without inspiring a backlash from social conservatives. It would be a separate, but equal solution. However, when I began to realize that people were spending enormous amounts of time and energy to deny me the rights that they themselves enjoy, I started to think of things differently.

If segragation in the American South in the first half of this century can serve as a guide, then it is pretty clear that separate is never equal. As long as one group is excluded from what the mainstream enjoys, then the excluded group will never be considered equal. I can't think of a single exception in history to this simple assertion. If someone can, please comment.

I have been thinking hard about why straight people would deny gay people the right to marry. And I don't just mean disagree with the idea privately, but be so vehemently opposed as to launch state campaigns costing millions of dollars. Currently, 27 states have passed laws forbidding people of the same sex to marry. Even as the country was voting in its first African-America president, voters in Florida and Arizona decided to change their state constitutions to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, and on the same day Arkansas voted to forbid single, or same-sex couples from adopting.

The only reasons to take the trouble to vote in favor of denying someone else a basic human right are hate and fear. I cannot imagine, and I have tried, how the two gay guys living down the street getting married affects anyone but themselves. I know there are some lame arguments about health care going up if insurance is extended to same-sex couples, but wait.....a nine month pregnancy and hospital birth are pretty expensive also! The simple fact is that people see marriage as between a man and a woman because marriage is supposed to ensure that there are two parents around to take care of the kids. If that is the real argument here, why aren't couples who are infertile, or who choose not to have kids, forced to absolve their marriages after a suitable waiting period. No kids=no marriage license. My brother has married three times and has five kids with four different women. And he can get married three more times if he wants to do so. If marriage is so sacred, shouldn't there be a limit? Two per lifetime?

Recently, a woman named Linda who went to my church died. She had been living with another woman for the past four years as her partner and lover and they shared a house. She died unexpectedly of a heart attack one morning and in just a few days Linda's family had come in from California and her girlfriend was out of the house. She wasn't mentioned in the obituary, she didn't sit in the front row of the funeral home with the rest of the family, she wasn't consulted in Linda's business affairs-nothing. She had none of the rights a legally married spouse would have. You may ask "Well, why didn't she make a will?" The answer is "I don't know", but how many married couples are there without wills? Many, I would suspect. Yet they do not have to leave their homes when their partners' die.

The entry isn't the cogent argument I would have liked to have presented. I can take comfort in the idea that there are others on the Internet and in the media who are presenting the careful, logical, argument I feel I should have presented here. I have always felt, as a gay man, a certain pressure from society. I have always felt I was swimming upstream, as it were. But this is the first time, even though I live in a state where gay marriage is not permitted due to a vote taken two years ago, that I have really felt the impact of having the majority of people, however slim that majority may have been, in a state vote to make me a second class person. I never dreamt that the right to marry, once having been granted, would ever be taken away. I thought it would be a gradual process and the states would fall like dominoes, one-by-one, until one of the last state sanctioned discriminatory policies in this country would be gone forever. I am so disappointed to be proven wrong.

WALL-E and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I recently watched two films whose excellence reminded me once again of the possibilities of movies. One was a big budget Disney/Pixar production and one was a low budget French movie. Both were excellent.

Andrew Stanton's WALL-E didn't interest me when it came out this summer. To me it looked like a remake of Short Circuit. Remember "Number 5 is alive!"? How many movies have we already seen about robots falling in love? Remember Heartbeeps with Andy Kauffman and Bernadette Peters? Blegh! So I didn't go see the movie during it's initial run this summer. However, I began to notice that many of the reviews I read were saying it was the best movie of the summer and even that it should be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this spring. I became intrigued, and I went to see it at the dollar movies. My seat was uncomfortable, the screaming baby in front of me needed his diaper changed, and I sat, entranced, by this movie. It is a delightful, sophisticated, blend of romance and satire with allusions to the science fiction movies of the seventies, to Hello Dolly, to 2001: A Space Odyssey and to Charlie Chaplin. The first half of the movie is virtually silent, but the clever filmmakers give us visual clues to fill us in on what has happened to WALL-E and his world. I won't waste time and space here with a plot summary, but let me tell you that WALL-E is endlessly inventive, deeply romantic, and well worth your time.


The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the true story of Jean Bauby, the editor of French Elle magazine, who suffers a catastrophic stroke and becomes the victim of "locked-in syndrome" meaning he is totally paralyzed with the exception of one eye which he blinks in response to a speech therapist who reads him the letters of the alphabet. Using this painstaking, tortuous method, he writes a book about his experiences called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The movie beautifully represents the world from the view of a man who can only use one eye, and the director, 80s painter and tireless self-promoter, Julian Schnabel uses images (butterflies, glaciers melting) that should seem like cliches, but that are somehow made new and beautiful through his vision. Or is it his? It is hard for the average film goer to know how much of the movie is Schnabel's vision, or how much is Janusz Kaminski's, the great cinematographer, who has photographed of all of Speilberg's movies since the early nineties. I haven't seen such effective use of lighting and editing since Traffic. The movie is in French, which is probably one reason it only made $5 million dollars in its theatrical release. I'm sure the movie is out now on DVD, and it would be a great rental or even better purchase. Seek it out!

Sleepy time

Sleepy Time

The end of daylight savings time always messes up my sleep schedule. My problem is that I always equate one extra hour of sleep with some sort of "divine" permission to stay up an extra six hours. I realize it doesn't add up, but I am a master at fooling myself.