R.I.P. Rufus

Rufus in healthier days

Today I accompanied my neighbor and her cat, whom I've had the distinct pleasure of cat-sitting for a couple of years, to the vet. 13 years and cancer had taken their toll on this rambunctious guy; We were there to say goodbye. Rufus went purring in his mother's arms and I provided the tissues and a shoulder to cry on. 'Course I was a puddle, too. I only wish I could have done the same for my first cat, Aesop, who died suddenly and painfully while I was 5 minutes out in a cab rushing to his side. In a way, I feel like I got to finally send him off right by helping out Rufus and his grieving human Mom.

R.I.P. Rufus, and my sweet Aesop.

Fat Girls

Dasha, Ash & my sweetie snuggle at Detention

Spent last night with the sweetest gay boy from Texas, Ash Christian. Oh, and did I mention that he's the hottest thing at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival with his film "Fat Girls?" He must be a mensch; he hung out with me and sweetie at Henrieta Hudson - a faigala voluntarily entering a lesbian bar and making movies about Fat Girls? Such a nice dyke daddy. We got tix for his film immediately following Q-Me Con last weekend, and can't wait for the premiere party. I must admit, though, I'm far more excited by the prospect of working with Ash - he's got a great idea for a film about that "Over The Rainbow" icon that'd I'd love to write...

Ah, film festival season is upon us in NYC!

city views

views of West Side Community Garden and the Financial District

I love NYC. From tulips in bloom in my neighborhood in the morning, to the economy in bloom in the financial district as the sun goes down over the South Street Seaport. Yum.

(And I love my camera phone.)

Party!

Marga Gomez (fresh from her off-Broadway hit "Los Big Names") & Dasha Snyder (not so fresh from her day job)

Marga & Me - together again at the launch party for Q-Me Con. It was held on a pier hidden behind Basketball City and attached to a floating rust bucket called "The Frying Pan." Migraines, motion sickness and drinks do not mix well. But seeing friends and complaining about it do. Must sleep now, as I've got to wake up in a few hours and have witty answers to audience questions on queer DIY filmmaking!

To Infinity and beyond...

Liftoff for the Space Shuttle Columbia on April 12, 1981, photo by NASA

Hard to believe it was 25 years ago when the first space shuttle blasted off into the stratosphere, literally. I was 10 and thought "I'm going to fly in outer space one day." Fueled by Star Trek reruns and later by Kim Stanley Robinson's vision for the colonization of Mars, I assumed that intergallactic travel would be mastered by my 30's. Perhaps I'd write a play in space - not set in space, but composed on my Apple II+ (I was a Mac head even then...) while riding on a more posh version of the Space Shuttle. Now I'll need to save up the $200,000 for a quick passenger jaunt in an updated SpaceShipOne, or I could cough up $20 million for a 10-day stay on the International Space Station by way of Russia (hey - I already speak the language!). But with that kind of cash, I can make a movie (or 20). Hopefully, this one.

All About Eve?

Inspired by Jen Katz's score as a student dyke on the "What Type of Lesbian Are You? (Inspired by Curve Mag.)" quiz, I plunged in to the questionaraire myself and can't quite believe the result.

First of all, I love Eve Ensler! I worked on an amazing play she wrote & directed at HERE many years ago called "Extraordinary Measures" with James Lescene. But she's not a lesbian. So, while I'm honored to be associated with her at all, I think the picture's a little misleading for the subject matter.

You scored as The Vaginal-Reference-Making Dyke. You are the lesbian who can connect your vagina to nearly every object in the entire universe, creative and a little creepy you always astonish your friends. The Vaginal-Reference-Making Dyke 65% The Student Dyke 60% The Granola Dyke 55% The Pretty-Boi Dyke 45% The Magic Earring Ken Dyke 40% The Surprise! Dyke 35% The Stud 35% The Femme Fatale 30% The Little-Boy Dyke 30% The Bohemian Dyke 20% The Sprightly Elfin Femme 20% The Quasi-Gothic Femme 15% The Hipster Dyke 0% What Type of Lesbian Are You? (Inspired by Curve Mag.) created with QuizFarm.com

A Good Day

Meme via Bill Shunn: Search Wikipedia for your birthday, minus the year. List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year each occurs. Mine's July 2.

Neat Facts (I'm listing more than 3 - too many cool things happened on my birthday):

• 1776 - The Continental Congress adopts a resolution severing ties with Great Britain, though a formal Declaration of Independence is not adopted until July 4.
  
• 1839 - Twenty miles off the coast of Cuba, 53 rebelling African slaves led by Joseph Cinque take over the slave ship Amistad.
  
• 1937 - Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappear over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first round-the-world flight at the equator.
  
• 1947 - An object speculated to be a UFO crashes near Roswell, New Mexico, though the United States Air Force claims it is a weather balloon.
  
• 1964 - U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law.
  
• 1976 - North and South Vietnam, divided since 1954, reunite to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
  
• 1979 - The first U.S. coin to honor a woman, the Susan B. Anthony dollar, is introduced.

Two births:

• 1925 - Medgar Evers, American civil rights activist (d. 1963)
  
• 1946 - Richard Axel, American scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

One death:

• 2005 - Ernest Lehman, American screenwriter (b. 1915) of such classics as The King and I (1956), North by Northwest (1959), The Sound of Music (1965) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Q-Me Con 2006

So, The D Word has landed me on 2 panels in the near future. The first and biggest (and the one I actually have info for) is the queerliscious 2006 Queer Media and Entertainment Conference. Think of it as my beloved NewFest Filmmakers Forum (which I'm coordinating) on steroids, or the East Coast edition of Persistent Vision (which I'm dying to attend). I'll be speaking on the first panel on April 15 - The DIY Generation: Creating and Distributing Your Indie Digital Content.

Come watch me talk way too much about grass-roots independent filmmaking with some very interesting folks. And it's all gay, all the time, to boot!

Did I mention that The D Word will be playing in rotation at their Mix Tape PLAYroom?

Q-Me Con 2006
The DIY Generation: Creating and Distributing Your Indie Digital Content
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Theater 2: 11am-12pm
Tribeca Cinemas

Transitional Creature

Kathleen Warnock, Sarah Waters & Me! photo by Kelsy Chauvin

I feel like I'm a transitional creature, a missing link of sorts, not unlike the heralded recent discovery of aquatic/land fossil Tiktaalik roseae. I read about this Darwinian intermediary this morning in the NY Times and finally had a term for the way I felt last night.

To quote the biologist from the Times "It's like, holy cow." Or fish, as the case may be.

I attended the All Girl Action party for the brilliant author Sarah Waters in honor of her new novel The Night Watch. All the lesberati (you know, the literate celesbians) were there, packed tightly into a fabulous Chelsea apartment. I was star struck and somewhat agog that I had been invited into this crowd; how exactly did I make the guest list? Well, I made The D Word and have hung around the NYC Dyke scene long enough to know some of the lesberati peripherally. So, I felt like I bridged the evolutionary gap between fan and celesbian. Call me the missing link of dyke culture.


A model of Tiktaalik roseae, a fish in transition to becoming a land animal, photo by University of Chicago.

Snow in April

Need I say more? Short sleeves a few days ago, and now long johns. No wonder today was weird as hell at the office. Computers fighting back, resisting my benevolent upgrades, refusing RAM and CD's, spitting out software. As I wrestled with an indigent iMac, I couldn't help but long for uninterupted solitude to write new scripts, like the way the city gets after a fresh snowfall - quiet, padded with flakes and reflection, even in April.