Christmas Memories

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When I was little, my older brother and I had a strange tradition.   We’d put on my parents’ Andy Williams’ Christmas Show record album, get down on the living room’s hardwood floor—me wearing my Donald Duck pajamas—and spin around on our knees.   We were whirling dervishes, accelerating to the  music, and inevitably, hysterically wiping out into each other or the sofa (or both).

These kinds of behavior are hard to analyze.   Was it a protest of absurdity against what we regarded as the cornball musical tastes of our parents?    Was it a way of joining with the sentimentality of the season, on our own terms, in the least conventional way that we could fashion?

All I can say is that Christmas was a time of great excitement.  There were the toys, the candy, the cookies, the snow forts, and the crackling wood in the fireplace.  There was also the allure of miracles.  Not that I was raised with a particularly strong sense of reverence for the season.   When we  broke out the Christmas ornaments, my mother used to put up a creche, but it always seemed  as make believe as the stuffed animals and Matchbox cars I played with.   In fact, I sometimes incorporated the nativity scene figurines into my imaginary games, with the wisemen and angels leading cross-country races through the house.

Science was the greater influence growing up so the Christmas story interested me from an academic point of view rather than a spiritual one.   We lived in Buffalo, New York, and I assumed that the rest of the world was freezing cold and snowy in December.    I wanted to know how baby Jesus survived in that straw-laid crib, barely sheltered by an open stable?

Santa Claus intrigued me even more.   If he brought gifts to every single kid around the world, how long did that take?   My brother and I looked up population data and calculated how fast Santa would have to travel to do his job in one night.   Still, I believed.   If it could be done by superheroes like Flash, it could be done by Santa.

I believed up to the time that I walked in on my mom and brother talking about a world globe he had gotten as a gift.  My brother had questions about the Arctic Circle, and my mom was telling him it was all ice, no land, completely uninhabitable.   I asked:

“But how does Santa live there?”

My mom looked at me with a slight smile, no doubt touched by my innocence, but the truth was there in the awkward silence.  It had all been a deceit.

Even without Santa Claus or Jesus Christ, I always felt that there was something different going on this time of year—good will toward men, a little extra kindness, unexpected generosity.  I like gift giving (and receiving) and sometimes think that maybe that’s enough of a reason to celebrate.  Shouldn’t there be at least one time of the year where you go out of your way to give something to the people who are important in your life?

These days, Christmas morning is mimosa’s and hot cocoa while my partner and I unwrap our presents.  Sometimes we’ll watch an animated film by Disney or Hiyao Miyazaki.   Often, we’ll find ourselves back in bed for an afternoon nap.   There are a few tasks to do like phone calls, cleaning up the breakfast dishes, and taking out garbage bags full of wrapping paper.  But mostly it’s laying around in our pajamas and not caring for a day if we make it out of the house.   That’s something worth looking forward to and reason enough for me to celebrate this time of year.

Outlining: How I hate thee

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There’s a division among fiction writers: those who outline their projects and those who wing it.

The outliners say they could never organize their plots, sub-plots or character arcs without drawing out the architecture of their story, separate from the narrative.

The non-outliners say their process is more spontaneous, and necessarily so. They need to let the story happen to them, and they consider outlining a tedious chore that results in an uninspiring, paint-by-numbers project.

(I suspect that non-outliners often overstate their freedom from outlining. To be a successful writer, you need—at least—to submit a plot synopsis at some point in the publishing process. And unless you are a certified genius, which few of us are, I don’t think it’s possible to keep all the many details of a 60-100K word story laid out logically in your head).

I consider myself a reluctant outliner. I absolutely abhor it, and I only fall back on outlining when I start losing track of my story, usually around 20-30K words. Even then, I’m resistant to outlining further than I’ve written, a sort of outline-as-you-go technique. I don’t recommend this approach. While it satisfies my need to write unfettered, with a childlike sense of possibility, I’ve blindly hit walls on many occasions because I’m not committed to the way ahead.

There are many outline resources.  Here’s a familiar romance outline:

Boy meets boy

Boy loses boy

Boy gets boy back again

Or,

Hero has a problem

Hero tries to fix the problem (usually through three tries)

Hero overcomes the problem

These broad sections of the story coincide with the dramatic structure: Act I, Act II and Act III. Or you can do Act I – V if you want to include falling action and denouement.

The first plot diagram was created by German playwright and novelist Gustav Freytag and has become known as Freytag’s Pyramid.  Here it is in its simplest form (swiped from Wikipedia).

Its a helpful way to visualize the dynamic of rising tension, or stakes.  As novel writing how-to author Jack Bickham puts it: the further along your story goes, the worse shape your hero should be in (paraphrased). A good example is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The hero Uncle Tom, a mid-19th century American slave, gets passed from owner to owner, one worse than the next, and ends up in the hands of super-villain Simon Legree.

For epic fantasy, the standard structural guide is Joseph Campbell’s monomyth or The Hero’s Journey, which is a much more detailed outline.   I found this interesting chart about it at Wikipedia.

There are entire courses on mastering the construction of this kind of story.

So, what do I do with all of these resources? Study them for awhile and hope that some of the information synchs up in my head subconsciously so I hopefully will never have to study them again. I once tried a technique suggested by Beckham: use an index card for each scene of your story indicating:

Story question

Conflict

Disaster

I was supposed to tack each card up on a bulletin board in sequential order. Then I got bored with it, and the cards got buried on my desk.

The next morning, my cat had jumped up on the desk, batted everything around and scattered the index cards all over the floor. At least she thought the exercise was a fun idea.

World AIDS Day

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As part of the post-Stonewall generation, I grew up at a time when AIDS was matter-of-fact.   That’s not to say there wasn’t stigma or misinformation.   In school, I listened to friends joke pretty brutally about it.   AIDS was something gay men got deservedly, and no one knew anyone who was gay.   I barely understood that I was gay myself.

In gay literature and films of the 1980’s and early 90’s, AIDS always figured in, often as a dominant theme.   Our stories were sometimes criticized as too AIDS-focused, excluding other facets of gay life.   But really, what was the alternative?   Men getting sick and dying from the disease was the reality.    To omit these stories would have been dishonest.

My favorite novel from the time was John Weir’s The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket.   It’s been compared to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and concerns a young man who finds out he’s HIV positive and goes on an adventure in New York City, a sort of last hurrah.   In those days, no one lived long with AIDS.   I didn’t personally know anyone who had contracted it, but the terrifying cinematic images—emaciated men in hospital beds with gory lesions—were branded in my consciousness.

The first gay film I ever saw, in secret, sneaking off to a late night showing at an indie theater in Manhattan, was Longtime Companion. I cried through the last thirty minutes of the movie, but it wasn’t as depressing of an initiation to gay life as it might sound.   I saw men caring for each other.   I saw the possibility of fighting against injustice.   I saw hope.

The AIDS epidemic has changed and accordingly, so have gay men’s stories.   I was surprised and encouraged by a recent statistic.   The life expectancy for someone diagnosed with AIDS has increased to 30-40 years such that on average, many people with AIDS will live well into their 60’s, some even longer, approaching a healthy lifespan.

Yet AIDS continues to impact our lives.   The number of newly infected men has stayed flat from year to year.   In some urban areas, as many as one in five gay men are positive.   There’s been a lot of focus on transmission rates among young guys, but there are new diagnoses in virtually every age group so it’s not just a problem for the younger generation.

From my experience, I don’t think that the major factor is that guys no longer care or that they are choosing to get infected (“bug chasers” was the media hype a few years back).   HIV is sexually transmitted, and sexual behavior is stubbornly resistant to change.   Those who criticize gay men for being “promiscuous” or lacking self-control might ask themselves:  is it healthier to fear sex or to enjoy sex?

Eroticizing safer sex is the best solution in my opinion.   Finding a cure is of course even better, but for now we need realistic approaches, gay-affirming approaches, versus shame and fear campaigns.

This year’s World AIDS Day theme promotes “Universal Access and Human Rights.”   These are issues that impact people everywhere, but they’re hugely different if you live in a western country or in places like sub-Saharan Africa.   Access to treatment is a problem in the United States.   For the majority of people living with AIDS globally, it’s a tragedy:  about half of people living with AIDS have access to the medicine they need.   Think locally, act globally.   We’ve got a long way to go.

Writing prompts

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I haven’t shared much of my creative writing in awhile so I thought I’d post a couple of my favorite pieces from a writing group I participated in a few months back.

This was a common exercise:   someone picks out a random word and you have about ten minutes to take off from there.   It’s fun, it loosens up your brain-—my sometimes glacially-compacted vocabulary-—and it helps you find your voice.   In my case, that voice tended to be ironic and absurd.

TRAUMA

She named the twins Trauma and Drama.   No one ever knew exactly why.   There were stories and explanations.   She used to be a stage actress.   The girl’s father was foreign—from Guam or something like that.   And this—the lamest—from my ever understated mother:   “She was a little eccentric.”   Trauma and Drama.   I knew why she came up with those names.   The woman was batshit nuts.

Trauma and Drama followed me through kindergarten, grade school and all the way to junior high.   I always thought of them as neglected porcelain dolls.   They were identical.   Straight black hair.   Skin the color of dishwater.   Big black pupils that took up all of their eyes.   They always looked like they were about to cry, but they never did, at least I never saw them crying.   You couldn’t help but be fascinated by them, and I noticed they only had three outfits that they alternated between themselves through the week:   one gray, one blue, one pink over-sized shirt, all the same style, each embroidered around the collar with tiny hearts, that they wore through all the seasons, paired with a pair of dingy, baggy jeans.   I wondered how they decided who got to wear which one each morning.

Kids used to laugh a little at them when they walked into the lunch room or came out on the playground, always hand-in-hand.   I think they spooked the teachers.   They never got called on in class, and wherever they were sitting, the teacher seemed to wander to the other side of the room.   Sure, they got teased, but they stuck together.   Trauma and Drama.   They were all each other had.

GRACE

“There but for the grace of God,” Grandma said when the big birch tree split open in a lightning storm and missed hitting the house by an arm’s reach.

“There but for the grace of God,” she’d say three, four, five times during the nightly news.   Stories about the police finding missing children or hunger relief arriving in some far off country or the hero of the week who dove into the icy water to rescue the passenger from a car that flew off a bridge.

She also said it when some guy would hold the door open for her at the mall.   Or when the weatherman predicted rain on a sunny day.   Or when she found her reading glasses wedged beneath the sofa cushion.

I’ll tell you:  it all got a little tired living with Granny.   And it made me wonder what is there left for her to proclaim to be a miracle.? My lord—she’d seen it all!   And doesn’t such a reckless overuse of a proclamation cheapen the real acts of grace, the real miracles when they actually happen?   Taking all these thoughts together, I’ve come to the conclusion that religion is a load of bunk.

 

Charles Busch’s The Divine Sister

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Previously books and movie reivews, this week Broadway.

It’s been a little while since my partner and I went to a show, last spring actually, to see the silly, contagious ode to 80’s headbanging Rock of Ages.  Charles Busch’s The Divine Sister is equally tongue-in-cheek in tone but a lot more clever and satisfying.

Busch has a cult following.   His theater and film projects haven’t made it to the marquee’s of Times Square or the strip mall multiplexes (with the exception of his Tale of the Allergist’s Wife). But his admirers will follow him wherever he goes from Off Broadway to the community theaters across the country.

He works in the medium of 50’s/60’s screen diva reincarnation: Die, Mommy, Die! (Bette Davis), Psycho Beach Party (Joan Crawford), which perhaps has a limited audience, but for those of us who could imagine few pleasures greater than snuggling in for the night to watch All About Eve, he delivers big time.   There’s absurdity galore, and emoting doesn’t begin to describe Busch’s stage performance, but I wouldn’t classify his portrayals as send-up or parody.   As ridiculous and vulgar as things can get—his sexually voracious Angela Arden in Die, Mommy, Die comes to mind—he manages to walk that difficult line between caricature and misogyny. He is, after all, a gay man in make-up and a dress who loves the campy female characters he recreates. The send-up is in the subversion of the sunnied, homogenized family-friendliness of 50’s and 60’s screen hits.

In The Divine Sister, Busch plays Mother Superior at St. Veronica’s, a convent on the skids. The buildings are falling apart, there’s no money to rebuild the community, a visiting German nun is up to something nefarious late at night, and young Sister Agnes–a derivation from the movie Agnes of God–is having miraculous, and likely, fictitious visions that have attracted the interest of a Hollywood screenwriter.

It’s hard for Busch to stand out amidst the phenomenal comic cast. Julie Halston is the hard edged Sister Acacius who is steadily unraveling from a guilty conscience. Alison Fraser channels Marlene Dietrich cum Frau Blucher as Sister Walburga, and Jennifer Van Dyck is a snooty heiress prone to lapse into absurd, meandering reminiscences.   Busch’s deference to his co-stars is a triumph.  Everyone has their “moment,” and you find yourself rooting for everyone no matter what their bizarre motives.

Best of all is how the actors play off each other with perfect comic timing. A string of double entendre insults delivered to Sister Acacius (too dirty to repeat here) was a highlight. Good for full-body laughter.