A New June Mix

June is an important month at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, & made even more so after Portland was dealt the coolest & wettest spring since records have been kept. The garden is certainly green. Yet your host is pale & petulant & peevish. The Husband & I have lived in Seattle or Portland for 30 years, but that was not enough of enlightened edification tp prepare for Spring 2001.

When I finally reach Saturday, I will have worked 16 days in a row, sometimes 15 hour days, part of the stretch I was sick. This was all because my assistant, went off & got married, wed to a young lady that I hired & they fell in love on the job. They have me to thank for their happiness. That is what I do, I spread happiness.

Saturday I will start a week long staycation. It will begin with 2 days of temperatures in the low 80s & blue skies. I am so very ready for some Vitamin D.

June warrants several of my custom playlists that are very much in demand in my circle. I allow myself to become unnecessarily gay in June, as it is Gay Pride in Seattle & Portland & the month of the Tony Awards, a high holiday at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia. God in Her infinite generosity has aligned Gay Pride & the Tonys to be on the same day! Now that is Gay!

I celebrate Pride by not going to the parade or the Pride Festival at the waterfront. I have a deep disapproval for &a need to avoid large gatherings of people who are not usually positioned in a place they would normally never be, unless they are there to see me, which would be understandable. On Pride Day I stay home, smoke some pot & play show tunes rather loudly as I sing & dance along, a custom that dates back to 1969. I appreciate the continuity.

I offer up a just completed Custom Mix for my respite. If for any reason you find this mix to be amusing & alluring, simply email me with your snail mail address & I will send you one. That is how much I love you.



I give you Steve's At It Again Mix:

One For My Baby- Marlene Dietrich & Burt Bacharach

Boys Dont Cry- The Cure

When The Hangover Strikes- Squeeze

The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)- Tom Waits

Drinking Again- Dinah Washington

Something Cool- June Christy

I'm A Stranger Here Myself- Patti LuPone

I Love Men- Eartha Kitt

Calgary- Bon Iver

Crazy In Love- Antony & The Johnsons

Without You- Eddie Vedder

Rum & Coca Cola- Julio Iglesias

Born On This Day- February 27th... Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky

She came into my focus as my mother sat me down at 5 years of age & explained the entire Elizabeth Taylor + Eddie Fisher – Debbie Reynolds = scandal equation. I got it. She remains my mother’s favorite star; they are the same age & were born in the same month. She is a favorite of mine & I think she is the last of the truly great Hollywood Royalty, & very possibly the most beautiful woman of all time. I love her deeply.

Taylor has been a trusted friend to the gay community, & we have loved her right back. She was very close friends & a confidant of gay men: Roddy McDowell, Rock Hudson, George Cukor, Noel Coward, James Dean & most famously to Montgomery Clift. Were there ever any 2 actors at the apex of their beauty, more stunning than Taylor & Clift kissing in A Place In The Sun?



Elizabeth Taylor is a conundrum: truly classy, but perfectly campy, deeply kind, but shamelessly embarrassing, perennially lonely, & serially monogamous. Pills, coke, booze, men, the commercials, the mascara, Studio 54, the guest appearances on soap operas… Elizabeth Taylor & I got through the 1970s together. She gave audacious performances in film adaptations of “gay” plays as Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer & Cat On A Hot Tim Roof, & Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I met her once, at the 50th Anniversary of MGM Ball. I was thrillingly treated to a 7 minute conversation. She amazingly asked about me. I explained that I was a Theatre major at Loyola Marymount University & Taylor quizzed me on my curriculum & my stage roles. I told her was a huge fan of her work. She touched my arm & looked at me with the famous violet eyes & murmured: "I always thought that I was a fine actress, but I spent a lifetime feeling that I was held back because I have such a terrible speaking voice. The coaches at MGM attempted to help me & I did improve, but I will never shake the fact the dreadful small voice was what stopped me from being truly great..." She was only in her early 40s, wearing a beautiful canary yellow mini-dress with yellow flowers in her hair. She was smoking a cigarette with a holder. She was faultlessly beautiful. I nearly fainted.

I appreciate that, like me, she has had a taste for expensive pharmaceuticals, rich fabrics & rich men. I tremble at the thought of her 8 tumultuous marriages & the public denunciation by the Vatican as a home wrecker. I love her for her dramatic tracheotomy scar, of which she was never ashamed. I appreciate her love affair with jewelry that inspired a book simply titled My Love Affair with Jewelry… it looks handsome on the shelf with my own volume- My Love Affair with Whiskey. I admire her unswerving devotion to her friends, to gay people, & for gay activism & attention to fund raising for HIV/AIDS. My feelings are simpatico with Elizabeth Taylor. My mother loves us both, we have both lived with incidents replete with slurred speech, jokes about weight gain, inelegant gestures of elegance & displays of dignity in the face of devastation.


On Oscar day today, the Oscar winning actress turns 78  & she is hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for for treatment of congestive heart failure. I send her love & healing white light. A world without Elizabeth Taylor will not be a good place.

An Anthem For Our Time?