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That’s what I yelled, all you Mel Gibson haters. Twice.
Not as bad as what was recorded coming out of Mel’s mouth, but I guess it’s enough to call me a racist.
Turn off the radio, you fucking spic bastard.
This was Manhattan in the early sixties. I had a cheap, rent-controlled apartment on 60th & Amsterdam. The bedroom window overlooked the courtyard of the buildings on 59th and 60th off of Amsterdam.
After an absence of seven years, I’ve been back in this wonderful city for five days. My wife, who just got her Masters in Social Work has come for a conference in group therapy techniques. She’s learning stuff, it’s a write off and we’re seeing old friends.
And I’ve been re-enjoying this extraordinary city, where I spent seven happy years writing television here and for the CBC in Toronto.
Okay, I’m confused. That wonderful show The Fantasticks had a 50th Anniversary moment the other day in New York. As an alumni of the show, I was invited, but couldn’t make it.
The previous year, however, there was what was called a 50th Anniversary bash, and that one I happily attended. The following is my piece on that experience, posted originally on May 14th, 2009.
I had an eye-popping experience at Durham’s Teen Fest performance at NCC’s B.N. Duke Auditorium this past Saturday deserves a bit more.
Teen Fest presented a talent show for and by teenagers committed to fighting drugs, alcohol, abuse and gang violence among their peers. I got the heads-up from a John McCann column in the Herald-Sun, along with the notice that a long ago friend and colleague, Clifton Davis, of Amen fame was to be one of the judges. So I went.
Why the hell do some pleasures have to be guilty? And where did that idea come from anyway?
As I see it, there are two parts to a guilty pleasure: The guilt that’s felt for enjoying something and an embarrassment to admit it. That’s because structurally, a guilty pleasure is something your peers think is crap.
People who determine what’s crap are The Elites, defined as those who think they’re smarter and more sophisticated than everyone else, even if they’re not. You’ll find most Elites in the media, academia, HuffPo or in Whole Foods.
In the noisy and bitter aftermath of Proposition 8’s failure in California, national protests by gay and straight groups are sweeping the country. Today is Day Without A Gay Day and gays are being encouraged to call in sick and donate the time to help in the battle for gay marriage.
Their efforts might gain even more traction if the issue were exclusively political. But it isn’t. The gay marriage issue isn’t really about marriage, it’s about homosexuality which, like abortion, is viewed by Christians as a moral issue and not a political one.
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This past weekend, I drove my nineteen year old son, Mario, and his friend from Durham, NC to Glenside, PA. to see Brian Wilson in concert at the Keswick Theater. My son has had a passion for the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson for years, the kind of passion I felt at his age for an opera singer named Mario Del Monaco, after whom my son is named, incidentally.
While surfing the web recently I came across a 2004 story which reported that in Montreal, there had been a decrease in the prevalence of drug resistance in HIV-1 transmitters among men who have sex with men.
Any positive report about this terrible disease is a welcome oasis in the desert of bad news about AIDS, but in reading further, a similar decrease had not occurred among men having sex with men in other parts of Canada, specifically Ontario and Vancouver.
Child rape isn’t enough, says the Supreme Court of the United States. If you’re a fan of the death penalty, child rape just doesn’t justify terminating the rapist’s life. To the Court, child rape is like being too short to go under the height bar to ride the roller coaster, too slow to make the Olympic Team, or too Caucasian to qualify for affirmative action.
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