Victor, Victoria, Victory!

Easter Sunday, but no Easter dinner for us – just a slothful day of recovery from last night’s festivities. Yesterday we finally got a nice, mostly sunny day (back to rain again today) so I mowed Cousin’s lawn using his Craftsman sit-down mower – really the first time I’ve driven ANYTHING, not counting video game cars, so that’s a big step for me, and once I got used to it, it was fun...don’t think I’ll use a push mower again if I can help it. Wouldn’t it be weird if I ended up learning to drive and LIKING IT after all these years of avoiding anything to do with the steering wheel of a car? Around 4pm Cousin’s friend John (the one who helps Cousin make doll genitals out of sculpting clay) came over to get ready for the Victor/Victoria party with us.

Each time I do drag (apparently that term comes from Shakespeare?) I take it a step further. This time I fully shaved all facial hair, Cousin did my makeup, and gave me fishnets and a sweet purple sequin minidress that fit me like a DREAM and big blonde princess hair and a pair of old black pumps that subsequently BROKE. I put on fake eyelashes (with eyelash glue) and long, pretty fingernails (with super-glue) and made fake breasts out of rolled-up socks and attached a pair of clip-on earrings, since I’ve never had pierced ears (just eyebrow, nose and lip – and I am now completely over facial piercings). My drag name for the evening was Taffeta, Taffy for short; Cousin was Nicole (Nikki) and John was Camille. Cammy, Nikki and Taffy out on the town. And when we got to the party, my goodness, what an entrance we made! EVERYONE wanted photos with us, and at one point there were so many cameras flashing on us that it was like paparazzi on the red carpet. K., the host and birthday boy, lives in a beautiful house up in the hills with a panoramic view of the town below – even at night it was beautiful, I can only imagine in daylight. I had a little trouble with the long nails. When we first arrived and hit the food tables I said “Oh good, deviled eggs!” and snatched one up but sliced right through it with the nails and it fell to the floor in two pieces. A nice little woman, noticing my predicament, started making little snacks and handing them to me so I could eat (so sweet of her). We spent most of our time on the open-air deck, so Nikki and Cammy could smoke, so that became the drag queen smoking deck, and people kept coming out to get photos with us, girls especially just seem to love drag queens. One kept telling me that I looked SO MUCH like her 14-year-old niece. We handed out flyers for our Auntie Mame party in May. (I hope we gave one to the cute boy in the DIY bluejean getup – the one from Switzerland. He was a hottie.)

Then as we were leaving, first one of my shoes and then the other completely lost their soles, and I was stumbling along with the soles flapping on the ground, trashy as hell and most inconvenient. We drove to Gian Don's, the one club on Maui that has occasional gay nights (there is NO full time gay bar on the island, one reason I may actually be ready to leave by October), where a very nice man at an Easter crafts table in the bar (the DJs boyfriend) used his hot glue gun and glued my shoes back together! I danced a little – started the dance floor, in fact! – but Cousin didn’t want to stay long at the club, so then we headed over to his friend DJ’s house, and DJ was asleep and naked, but didn’t seem to mind that we woke him up, but we didn’t stay there long, either, so finally we headed home, and were followed for a long ways by a police officer, which was really unnerving (three inebriated drag queens going over the speed limit – oh, that would’ve made an officer’s night – Cousin joked that if they put us in jail we’d have to ask to be put in with the women). Luckily we got off scott-free. But I had a bitch of a time taking my super-glued nails off this morning. Couldn’t get the thumbs off, in fact – ended up just trimming them down with a nailclipper. Tomorrow morning, back to business: gonna get up early and go in to Kahului to continue the job hunt, and get a new canvas for another Ben Whishaw portrait I’m going to do (using a photo from Interview magazine) that’s going to be the best yet. Oh yes. It’ll make him fall in love with me for sure.


xo

glam aka tony

Art, Spam and stem cells

Just got back from a trip in to town (Kahului), and I have a bunch of new art supplies. We went to the Golden Palette, about the saddest, most decrepit little art store I’ve ever seen: the only shop left in a little ghost strip mall that was evacuated because of the fire that destroyed the Salvation Army. They don’t have much of a selection and I can’t think how they do enough business to stay open (Cousin says they’ve been there forever), and I bought a canvas because I felt guilty about leaving without buying something, it’s the sort of underdog business you feel sorry for. Then to Ben Franklin’s in the Queen Kaahumanu Center where I got another canvas and some paint and mineral spirits, then Cousin drove me to meet this guy who put an ad on Craigslist, offering 14 tubes of oil paint (including three of the really big sized ones) plus a bottle of linseed oil for $25, a killer deal, so that was a score. Then we went to Denny’s for lunch. Cousin said, “This is the good Denny’s,” meaning not the Bad Denny’s in Kihei where he broke his arm a few years ago. Two of the dishes on the Specials list came with – no kidding – SPAM. (Cousin said the food the natives eat here is really bad, and I’m afraid it looks that way. There are also these really gross red hot dogs that are sold everywhere and are made with meat possibly as gross or grosser than Spam.) I’m already finding it hard to stay motivated here, and the job hunt has yielded no success. It’s also proving hard not to eat bad (fattening, greasy) food, since it’s everywhere. But I haven’t fallen down on the exercise program yet, and the pants that used to be uncomfortably tight around the waist are falling off if I don’t wear a belt.

So, about that art. I have nearly completed a large portrait of Ben W. over a background of the Union Jack; oil over acrylic, and the oil is drying right now before I go in for the finishing touches. Cousin showed me how to print the photo I was working from on a transparency and then project it onto the canvas so it came out better than I can draw free hand. This is a revelation for me and will lead to all sorts of new and improved ideas, because the thing is I need to paint humans (or animals), figures motivate me, they’re the subject matter I’m drawn to; when I try to do landscapes or abstracts or still lifes I invariably get bored and don’t finish them. If there isn’t a relatable human or living figure in it, I lose interest. Then I’ve started another of an Egyptian style cat, gold/yellow color with lapis lazuli (really pretty blue) bangles and adornments. And with the two canvases I bought today I’m going to do two more: another of Ben over a background of candy hearts (the ones that say BE MINE and DO TELL and SO DREAMY, etc) and one of a tiger-striped hippo. So I’m back in full creative flux. Right now I’m doing a drawing of a box of Boo Berry cereal, because we started talking about things that symbolize our childhood at lunch, in the context of Cousin’s book, and I came up with the idea of illustrating the book not only with photographs of all the old times we’re talking over (which Cousin has a lot of ), but also with drawings and paintings of some of the products and toys and foods that we remember from growing up – hence the Boo Berry cereal drawing. (My sister sent me a box of it last Halloween, I ate the whole box, and remain of the opinion that it is certainly the best-tasting of the monster sugar cereals.)

Did a little more yard work for Cousin yesterday and I’m going to mow the lawn (with the kind of mower you drive) later today or tomorrow. The Victor/Victoria party is this Saturday and I don’t know what to do about shoes. Cousin has a big pair of white thigh-high leather platform heels that fit me in the feet, but they don’t fit around my legs, so they won’t work very well, and there aren’t really any other options. We were going to go to the beach today but it isn’t nice enough; it’s been cloudy and rainy and relatively cool (K. says it’s “freezing”) the last few days. And I just started getting my nice island tan!

I saw Michael J. Fox on Jon Stewart the other night. My Mom told me he was on Oprah recently and Oprah's new doctor (I gather Dr. Phil has been replaced?) told him that with the new stem cell research bill that Obama signed (to use stem cells from ADULTS and not just dead babies or whatever) he will be CURED of Parkinson's within the next decade. Mom hopes they'll be able to cure her of her stroke damage within that same amount of time. And I started thinking about how strange it would be if she suddenly, at age 65 or so, regained the ability to walk and the left side of her body was un-paralyzed, meaning she no longer qualified for disability checks, and had to find a job and start her life over again - at the very age when most people retire.

Script idea, there.

Business and pleasure

Yesterday: a very active, focused day, and I burned lots of calories. Cousin dropped me off in Kahului and I job-hunted from 9am to 1pm there, but it was more schlepping along in the hot sun carrying my backpack, beach gear and laptop (the strap of the laptop bag digging into my sunburnt shoulder) than turning in too many resumes or applications: most places do their hiring online now. For example: Fedex Kinkos, Safeway, Ross Dress For Less (which IS hiring), Blockbuster, and Whole Foods (which isn’t open yet, still being built, and that would be about the ideal place to work for a few months). I made the mistake of buying groceries (apples, tea, strawberry frosted pop tarts) from Foodland, then went to Safeway and saw everything I’d just bought for about half the price. Of course Foodland is the local, karmically superior, less corporate choice, but until I get a job, I’m going to have to put savings above principles.

At 1pm I caught the Haiku Islander bus to Paia, where I made a halfhearted attempt at further job-hunting (turned in resumes at Charley’s, where we had breakfast the other day, and the Flatbread Pizza Co., which seems to do a brisk business), but soon ducked out to Paia Bay, the public beach, which is actually quite nice, and wasn’t crowded at all, to my surprise – K. said there aren’t too many visitors on the Islands yet, more will come later, with the summer season. I spent about three blissful hours body surfing, being tossed up and down on warm waves – about as good as life gets, from my perspective. I kept my laptop and other things close to the shore and continually surveyed them, since the girl in the surf shop warned me not to leave my things unattended. But it was smooth surfing. I feel effortlessly at home in the ocean. Practically everyone else had a surfboard, and I’d like to get one and try that some day soon, but I have plenty of fun with my plain old self. The old adage about how you should never turn your back on the ocean is true, though: a couple times I got caught, turning back to scan the beach, then having a big wave abruptly jump up and crash over me. It’s so unpredictable: waves that look like they’ll come in huge weaken to nothing just before they hit you, while a giant white-crested wall can roll up out of nowhere just a few yards in front of you. But that’s the fun of it: keeps you on your toes. It’s like the wave machine in the water parks I so loved as a child, except even warmer, and more fun, because the waves aren’t churned out uniformly by some man-made automaton: they follow the caprices of Neptune, a worthy and wily opponent. But an ally as much as an adversary, if you’re an aquaphile like me.

I'm peeling. It's something you have to go through to get your Maui tan, of course.

After my splendid ocean reverie I spent some time in the Green Banana Internet Cafe, applying for jobs online and such, then caught the bus again to the Haiku Community Center, and walked from there to Hohani Place, by which point I was really exhausted. It looked like it was about to burst into heavy rain the whole time, and I was considering what to do, since I was carrying my laptop with nothing to protect it but its carrying bag, but it never did.

I haven't really seen any destitute or homeless people here yet. There's a major difference from Portland.

We finally did our first GOOD session of work on Cousin's (as-yet-untitled) book yesterday: worked on it all day, minus little breaks for exercise and kite-flying and palm-tree hacking. Called my Mom to get her to corroborate some of the memories we were going over, of the old days in the trailer court and Cousin and Auntie’s apartment in Burnsville, and the fourplex me and my Mom had by Rockite Silo, etc, and my Mom was sullen at first but then got really excited and animated, because the memories of the time when she was young and alive bring her back to life, which is why I want to try to include her in the memory-collecting process as much as possible. And Cousin pulled out a suitcase with tons of old photos, some of which I’d never even seen before, including ones of my Mom and Auntie when they were cute little girls in bonnets, and one of my Mom around the time she was dating/married to my Dad and she was super hot, so skinny and pretty, it’s just hard to believe it’s even the same woman, that she was ever that fine. What was my Dad thinking to dump her? I’ve already developed a fondness for typing as Cousin talks, because he really gets revved up and his way of recounting this endless saga of absurd childhood incidents and tragedies and hilarities is SO FUNNY. Example: the one about his mother buying them their first color TV set when they lived in the trailer court, and how she flew into a rage while watching The Wizard of Oz because she forgot the first part of the movie is in black and white, so she started tweaking with all the tint and contrast settings, thinking there was something wrong with the TV, so when Dorothy finally opened the door in Oz the colors were all fucked up and wrong and overly saturated (this was during her heavy drinking days)!

This book is gonna be a lot of fun...although Cousin's haphazard, sporadic way of working on it is going to clash with my desire to set a regular time to work on it each day. Especially if I do end up getting a job, so my time is more restricted.