Fried & Convicted, page 20
We dunk our Kabuki-masked heads under the water’s surface to rinse and swim for the bar, where our magic bracelets know we get a complimentary beer. Swimming away, savoring the Icelandic brew, we drink and dive with impunity. It really is glorious.
Then it’s back to the kiosk for the algae mask. “It’s an anti-aging marvel,” says the handsome young man in the kiosk as he offers up the green sludge.
“Too late. That ship has sailed,” I say.
“No, look at me,” he says, “I’m 75.” Good one.
We obediently apply the green algae muck to our noses, cheeks and chins and start singing the score from Wicked. Bonnie channels Kermit singing “It’s not easy being green.” As for me, I’m Lou Ferrigno’s Incredible Hulk.
Green at the gills, we swim behind a waterfall, travel the circumference of the enormous lagoon, and marvel at the natural lava rocks masking its man-madeness. We frolic, luxuriate some more and then, algae mask hardened to perfection, I crack a smile. Literally. Time for dinner and Prosecco.
We wade out of the lagoon, don our terry robes and slippers and trudge back to the lockers. Mercifully, the tour buses have stopped arriving and the changing area is no longer a massive peep show. We scrub the vestiges of green mud from our faces, dress, return our terry cloth and, using our electronic wrist bands, verify that we drank no more than was due us on our prepaid ticket. Then, we use the wristband once more to open a compartment in the exit area, surrender said wristband and watch the turnstile open automatically to let us out. Very high tech, but I was disappointed it didn’t have a Rosetta Stone app to help us pronounce “get me a glass of bubbly, stat!”
Frankly, we didn’t expect much from a fancy restaurant at a tourist attraction, but we got a great surprise, enjoying delicious arctic char and lamb chops along with that included bubbly.
And we toasted to the marketing and promotional superstars who turned power plant leftovers into one of National Geographic’s 25 wonders of the world. It’s enough to turn us PR hacks green with envy.
September 2016
FAREWELL, KUDA
Marie Kuda has passed away. The 76-year-old LGBT activist, journalist, essay writer and educator was in a nursing home in her beloved Chicago.
I got the sad news from Tracy Baim, editor of Chicago’s Windy City Times, a thriving LGBT newspaper in that city.
That the publication is thriving, along with an equally thriving population of LGBT citizens nationwide, is surely due in no small part to the role Kuda (that’s how she signed her letters and e-mails) played. She promoted dialogue and understanding between gay men and lesbians, and between the gay community and heterosexual society, in the decades when that was a tough job at best.
Kuda organized five national lesbian writers’ conferences and published, in the ’70s, the first annotated bibliography cataloguing lesbian literature in Women Loving Women; was a member of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force for the American Library Association and was appointed by Chicago’s mayor to the city’s first Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues. She was inducted into the first class of Chicago’s LGBT Hall of Fame in 1991. Marie Kuda spoke her mind, in print, about discrimination, injustice and the positive attributes of gay, lesbian, and transgender people.
She was a pioneer and a part of our lesbian history that I believe we should celebrate and pass along.
I “met” Kuda by e-mail. After my mentor Anyda Marchant (who wrote under the name Sarah Aldridge) passed away, I wrote to Kuda to let her know.
In return, I got a long, detailed e-mail about the prominent place she thought Anyda should occupy in lesbian history. She emphasized her courage in co-founding Naiad Press, her tenacity in dealing with sometimes difficult colleague Barbara Grier, her willingness to write lesbian romances with happy endings, and then her setting out to make their publication happen.
Kuda and I had a several-month e-mail conversation, much of it discussing Anyda’s departure from Naiad Press and the real reasons why. That fascinating tale is for a column coming up shortly in these pages.
For now, let me just say that a true pioneer has left the building.
When I responded to Tracy Baim (who is, like Kuda, a powerful and respected LGBT journalist and historian in Chicago) about Kuda’s passing, Tracy answered, “She loved your books. There was one with her in the nursing home.”
What a wonderful surprise.
Farewell, Kuda, and thanks for all the remarkable good you have done for us all.
September 2016
TRUTH BE TOLD. PLEASE.
Okay, people, listen up. Here comes digital bait. As we surf the web, mean jerks with ugly agendas are tossing online chum to stir us up. We take the bait. It’s Internet flotsam and jetsam. Wow, this may be the first time I’ve managed to embed the name of this column in an actual essay. Cool.
And the flotsam I mean is fake news sites. I’m disgusted at having to consult Snopes.com on a regular basis. You do know Snopes, right? It’s an invaluable website, ever on high alert, to debunk all manner of false, bogus, phony internet claims, theories, news stories, and other dangerous jetsam.
I cannot figure out why the icky trolls post this fake stuff to sucker-punch web readers. But they do a frighteningly good job. I guess it’s capitalism at play, as we are misled into reading a new conspiracy theory about Princess Diana’s death (just a rehash), or the sad truth about Dolly Parton (there was nothing sad to report), and then get bombarded with ads for miracle diets, anti-aging goop, and prepaid burials.
Yes, I can be fooled into clicking this stuff from time to time. Believing it? Not so much.
But thank goodness for Snopes’ Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors. According to Snopes, “Fake/hoax news sites . . . are an attempt to play on gullible people who do not check sources and will just pass the news on as if it were really true.” How that infuriates me. How that amazes me. Are people really that dumb? (Author’s note: based on the 2016 Presidential election campaign, I say yes, they are. Trump????) But I digress.
In contrast to fake sites, satire websites are sites that make fun of the news. These over-the-top, hilarious stories can be very funny indeed, especially in this hideous election season. But they are satire! The Onion.com is the most brilliant at it. But, sadly, some folks who are humor challenged get buffaloed and pass humor along as truth. Seriously??? You’re gonna believe headlines like “Scientists Find Strong Link Between Male Virility, Wearing Mötley Crüe Denim Jacket,” or “70% of Trump Endorsements Made after Staring at Ceiling for 4 Hours”?
The Borowitz Report is another brilliant and hilarious satire site written by humorist Andy Borowitz. The fact that the venerable New Yorker magazine purchased The Borowitz Report Blog, means that a quick glance at a headline with the attribution “The New Yorker” can cause momentary confusion. But seriously, people, read the story before passing along the headline! Do you really want to be known as somebody who believes “BREAKING: White House Authorizes Search for President’s Mojo” is a real headline?
I’m also done with careless readers who don’t check dates and sources. At first, even I was caught feeling sad about the death of a celebrity who actually kicked the bucket several years ago. I’ve seen such “news” circulate on like wildfire, caught hours and hours and hundreds of morose comments later by somebody actually paying attention. “Um, Maya Angelou died in 2014.”
I have to admit, the confusion between satire and real current events is not a new phenomenon.
Apparently journalist/humorist Mark Twain wrote hoax news all the time in his hometown newspaper. There are tales of the author fleeing from the authorities over stories he made up. However, the newspaper, at some point, did note that the stories were fake. I see no such disclaimers on fake news dot coms.
And of course, “Woman gives birth to space alien” is supermarket tabloid worthy. I don’t think people believe this kind of event is possible, but why do they laugh at it in the grocery store yet find it more credible on the web????
And while respected newspapers print satirical features every April Fool’s Day, it seems that online every day is fool’s day, as these fake stories proliferate and get passed along.
We must be vigilant. We must parse them all and make sure they are true! Like last week, when I read this headline: “Weasel Shuts Down World’s Most Powerful Particle Collider.” Ha-ha-ha!!!!
It turned out to be true. Sadly, the weasel did not survive.
Okay, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice . . . etc. So imagine my skepticism upon reading the headline, “Dr. Heimlich Uses His Maneuver at Retirement Home, Saves 87-Year-Old Woman.”
Oh come on! But no, it turned out to be astoundingly true. The 96-year-old physician who invented the punch-in-the-gut move to dislodge food from a choking victim’s windpipe actually had a chance to use his own maneuver. I’d say “you can’t make this stuff up,” but you can. They do it all the time. But this one was true. It’s so hard to tell the flotsam from the jetsam.
Which is why I like the nautical definition of the word flotsam: anything floating in the water from which there is no response when an offer of a cocktail is made.
There’s something I can believe.
October 2016
RUSH LIMBAUGH FEARS ME
In an already insane election season, today’s news is not even the craziest. But it hits closest to home. Right-wingnut radio host Rush Limbaugh recently started screeching about the rise of lesbian farmers.
And I am one.
You may recall that in the fall of 2014 I discovered a crop of baby pumpkins sprouting in the tiny mulch bed in front of my house. The total crop on my “womyn’s land” was three small pumpkins, and I went out of my gourd with glee at being an urban farmer.
Sadly, the pumpkin patch remained fallow in 2015, I hope through no fault of mine. The vines turned to mulch and October bore no fruit. I feared it was the end of my nascent farming career.
But come 2016, along with the autumn equinox, the leafy vines and bright yellow flowers returned, shielding four baby pumpkins, pumpkinettes, really, from the unusually hot late September sun.
Yay! Production was up by 25 percent and I was back working the land.
Imagine my shock when I heard that Limbaugh had discovered a USDA program called “Rural Pride”—started to improve the lives of rural queers living outside metropolitan areas. Limbaugh began shouting that the program was an “attack,” orchestrated by the Obama administration, on what he noted was the last conservative bastion—rural America.
Fearing that subsidized lesbian farmers could overrun rural communities, he shouted, “I never knew lesbians wanted to get behind the horse and the plow and start burrowing.”
Oh honey, I did. Wearing flannel and waving pitchforks.
The whole thing sounded so incredible to me I checked it out. Even the Internet’s hoax patrol Snopes.com confirmed the news. Calling the meme Pink Dawn, Snopes noted that “Conservative radio pundit Rush Limbaugh railed against what he described as an Obama administration plot to pay lesbians to become farmers and invade conservative rural strongholds.”
I say, “You go, girls!”
As for me, this New Yorker is about to harvest the cream of the crop (the top of the heap) and celebrate my home on the range.
Cartoon by Rob Waters
October 2016
THE NEWS IS MAKING ME NUTS
Just like everybody else, I’m about to lose my eff-ing mind over U.S. politics. Is America going to hell in a handbasket propelled by Donald Trump, or will Hillary Clinton, a sane and experienced candidate, be elected President of the United States?
This election reminds me of the famous quote by losing candidate Adlai Stevenson, who ran against Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. When a constituent said to him, “You’re the thinking person’s candidate,” he replied, “Yes, but I need a majority.”
Can there really be a majority of ignorant, racist bigots in this country? Possibly.
And if you need any further evidence, here’s what happened to a friend of mine, in her own words from facebook, when she went to vote here at the beach on primary day.
I wish I had gotten a picture of the woman who did not want me to vote today.
I walked in the door. A gentleman said, “Can I help you sir?” I corrected him that I was not a sir. He did not apologize.
I said, “I will go to the other table where they won’t insult me.”
But the person at table two informed me I was not in that district. The person at table three smiled at me, looked at my voter registration card and she said, “Alicia—that’s a pretty name, but that’s not you.”
“Yes it is,” I replied.
She said, “But it’s a woman’s name.”
I said, “Are you questioning if it is me or if I am a woman? I AM a woman.”
She then said, “Really?”
I repeated, “Are you questioning if I am a woman?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Really?” My anger was rising. I started to gesture taking off my shirt and said, “Would you like proof?”
The police lady standing off to the side steps in. “Can I help you, sir?” I said, “You too?”
Finally, they led me to the sweet lady who signed me in under my registered name and then I voted.
I’m mostly angry by the rudeness and lack of apology by anyone. Is this a case of gender insensitivity or a crude form of voter suppression? Or both?
Well, I say both. The way this election season is going I am absolutely certain it’s gender insensitivity. Why? Because a certain orange-faced, comb-overed, megalomaniacal bully has, to bastardize his campaign slogan, “ MADE AMERICA HATE AGAIN”.
And the haters feel they have the right to say whatever they think, no matter who it hurts. And here’s the important thing—while these kinds of confusions do happen, frequently, it’s the aftermath here that is so frightening. Nobody felt the need to admit their error and apologize. No one was sorry for offending the voter.
Bigots have been emboldened to make their offensive mistakes (if it was a mistake, hard to know) and then display absolutely no remorse, embarrassment, guilt, no nothing. They have been granted permission to offend, at will, the people they have been encouraged to despise.
Not a pretty picture.
And Alicia, I apologize to you in the name of the assholes who offended you and those who wish to continue doing so.
As for me, I make it a practice not to vote for anybody endorsed by the KKK and the American Nazi Party.
November 9, 2016
THE AMERICAN AUTUMN
Holy hell, President-Elect Trump.
As you read this, many months or even years later, you have some idea of how it all turned out. I hope my worst or even my tiniest fears have not come true.
But it was a bleak day in the United States on November 8, 2016, if you were not a straight, white, Christian person. Oddly, the many women who voted for President-Elect Donald Trump seemed not to feel the target on their backs or the inequality in their paychecks. Eventually, it will dawn on them.
As I sit here writing, I’m angry, sad and scared, with no clue what the future will hold. I’m fried. In the new America, I hope these words won’t get me convicted. That Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by millions but will not be president has me becoming uncorked. Some 18th century law rendering my state of Delaware virtually irrelevant is irritating beyond words. So I won’t say any more about it.
But I will ask: What kind of country is this? What the hell happened to kindness? Civility? Class?
I do know that this 18-month election season, overflowing with stupidity, bigotry, hatred, and lies was actually a peaceful (so far) ballot box revolution. Like the Arab Spring, it was the American Autumn. People wanted change regardless of the lack of qualifications of the changer. I’m trying to understand.
Clearly, a smidge under half the people in this country (thanks to that obsolete electoral college thing) have mistaken reality shows for reality.
But of all the stupid on display in this election, the most disheartening trend is the nation’s willingness to accept outrageous lies as fact. The media doesn’t call out the lies or liars and demand retractions; the populace itself doesn’t demand a stop to the lying; campaigns and news outlets lie at will and there are no penalties.
There must be consequences for knowingly lying. We must disprove the lies by the politicians (of both parties), campaigns and the media itself, and liars must be fined, big time. News organizations must be outed and have to pay up. Talking heads must be called to task and required to fork over the big money. Hell, if making money is the motive for repeating the lies on the news, let’s hit them where it hurts.
But how?
Listen, merely 20 years ago, people thought it was just fine to let their dogs poop all over sidewalks and lawns without feeling the need to clean it up. Likewise, few people thought twice about driving buzzed or even drunk.
But in the past two decades, our consciousness has been raised about those two issues and others like them. Almost all of us hand over our keys or call Uber when we know we’d be driving impaired.
Likewise, it has become socially unacceptable not to clean up dog poop.
But what about the crap that comes out of our campaigns and the media that report on it? Now it’s society’s turn to tackle the notion that it’s okay to concoct phony political scandals, spread bold-faced lies, and torpedo reputations with outrageous falsehoods.
