Gwen's blog

Current Events

May 3, Houston: The big one -- the Inprint reading -- occurs at the Alley Theatre on Monday, May 3. Do not miss it or you'll be sorry. I'm not kidding -- I'm going to say the craziest, most intellectual yet hilarious stuff I can think of, and I'll be sharing the stage with the ultra sexy Oscar Casares, too.

June 24, Houston: I'm one of the peeps scheduled to read at Poison Pen, at Houston's famous Poison Girl bar. Besides me, everyone there will be ultra, *super* sexy. Come see me and drink!

June 26, Washington, DC: I'll be reading at the American Library Association conference. Come on down.

My other blog: Go read my the Houston Chronicle parenting blog (or my ChronMomBlog, as I like to call it) and make sure my kids won't resent me more than other kids resent their own parents.

Buy my new novel, Lone Star Legend. Already did? Well, buy a few more for your friends, then. :)

Monday, July 30, 2007
Paw Prints, Your Heart

Earlier today, in the restroom of my workplace, a Soap Opera Digest appeared before me and I happened upon an advertisement for this Faith Friend Collectible Music Box: Pet Dog Lover Gift. (Yes, that is what it's called. Don't believe me? Click the link and read the HTML header.)

I'm sure there's already at least one web site dedicated to enumerating these sorts of collectibles and making fun of them where applicable. So I won't make fun of this one... but I don't even want to, because something about it attracted me, actually. I don't know if it was the pale green color of the not-Faberge egg, or the dog's facial expression, or the pure overkill of the design concept -- a smiling Yorkie rising out of a not-Faberge egg, with a music box playing "You've Got a Friend," plus 22K gold accents and 100-plus Swarovskis, crystals, and rhinestones, all topped off with the inanity of this caption: "Yorkies Leave Paw Prints On Our Hearts" (all capped, if you please; yes, even the preposition). Despite this totally jacked-up concept, it manages to look sort of nice, in the end. In an Easter, pillow-mint sort of way.

I love it. Please, someone, buy me that thing for Christmas.

Enthusiastic Recommendation of a Five-Year-Old Movie

Oh my god, why did none of y'all tell me how much I would like AI: Artificial Intelligence? Was it because you were sick and tired of Steven Spielberg, or because Haley Joel Osment creeps you out? Well, I can certainly respect that, but we saw that movie on cable, at a hotel, over the weekend, and it just about killed me, I got so into it.

There's no use in me telling you all my thoughts about an old movie. I'll just say I liked it because it gave me a lot to think about. If you haven't yet seen it, you might want to rent the DVD and check it out. Or go to a hotel room and catch it on cable. (I swear, I see more movies in hotel rooms than anywhere else, seems like.) At first the movie pissed me off really badly, because I hate stories about evil mommies or even just run-of-the-mill, crappy mommies. But then I realized the crappy mommy was just incidental to the moral questions the movie wanted to ask, and so I relaxed and enjoyed the rest of the ride.

I can do something kind of useful for y'all today... Here's a link to the 1969 story the movie was based on: Super-Toys Last All Summer by Mr. Brian Aldiss. Free vintage literature! Enjoy.

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5:41 PM #
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Monday, July 23, 2007

Ominous?

Today my horoscope says, "You hard-working Capricorns are faced with a dilemma this midsummer. The Sun is now moving through your mysterious 8th House, encouraging you to delve into the mysteries of the occult, death and sex. Although these are deliciously juicy issues, it's summer and the beautiful outside beckons. Strike a balance now between the inner and the outer worlds you wish to explore."

At first, that freaked me out. The occult? Death? What in the world was supposed to happen to me today?

Then, I realized what it actually meant. See, this evening, I'll be torn between going outside and enjoying the break from the rain, and staying inside to finish reading Harry Potter.

The balance will be achieved if I take a walk to get the mail, first. Or maybe I can finish the book in the car, in the sun, as my boyfriend drives us around.

Weekend Adventure

"I wish," I told my boyfriend, Tad, "we could have some kind of adventure this weekend."

That was Thursday night. The weekend before, we'd gone into the heart of Houston's New Chinatown (aka Bellaire) and tried a new banh mi place that was straight out of Saigon. And that was exciting. This weekend, since we can't afford to travel outside of Texas, I thought we might again find something new within our own town. "Okay," said Tad. "We'll go somewhere new."

Friday night, Tad's brother-in-law called to invite us to a very impromptu celebration of his birthday. He picked a nightclub out in the satellite town of Katy, Texas, so as to make the party accessible to multiple suburbanite friends.

I'm going to call the club Bikini Bottom, because it did have the word bikini in it, and I can't remember the rest. Why did it have the word bikini in it? Because the female servers wore bikini tops, and there were girls in bikinis dancing atop the bars. The decor was darkness, disco lights, and plastic palm trees. Old (not old school, but just old and stale) hip hop blared from every corner. Upon being ushered in, we joined Tad's sister and b-i-l, their neighbor, and our friends Mike and Claudia in an alcove, where we hurried to catch up to their blood-alchohol levels while surveying the scene.

The first bikini'd girl, just inside the entrance, danced on a table near a giant bucket of beers. Her job was to dance, sell the bottles, and periodically squat down to rubber-band the ones in her register. This girl was rather attractive. At least, she seemed to be under all her makeup, there in the dim light. Every man who walked into the club stopped in front of her station to ogle. Some of them bought beers, and some just gave her dollar bills for nothing. They put them into a cut-open milk jug at her feet, and in return got... a smile. No extra movement, no chance to touch. But the men seemed okay with that, because they were in love with her. It was obvious, from the looks in their eyes and the clumsy way they tried to initiate small talk that she couldn't hear. She danced like a stripper. I wondered if she was trying to work her way back into more legitimate means of tip-garnering. Maybe she'd move up (down?) from go-go dancer to cocktail waitress, then to diner waitress, then to executive assistant, then Avon saleswoman, then animal shelter volunteer, then old lady arranging flowers at the local Baptist church.

The other go-go dancers, deeper inside the bowels of the club, had nothing but their youth to recommend them. Their youth, their lower-back tattoos, and occasional bouts of Sapphic display. While we waited for a bartender to take our order (and then admit that she didn't know what a kamikaze shot was), a tiny, roped-off stage lit up inside the bar. An emcee appeared there and called up two doughy teens in sagging, dully colored bikinis. "Shanna and Allison, are you ready for the showers?!?" he bellowed into the mike. Yes, they were. They were so ready, they shimmied against each other and kissed each other's lips. The emcee pulled the cord that activated the shower head above them. (He himself was wearing a long-sleeve shirt and jeans.) The girls got wet, did more shimmying, then shook their lank hair at the crowd. Water splatted across my face as I took my apple-pucker-flavored kamikaze from the bartender. Somehow, it didn't feel as sexy as they seemed to intend it.

The doorman hadn't hassled us at all on the way in. He wasn't hassling anybody -- an ID and five bucks got you in, and that was that. The crowd at Bikini Bottom looked like a complete cross-section of Katy, Texas, itself. There were twenty-somethings in a range of demographics, from the Ford F250 drivers, to the Camaro drivers, to the pimped-out Scion crews. There were older men in Hawaiian shirts, and older women in lacy black suits. As our friend Mike put it, "This is like Wal-Mart with hip hop." (That was before we knew that one out of every ten songs would be Latin music.)

It was Spank's birthday, and not that many of the gang had shown up with such short notice, so those of us there did our duty. We drank, and we danced. Well, Susan and Claudia danced, while the rest of us drank. That's how our set rolls sometimes -- the women dance and the men watch.

I don't like to dance when it's only women, so much, because I'm the tallest one by far and it always makes me feel kind of weird, like I'm a substitute boy. You know -- like I'm the one who has to do all the humping once everyone gets drunk enough to do the silly hump dances. Sometimes I don't want to hump, you know? Sometimes I want to be humped, dammit. But, eventually, Susan and Claudia dragged me out onto the floor and made me form a hump sandwich with them. Okay, fine, I thought, putting my hand in the air. Hump, hump, hump.

Like a magnet, a man who was not my type slid up to our threesome. "Hello," he said. Claudia said hi and turned away, Susan ignored him completely, and I did a polite but dismissive not-smile. He hovered around us for a while, air-humping but not infiltrating our boundaries. Then he went away.

I tried to disengage from the dance then, but only got a sip of beer and an ice cube stolen from the stripper's cooler before the other women dragged me back out. "Come ON, Gwen!" Hump, hump, hump. Woo!

Like a migratory bird, the stranger guy came back. "Ladies, my friend over there in the white shirt thinks y'all are fine." He pointed out his friend, who gave us a cool nod and a beer-bottle salute.

"Our boyfriends are right there," said Claudia, pointing to Mike with her drink. Susan said nothing, just shook her hair. I don't think she even saw the guy -- she was in her own little flashdance world.

"And where's yours?" he said to me. "I didn't see you with anybody." Annoyed that I had to prove my eligibility for love, I pointed out Tad, who was sitting at a little table, leaning back and drinking a Corona as if it were a nice day on the beach. He didn't even wave to me. Our interloper looked skeptical, as if I had randomly pointed out this bespectacled Asian man, shorter than me (horrors!), in order to play hard to get. He walked away to confer with his friends. I grimaced at Tad, who only laughed.

Claudia whispered in my ear, "Girl, that man wants you! He wants your healthy booty!"

"I am," I thought, "too old for this."

I was about to leave the floor again, when the guy came back again. He tapped my shoulder. I turned around and said "what" or "huh" or "uh," don't remember what, exactly. Something in my face, though, scared him away. (My natural expression, at rest, is quite bitchy.) "Okay, fine," he said. "Golly." He looked very hurt and backed away. I felt kind of bad, but not bad enough to call him back.

"God," I said to Tad, who'd never once moved from his chair. "What was up with that?"

"That guy's been watching you all night," he told me. "The minute you started dancing, he ran up."

"What?" I said. "Why didn't you do something, then?"

"Because," Tad said, "that shit was hilarious."

Two hours and one "booty-shaking" contest later (Susan and Claudia entered but I refused, as I was still just sober enough to deduce that it was rigged), Spank said he'd had enough festivities and it was time to go. And so, we bid Bikini Bottom farewell.

As Tad and I crossed the muddy embankment and the Whataburger parking lot on the way to our car, the hip hop faded behind us. A block away, in another parking lot, a group of high school kids passed us. One boy noted our clasped hands and called out, "Are y'all gonna have sex tonight?"

"Maybe," I said. Tad nodded. Disarmed by our candor, he moved on, and we whispered shared hopes for his future, and for the future of all Katy youth.

As Ford trucks zoomed around us like fireflies, we finally made it to the tranquility of Tad's car.

"Well, that was an adventure, wasn't it?" I said.

"Yes," said Tad. And then we went home.

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6:52 AM #
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Friday, July 20, 2007

There's this really weird book. You should totally check it out.

The other day my friend Ashley and I went to Texas Art Supply, which is one of the most awesome stores in Houston, partially because it contains all the Dover coloring books and copyright-free image books.

Whenever I go there, I have to look at every single new coloring book so that I can purchase at least one of them, then take it home and put it in a drawer in my vanity, next to my unused box of Prismacolors. That is my habit. That is my way. Right now, I have the following Dover coloring books in that drawer:
Old-Time Children's Fashions Coloring Book
Gods of Ancient Egypt
Chinese Fashions
Japanese Fashions
Classic Cars of the Fifties

I'm very picky about them. I can't just buy any coloring book and then take it home and never color in it. The ones I pick must have particular characteristics as far as facial expressions, line thickness, and color variety potential are concerned.

So, like I said, I was very carefully going through the new coloring books, trying to decide between medieval fashions and fairies, and Ashley was keeping me company. She'd found a book of illustrations of scenes from the Bible and was entertaining me greatly by commenting on it aloud.

"I love the Old Testament," she said. I don't love it, myself, particularly, but I appreciated her enthusiasm.

"Oh, God," she said. "Look what they did to Jacob. This is horrible." I think Jacob was the name of the guy who had to wrestle the angel. It was, as Ashley pointed out, a very lackluster illustration. Jacob looked tired and more like he was hanging on the angel, begging for lenience, than wrestling him. Ashley said this was an injustice, since Jacob (or whoever) had actually put up a pretty good fight until the very end.

At that point, I noticed a man walk near us. On the back of his calf, he had a tattoo of a red, winged devil woman. She was nude and had large, red, devil breasts. I whispered for Ashley to look at the tattoo. She said it was awesome. We went back to the Bible.

"This one's my favorite," said Ashley. She showed me a picture of Lot, his wife, and his daughters fleeing Sodom. "Did you know that, after they left and Lot's wife looked back and turned to salt, Lot and his daughters went to a cave, and his daughters got him drunk and..."

"Had sex with him?" I said. "So they'd get pregnant?"

"Yes!" said Ashley. "Isn't that awesome, that out of the four people in Sodom who weren't sinners, three of them ended up performing incest?" We looked for a picture of the incest, but there wasn't one.

The guy with the devil woman tattoo had a wife. Or a girlfriend. She was pushing a stroller, and the child in it let out a cry. The guy went to join them. He and his woman talked inaudibly, into each other's ear.

I had a thought. "Find the one," I told Ashley, "where the guy has sex with his handmaid, while the wife watches."

"Ooh. Is that... Abraham?" She found Abraham and Rebecca, and then a grown-up Ishmael, but no actual illustrations of handmaid-impregnating menages a troix.

"Did you know," I said, "that people think Cho Seung-Hui identified with Ishmael, and that's why he wrote Ismail Ax on his arm? And, like, in Muslim culture, the story's opposite -- Ishmael's the one who inherited, and Isaac didn't?"

The tattooed guy and his family were still within earshot, I noticed. They seemed to be moving in a semi-circle around us, close enough to hear us but not close enough for me to hear their whispering. They looked annoyed. I saw the woman roll her eyes.

"I think those people want to look at the coloring books," I said. They're waiting for us to get out of the way."

"Screw them," said Ashley.

"I know," I said. "Why don't they just come up and look at them? It's not like there isn't room."

"Okay, who the hell is this?" Ashley exclaimed, showing me a picture of the Garden of Eden. It contained Adam and Eve, obviously, but also a giant, forlorn man who looked like Rodin's Thinker or maybe the Jolly Green Giant. "Who is this guy?"

"I don't know. The giant guy that David fought? The devil?"

"No... I think it's supposed to be Gabriel," said Ashley, pointing to the winged Gabriel on the previous page. "And he took on the form of man... but why does he look so ridiculous?"

"Maybe he smelled the apple and morphed into the Jolly Green Giant. Because... you know... vegetables." Really, I know the New Testament way better than I know the Old one, because they never read the Old Testament at church when I was singing in the choir. How did Ashley know so much about it, I suddenly wondered. Had she actually read the Bible? Knowing her crazy ways, she probably did. She's artsy like that. She only works part time, then does art and/or reads obscure texts all the rest of the day. Or photographs her friends partially clothed near the bayou. Or takes the bus to Whole Foods and buys herself a coconut. She's a bohemian. That's why she fascinates me, I think. I would never, ever be a bohemian (because I grew up poor), but it's fun sometimes to watch her be one.

By now, the tattooed guy and his lady were openly sneering at us. Was it because they wanted unfettered access to the coloring books? Was it because we were speaking of the Biblical art in a less-than-respectful tone? Was it because we were ignorant of Gabriel's giant phase and too obviously dense for them to explain it to us? I wondered if maybe I should read the Old Testament. But then I decided that, no, I'm probably too delicate for it.

I ended up getting the coloring book with fairy tales scenes that related to flowers. And fairies. There was a gothic alphabet coloring book, and it turned out that Ashley knew the author. But I didn't get that one because I didn't like its lines. Sorry, Heather.

I also got a pencil sharpener, so I can sharpen my Prismacolors, now that Ashley's shown me how to properly open their box. Who knows -- I might actually color a fairy this week.

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6:13 AM #
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Monday, July 16, 2007

All I Want

All I want, as far as "autism advocacy" goes, is awareness.

I don't want to sue the people who vaccinated my kids. I don't want the government to give me lots of money (unless they just have their hearts set on it), because there are autistic kids who need the money more than we do. I don't want people to treat my son more specially than they treat other kids. I just want awareness.

Have you ever heard anyone say, "Ew -- that kid has Mongoloid features and unusual speech patterns, and he isn't as intellectually developed as his peers. What's WRONG with him? He's freaking me out! He's a weirdo! His parents must have totally messed him up somehow! He's creeping me out!"

No, you haven't, unless it was a thirteen-year-old bully, or a really lame stand-up comedian trying to be edgy. And you know why? Because most adults in America know what Down Syndrome is, and they know that people with Down Syndrome can't help having it, so there's no use making fun of them, unless you want to come off like a complete asshole.

Do you ever hear adults in America say "Ew -- that kid acts weird. He's socially stunted. He talks funny, and he's strangely good at math. Do his parents homeschool him or something? I bet he gets beat up in school all the time. I bet he's never gonna have a girlfriend, ever. He's creeping me out. What the hell's wrong with him? He's a freak. His parents must have messed him up somehow"?

Unfortunately, yes, you do. I recently saw it happen on a site that I frequent, in comments regarding a YouTube clip of a young spelling-bee winner who pretty obviously, in my opinion, had Aspergers or autism. And I'm not going to link to those comments here, because the young urbanites making them were obviously trying to be "edgy" by expressing fear/loathing of alternate cultures (i.e., homeschooling Midwesterners), and had no idea how to identify Pervasive Developmental Disorders. I want to believe that these people, had they realized it was a condition the child and his parents couldn't help, would have refrained from commenting on it. Because only a rude dumb ass makes fun of something like that, and some day a real rain will come and wash away all the rude dumb asses. (Right? Hope so.)

When adults meet my Aspergers-having son for the first time, they tend to react to him in one of two ways. Either they completely ignore him, because he inadvertently gives off social cues that discourage them from asking him the same questions they ask my other two kids ("So, how old are you now?" "So, how do you like school?")...
or else, way more rarely, they feel compelled to draw him out. And that's usually because he reminds them of themselves, or of someone else they knew who was quiet, but ultimately intelligent and rewarding to hear.

In either case, I find myself telling everyone I know that Dallas has Aspergers, if/whenever they express curiosity about his behavior. (They say, "Dallas... likes to keep to himself, huh?" or "Dallas is kind of... intense, huh?" or "Dallas reminds me of my uncle, who also preferred drawing complex machines to hanging out at family barbecues.") Why do I tell them, instead of keeping it private?

Not because I'm trying to excuse his behavior, and not because I'm looking for pity. It's because I want to help create awareness. I know that none of my friends would make fun of someone for acting a little different. But maybe, if they come across someone else who would, they can pass on what they know. They can say, "Dude, don't make fun of that guy. He was probably born with Aspergers. Don't be lame."

(Social shaming: the fabric of polite society. :) )

So, yeah. If you know me in real life, and I start giving you an informal presentation on Aspergers, autism, and PDD -- I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable, I promise. I'm just trying to do my part. Until we get a popular actor who outs him/herself as having Aspergers, this awareness thing is strictly viral marketing. Grass roots. Underground. Help me out, okay? Spread the word.

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6:00 AM #
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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse...

The other day my boyfriend and I stepped into the Hot Topic store at a local outlet mall. I thought maybe I'd score some cheap t-shirts for my kids.

Hot Topic, for those who don't know, is a little boutique for kids. It has t-shirts emblazoned with the names of all the coolest bands, plus t-shirts related to anything else that could be considered trendy and/or edgy. They sell jewelry made of vinyl, studs, and chains. They have, like, fake nose rings, for thirteen-year-olds whose parents won't let them get the real thing. My two older sons aren't really into that look, but my ten-year-old makes me stop every time we pass one. So, even though my kids are with their dad for the summer, I went into Hot Topic, looking for clearance rack bargains.

As we browsed, a quick, high-pitched disco tune blared over the store speakers. It was kind of catchy, and something about it seemed familiar. I found myself swaying a little to its beat, kind of like I already knew it. The vocal came on, sounding very much like the BeeGees... like the BeeGees on acid, more like.

You are only coming through in waves! [Boom... boom... boom!] Your lips move! I can't hear what you're saying! [Boom, boom!]

"Oh, my god," I told my boyfriend. "Listen -- this is a cover of Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb'!"

I wasn't the only parent in the store. Across the t-shirt rack, a woman about ten years my senior shopped with her son. She looked unhappy. She winced. Then, she muttered, at no one in particular, "Who had the audacity to cover this song?"

"I know! Pink Floyd!" I couldn't resist saying to her. "I was just saying that!"

"It's horrible," she said.

"Really, you think? I don't know... It's kind of catchy," I said.

She shook her head no, and I gave her my most sympathetic smile.

As we left, I asked the bleached and pierced clerk who was singing that song on the speaker.

"The Scissor Sisters," he said. And I felt proud of myself, a little, because I'd actually heard of them before.

Sometimes, among old people, cover songs cause strong emotion.

My boyfriend is Tad. His best friend is Mike. As far as boyfriend's best friends go, Mike is pretty cool and I feel lucky that he's my friend-by-boyfriend.

Mike and I are closer in age than Tad and I, and Mike and I share an old-school love of hard rock. For instance, Mike and I are planning to go to the upcoming Rush concert with one of Tad's other friends. Tad, however, will only accompany us if I buy his ticket, and even then he'll be physically inable to keep from remarking on Rush's lack of synthesizers. Because he is younger, and he needs synthesizers to survive. He simply can't help it.

Anyhow. The other day, Mike and Tad and I were at a noisy eating establishment. A song came on the speaker and Mike said, "Oh, that's that song I like."

I listened. The song said, Take a look at my girlfriend. She's the only one I've got. I said, "Oh, Supertramp."

Mike said, "Is that who it is? No, I thought it was by someone else."

I listened closer. "Yeah, that's a cover. Of a song by Supertramp."

Mike said, "Really?"

I said, "Mike!" Because I was ashamed of him, at that moment. I mean, that's the kind of thing I'd expect from Tad -- not recognizing a rock song from the '70s -- because he has only freshly entered his thirties. But not from Mike, who likes Rush and really should know better.

At that moment, then, I went on a two-hour-long diatribe about the fact that people keep covering Supertramp lately, and no one gives them proper credit. The Goo Goo Dolls' cover of "Give a Little Bit"? Did nothing but rip off the complete awesomeness of the original, without giving Supertramp the proper respect. Just thinking about it now pisses me off. Dammit. Whoever's covering "Breakfast in America"? Same thing. Damn you people! Damn you uncreative young pop stars!!

At least the Scissor Sisters took a Pink Floyd song and did something new with it, you know? Personally, I don't think you should cover a song unless you're adding something artistic to it. Otherwise, you're just plagiarizing, basically, as far as I'm concerned.

I think the law should state that, when a band basically plagiarizes an old song, DJs should be required to say so on the radio. You know?

This means I am old now.

Sometimes I have to laugh at myself, for being so old and curmudgeonly about things like that. Mostly, though, I'm glad I'm old now, because I don't want to wear the clothes at Hot Topic. I don't want to get my face pierced.

All I want to do is listen to my CDs in peace, and then crankily point out unoriginal covers to the younger generations.

I'm glad kids have Hot Topic, though. I like to take my son there, and see his face light up when he uses his allowance to buy a wristband with an embroidered happy-face skull or whatever. That lady who got pissed off about the Scissor Sisters cover -- she cracked me up. She was curmudgeonly, but she was there, you know? She went into Hot Topic with her kid, braving the music, instead of telling him "no we can't go there," or else sitting at home in front of her TV, ignoring her kid altogether. Because of that (and because she recognized that song), she is my secret sister.

It's okay to get old, as long as you can watch other people enjoy being young, without begrudging them any of it. That's what I tell myself, now that the eye wrinkles are setting in. Then I pop The Yes Album into my CD player, and roll down the road.

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6:02 AM #
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Friday, July 06, 2007

Welcome to This One-Man Show

I went to the Police concert last Friday with my friend Dorothy. Her husband got us tickets because he knows that we were totally obsessed with the Police when we were junior high-schoolers. We had the cassettes, the notebooks, the library books, everything. So he very generously splurged on the tickets as an anniversary gift to his wife. Eleventh row, baby. We were so close, I could see Sting's, Stewart's, and Andy's face. They all the same hairstyles they had twenty-five years ago, when I first became a Police fan. (A little less gel, maybe.) They were old, though. Of course. Everybody gets older.

I saw their faces so well, I was easily able to imagine interpersonal dramas occurring on stage. Like, when Sting sang "So Lonely," and he changed the lyrics to "All made up and no where to go/ Welcome to the Andy Summers show," it almost kind of looked like Andy threw the finger at him, with his fret hand. At the very least, Andy didn't smile. He didn't look amused at all. Later, Sting sang the same lyric about Stewart and got the same non-appreciative reaction.

When Andy did his solos, Sting ran up and tried to do that thing that bass players do with guitar players. (Stand next to each other and make their instruments have play dates or whatever.) Andy ignored him. He was totally, throughout the entire concert, like:
< ignore > Sting < /ignore >
At various intervals, Sting would run up to one of the side stages to mug and shimmy for the fans. I could have sworn that Stewart and Andy traded knowing looks over that, more than once.

Besides that (possibly imagined) tension, it was a good show. They played more Synchronicity stuff than I'd hoped they would, but that's okay. See, I am/was a very serious Police fan. I was all like, "I hope they play 'Contact' and 'Bombs Away' and 'Darkness' and all the other songs that are no one's faves but mine."

They played "Invisible Sun" and showed Afghani children on the video screens. They played "Walking in Your Footsteps" and showed CGI dinosaur skeletons walking around, which Dorothy and I agreed was slightly cheesy.

Dorothy and I, in our mid-thirties, were among the youngest people on the floor. After the show, Dorothy wondered if we flirt with the roadies so they'd let us backstage. I was like, "We're not that young." I mean, there were women in their 40s who looked way more sexy than us. If they weren't using their implants to gain access, I wasn't gonna bother using my stretchmarks. Ha.

Afterwards, Dorothy said she didn't know how she'd ever go to another concert again unless she got floor seats. Even though I never go to arena concerts (that was only my third, ever), I totally knew what she meant. Something about seeing the faces of the men who meant so, so much to me in my childhood... It was a very strong feeling. Like something had come full circle. That is cheesy, I know. But y'all regular concert goers probably know what I mean.

Thank you, Dennis, for the tickets. You are the awesome.

The Rain is a Pain that Falls Mainly on Houston. Insane.

It's been raining for about three weeks straight, which is rare for us in June/July. It's not supposed to let up until the week of the 15th.

I'm not one of those people who gets depressed by the rain, but I do miss the sun a little, now. I miss the blue sky just a little bit, you guys.

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11:25 AM #
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