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The Dating Game: The Major and The Birds

Saturday, the Major and I drove up the Sonoma Coast for the day, stopping at Tony’s in Tomales for barbecued oysters and clam chowder, then on to Bodega to visit the schoolhouse in Hitchcock’s The Birds, pastries in Sebastopol, then back to the CocoPlex for a screening of the Hitchcock classic.

The Major looks like a former marine but talks and gesticulates with a near-lispy sweetness and gaiety that is just a pleasure to be around.  That contrast is something that has always been very attractive to me.  If the last two left to be chosen for my team were a furry femme bear or a lumberjack, I’d go with the furry femme bear.  Oh, and he calls me “buddy,” which just melts my butter, fueling my Skipper and Gilligan fantasies.

And speaking of Gilligan, my first thought on Sherwood Schwartz’s recent passing was that I never got to ask him how “The Pro-fes-sor aand Ma-ry Aann” became “aand the rest.”

Seeing Suzanne Pleshette all pecked up on her front her steps is always upsetting.  How could Mitch have ditched her anyway?  Soulful and sexy, an educator, and looking like Elizabeth Taylor’s younger sister… The jerk.
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The Dating Game: Florida and My Mister Roberts

Last week I was in Florida, visiting my sisters with my brother and his family. My parents also drove down from Alabama, and we rented a beach house on Indian Shores. The trip this time was very mellow, just hanging out on the beach and with each other, eating grouper sandwiches, bitching about our siblings, building sand castles. And then along came this dreamy bipedal humanoid cryptid whom we shall call Mr. Roberts. Mr. Roberts and I had been conversing online for several months, but having seen only one picture of his fur-ensconced upper half, I had no reason to believe that such a creature could actually exist outside of a fetishist’s CGI enhanced imagination. He lives a few hours away from my sisters, and drove over to spend a day on the beach with me and my family. He was indeed real, and as hairy as his photo suggested, no CGI enhancement necessary. I couldn’t keep my hands off of him, for in addition to looking like something that should be petted, he was just so accessible and welcoming, a 6’2″ shaggy pooch. We drove to Fort deSoto, a beautiful undeveloped island near the mouth of Tampa Bay, and waded and bobbed around and got to know each other better, before heading back to the beach house and a yummy dinner with fish that my brother and brother-in-law snatched from the Gulf that morning. We watched the sun set, one of those spectacular pastel fiery blood orange Florida sunsets, as my family danced in the makeshift cabana/disco they set up behind us. Feigning tiredness, Mr. Roberts asked if it was okay if he could stay the night, so we pushed together the sofas and tried our dangdest to bridge the gap between the two couches, but my sister, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew kept coming in and out of the room. Like, all night. An exasperated Mr. Roberts breathed “Is your family name Kockblocker??” Somehow we ended up falling asleep, various limbs noiselessly entwined, our interaction unfortunately more Hardy Boys than X-Tube, the next day coming way too soon.

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A Wedding in the Midwest

I spent a week in Moline and Chicago recently to attend the wedding of BC’s niece. And to help with the flowers, table settings, and then emergency wilted flower resuscitation. Everything came off splendidly—except the chicken, which I’ll get to in a bit—the bride swaddled in white, the groom surrounded by sexy 20-somethings, everybody dancing. I adore BC’s family, and their extended network of ex-husbands, childhood friends, and very sexually active octogenarian neighbors. It’s like stepping into a sitcom, every moment so filled with jolly repartee, bright bubbly guests, and hushed musings on So-n-so’s investment in African gold, brother What’s-his-face’s wife who hasn’t spoken to her husband in years yet still shares a bed with him, What’s-his-name’s squandering of his wife’s inheritance on the riverboat casino, the love child, the father who’s now a woman, the son without a father…

The chicken at the wedding was without a doubt the most challenging thing I’ve ever encountered in edible form. Overcooked, sauceless, characterless, flavorless and cold, accompanied by… what, I can’t even remember. Please, let me forget, but not without giving thanks to the brave chickens who gave of their breasts to our festive group mastication.

BC and I went out a few days before to dinner at the local steakhouse, accompanied by the bride’s mother and her current beau. The midwest is where you should always order steak. Mine was impossibly tender, like butter. I didn’t even need a knife. I completely ignored my dinner companions and made love to my New York strip, right there on the table, the juicy object of my ravenous appetite, slicing it into tinier and tinier mouth-watering morsels, hoping it wouldn’t end, licking my plate and knife as it disappeared forever.

Everybody in this area either works for, or has worked for, or their children will soon work for John Deere. Including BC’s stepdad, now retired, who took us on a private tour of the combine factory. We got to climb into a giant combine and were then driven through the plant in a golf cart and through the process of the combine’s creation. Most of the workers calmly pushed buttons that controlled machines that did the work that I had imagined the workers would be doing. The John Deere Company, with headquarters and factories and facilities all over the area, is hardly noticed, except that every other business is “John Deere” something or other. They’ve minimized their visual presence by integrating their buildings seamlessly, sensitively, and beautifully into the urban and rural landscape, as much a part of the community as the community is of it.

We got to see a wonderful show of chairs at the Figge Museum, “The Art of Seating,” including some of my faves—the Lavernes’ Lily Chair, Herbert Von Thaden’s Adjustable Lounge Chair, George Nelson’s Medium Arm Fiberglass Chair… I got in trouble for taking pictures. An attendant ran up three flights of stairs—perhaps she viewed me on some monitor somewhere, or someone alerted her to my violation via walkie-talkie—to breathlessly request that I please stop photographing the chairs.

After the wedding, we drove to Chicago to visit BC’s dad, who lives right around the corner from where the big Gay Pride parade was going on. We walked on over just as the parade was ending, wading through the one-foot deep mound of bottles and cups, and bumping into the drunken stumbling hooting half-naked proud homosexualists. I have never felt so old, so consciously not naked, or so far removed from anything resembling pride.

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The Dating Game: Giancarlo and My Foreign Correspondent’s Mom

Giancarlo has dark sad eyes, a permanent 5 o’clock shadow, and an ever-shifting facial hair configuration. He’s attentive and sparkly, talks a mile a minute, and is a super snazzy dresser. We ate at Criolla, a really wonderful new Southern restaurant where the Bagdad Cafe used to be. I call him Giancarlo because he reminds me of Giancarlo Giannini, only cuter, if you could possibly imagine such a thing. After dinner we hiked up to Kite Hill and sat on the bench overlooking downtown and the east bay, watching the reflections of the setting sun in the windows across the water. We didn’t kiss or embrace, or even hold hands, but the comfort I felt from his presence produced an enveloping sense of contentment.

He’s lost a lot of weight recently. And on purpose. The chubby chaser in me can’t bear to look at the before pictures, as they’re so arousing. I bite my tongue, saying “good for you, losing all that weight!” instead of the “oh my god, you were so hot!” that I want to blurt out. It’s not that I eroticize excess body weight—or is it?—and I do want to be supportive of a healthier him, I just think a little belly is so adorable, a sign of a lack of restraint. Enjoy the creampuff already, a tornado could suck us all away tomorrow.

Tonight I had dinner with my Foreign Correspondent and his mom, also at Criolla. She was curious about the food of the American south. She’s here seeking a bride for her son, the man who, until a few months ago, was to have spent the rest of his life with me, Wife #1. I’ve told him that if she asks about the wife and two children of mine that he told her about, I’m going to have be straight with her—I mean, gay. I don’t think it’s my right to interfere with his version of himself, but I’m not participating in a fiction about me. She’s very concerned about her son’s very apparent buttcrack, which he can’t seem to keep from being exposed due to his tight shirts and low-hanging pants. When they came to the Castro last week, the naked guys happened to be hanging out on the street, and the worries about her son’s exposure were put in a different kind of perspective. She’s from a part of the world where women can’t even show their head hair, so seeing pubic shrubbery on the streets is something like teleporting to Sodom and Gomorrah. She’s a dear woman, softspoken, a wonderful cook and very devoted to her son. I would love to have called her mom.

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Dating Game: The Major

The shaving thing really bugs me. The Major came over last night and unveiled his barbed pubis and clipped chest. This guy is my Lou Grant; big bushy eyebrows, thick furry thighs… and then this pink area. Pink, and stubbly. The significant reduction in sensual possibilities confounded me.

I met him over the weekend, brunching at Tangerine in the Castro. He’s adorable, easy to talk to, with furry hobbit knuckles. After brunch, he grabbed me and kissed me on the street in front of the crowded-to-capacity Tangerine’s picture windows. It was so exciting, to be pounced on so publicly, and with such apparent urgency, but totally and completely embarrassing in front of all those brunchers. The various stimuli increased the signal output from a part of my brain called the para-ventricular nucleus. The signals then passed through special autonomic nerves in my spinal cord, pelvic nerves and the cavernous nerves that run along my prostate gland to reach the corpora cavernosa and the arteries that supply them with blood. Despite my slightly befuddled state, somehow the muscle fibres in the corpora relaxed, allowing blood to fill the spaces between them. Muscle fibres in my arteries relaxed as well, and there was suddenly an eight-fold increase in blood flow. The increased blood flow quickly expanded the corpora, then stretched the surrounding sheath (the tunica). As the tunica stretched, it blocked off the veins that normally take blood away from my corpora cavernosa. This trapped blood, the pressure becoming very high and the result quite erect. He kissed me again, as passionately as a kiss on the street in broad daylight could be, then fled, speeding away on his scooter, leaving me with my hands in my pockets and a fraught 6-block walk home.

Impulsively, I texted him later and asked if he wanted to come over the next day to pursue a sudden increase in noradrenaline production from nerves in our genitalia, to trigger and contract the muscle fibres in our corpora cavernosa and the supplying arteries. Hence the encounter with the clipped and snipped pink sector.

For the moment, I’m afraid I can’t see the forrest for the tree is bare. But stay tuned, it’s bound to grow back…

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Dresses and Wild Dinners

BC and I headed over to the Legion of Honor with Dean this weekend to see Pulp Fashion: The Art of Isabelle de Borchgrave. What is it with San Francisco and dresses? A few weeks ago we went to the Balenciaga show at the deYoung. Cristóbal Balenciaga created dresses inspired by Spanish culture and history, elegantly reducing the trills and elaborations into simple beautifully flowing lines and curves. Using only paper, Borchgrave recreates dresses made by famous designers or found in historical and allegorical paintings. While Balenciaga mined the rich history of Spanish couture to create something new and elegant, for me Borchgrave’s creations fall short of being transformed into something really new, just time-consuming reproductions that make me long for the real thing.

ForageSF is a local group attempting to connect San Franciscans with the wild food around them. Saturday night they sponsored a dinner for about 80 of us, structured around the theme of the morel mushroom. The menu contained a beautiful etching of morels, erroneously identified as “le morilles,” improper in gender and quantity, which pretty much set the tone of the meal. While most dishes were carefully crafted, and did contain many interesting ingredients, the foraged components functioned more or less as garnishes, sometimes completely lost. There were 8 courses. The first course was a crostino brushed with fresh bay laurel leaf infused butter, a really wonderfully vibrant flavor. The last course was a serving of perfectly ripe strawberries, dusted with fennel pollen, drizzled with balsamic vinegar and garnished with crème fraiche, each ingredient vivid and distinct. The dishes in between included: a galette of nettles on soggy puff pastry; a wild onion soup with not enough morel flavor to register on my palate; fried smelt; musty duck and mushy risotto; a salad of delicate wild flowers completely obliterated by delicious vinegared beets and a tangy champagne vinaigrette; and yet another rice dish, but this one quite good, with mackerel, sea beans, a quail egg and ponzu. I applaud the ambitiousness of their venture, and it was amazing that they were able to feed us all in a South-of-Market warehouse space, but I think the dishes would have been more successful if the subtle flavors of the foraged ingredients were allowed to shine through.

Last night I dined at La Ciccia with Big Chris, Su-Chen, Emily and Dean, a Sardinian restaurant on 30th Street, spending about half what I spent with the foragers, and for a meal that was twice as good, simply perfection.  Every dish was loaded with flavor, the stewed octopus and calamari impossibly tender, the clams tasting of garlic and the sea, the different textures in the gnocchetti and pork ragu a delight on the tongue. Foragers, take note: let the ingredients do the talking.

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A Birthday for Emily

Every year I look forward to Emily’s birthday. We almost always go to some fabulous new restaurant, and this year she chose Saison, a New American restaurant in the Mission. Big Chrissy, Emily and I were joined by buddies Scott and David. Scott and David are an adorable couple, together so long that they talk, dress and look alike, with only slightly discernible differences in demeanor. The meal lasted nearly 4 hours, with more than 10 courses, each course a handcrafted work of edible art. All of the ingredients are foraged or grown locally. We ate flowers, oysters, rabbit, a custard infused with smoked salmon roe, sea urchin, abalone, prawns, foams of every sort, fried lettuces, a pecorino brioche… so many flavors and textures, and for our final course, popcorn ice cream. It was certainly one of the most memorable meals of my life.

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City Tales

Big Chrissy and I saw the musical version of Tales of the City the other night at ACT. It was so great to see the old gang again. Mrs. Madrigal endearingly flubbed her lines, calling Edgar Michael, and Brian Edgar, but it so reminded me of my mom’s own difficulty in telling her offspring apart that I loved her performance even more. It was definitely worth seeing, especially to experience so much imaginatively crammed into three hours–but you have to kind of psyche yourself up a bit: imagine Whitney Houston as Mary Ann, and the Tales of the City set to Godspell. I can’t remember a single tune, but the number about the crotch comes close.

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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Last week I visited my parents and childhood chums in Alabama. I spent one of my first nights with my high school buddy James, sipping cocktails and munching on really the best fried green tomatoes of my life at The Club, atop Red Mountain, a swanky private club where Frank and Sammy probably would have hung out if the Rat Pack ever swung through Dixie. Built in the early 1950s, the streamlined curvilinear architecture provides panoramic views of the city, and several dancing, drinking, and dining opportunities, depending on what you’re wearing. We were the guests of James’ friends Barbara and Anneta, two really fun midwestern transplants who share a home with 5 lady dogs. James and his boyfriend have 6 dogs of their own. They all share such a strong bond, I foresee some sort of Brady Bunch union in their future, the 11 dogs and 4 parents cohabitating in a zany suburban household and exploring contemporary issues of gender and cross-breeding.

My mom and Dad took me to the Birmingham Museum of Art the next day, for a stunning display of quilts, and another fantastic show of African pottery and iron work. We stopped by the Aldridge Botanical Gardens afterwards to see the snowflake hydrangeas, discovered and patented by the former owner of the estate, Eddie Aldridge. It’s not often that you get to see snow in Alabama, and these blooms were like an early summer blizzard. My junior high buddy Susan swept me away that night to the Irondale Cafe, the real-life inspiration for Fannie Flagg’s Whistle Stop Cafe. I don’t think I’ve ever so thoroughly enjoyed such thoroughly fattening fare. Susan drove me through the devastation caused by the recent tornadoes that swept through the area. A giant tree fell smack dab in the middle of her daughter’s trailer, who fortunately had earlier sought shelter elsewhere with her husband and newborn. Enormous trees, snapped like twigs.

Saturday James and I took a drive down the Alabama Wine Trail. We visited only three wineries, but there seemed to be a consistent theme of sweetness running through the wines. Not cloying or subtle, but syrupy, lip-puckeringly sweet. The first place we stopped at, Vizzini Farms Winery, in North Calera, featured several “dry style” wines. I asked if the iron-rich southern soil and hot humid climate imparted any particular flavor into their wines. Asking each successive winemaker the same question, I received only blank stares. Terroir doesn’t seem to be much of a concern. Ozan Winery in Calera was the most beautiful, the tasting room atop a hill overlooking the vineyards, with grapes that are actually used in their wines, which we sampled in plastic cups. They make wines with not only the southeast native muscadine and scuppermong grapes, but also with local peaches and other fruit. By the time we got to Morgan Creek vineyards in Harpersville, I gave up on seeking out the essence of place and climate contained in the grapes, and slurped down their undated treacly concoctions, which seemed just the right thing in that hot Alabama sun.

While on the Wine Trail, we stopped for lunch at Pa Paw’s Restaurant, a meat-n-3 in Columbiana. I had the finger-lickingly delicious fried chicken with sides of field peas, mac-n-cheese, turnip greens and corn bread. After the wineries, we headed to deSoto Caverns. Outside, the cicadas chirped hysterically. The cicadas of the southeast materialize only every 13 years, emerging from the earth in the millions. After their 13 year adolescence underground, they shed their shells, and then enjoy six weeks of adulthood, screeching and mating and laying eggs. The cave had been a speakeasy briefly in the 20s, and a former indian burial site. After turning off the lights at one point, and leaving us in absolute and scary darkness, we were dazzled by a laser and spurting water display about the creation of the universe—the 7 day theory—ending with this broadway marquis style glittering crucifix glowing on the wall. A sacred indian burial chamber named after the destroyer of their culture, now a Christian propaganda theme park. Only in Alabama.

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Empty Nests

A pair of mourning doves made a nest in a planter of ivy on my parents’ deck last month, laying two eggs. Shortly before I arrived to visit with my folks in Birmingham, the eggs hatched. Every day we watched the parents feed the quickly growing chicks with their crop milk. The whole family seemed fine with us sitting only a few feet away, enjoying our iced tea while they regurgitated and pooped, wiggled their wings, and sang us their mournful tunes. After being out with friends one day, I returned in the evening to my dad’s excited announcement that the chicks had flown the coop. I was so excited, I ran up to the deck to see if I could see them around and noticed that dad had taken their nest away. “They’re so messs-ssy,” he complained. Shocked, I ran out and returned the ivy to its former place, and squawked that the chicks were going to be traumatized if they tried to return to their home and it was gone. I had no idea if this was true or not, but they had become part of our family, we had watched these chicks grow, regurgitated meals together. The dark forest behind my parents’ house seemed like a scary place for them to be, I wanted them to know that they had a secure home to return to.

Flash back to 1985. When I returned home the first time after leaving for college, the reproduction Peter Max mural in my bedroom had been painted over, my first edition Hardy Boys books sold, letters from my 6th grade girlfriends and other treasured memorabilia tossed out… no trace of me. Mom and dad, the extreme opposite of empty nesters.