From a local birding page. Nothing to back it up. They can do this to pretty much any lesbian. Anyways if you're in Provincetown tonight go see her show.

2023 Provincetown summer theme weeks

Here are the biggest theme weeks and weekends scheduled to take place in Provincetown this summer. Make your plans now. #Provincetown #Ptown

Summer is still a few months away here in Boston, but it is never too early to start planning your summer get aways to Provincetown. If you’re planning a trip to Provincetown you may want to coincide your visit with one of the many theme weeks this summer. Below are the largest theme weeks and celebrations scheduled for the 2023 summer. MAY & JUNE THEME WEEKS Memorial Day Weekend – May 25 – 29,…

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The Girl Next Door part IX

Pairing: Jeryd Mencken x OFC

Warnings: dubious content, affairs, age gap, morality issues, mentions of vomiting, mentions of pregnancy, my improper use of commas. MDNI!

A/N: Alright, this is the big one. There’s one chapter after this and then the epilogue. Can anyone guess where this is going? To everyone who has read this and commented, my lovely betas who listen to my neurotic rants, and everyone else in between, thanks for all the love. I never would’ve guessed this little piece of shit would garner so much attention but here we are. You all get one (1) kiss on the forehead.

WC: 2725

Call it women’s intuition, clairvoyance, unchecked paranoia, I knew the moment I saw the other vehicle in his driveway that she was home. I felt it deep within my gut, unsettled like the battering sea, churning away to the point that there was no ignoring it. Willful ignorance was the only thing keeping me afloat in those days.

Something came up. Let’s rain check our run.

“Rain check your run,” I mumbled to myself as I read his text, sliding into my trainers as I made my way to the front door.

A series of events quickly set into motion as I latched the door behind me, completely out of my control, blurring the lines between he and I even more than they had been blurred previously.

Jackson came barreling towards me out of nowhere, nipping and licking at my fingertips once he finally skidded to a stop at my shins, coaxing my hand to scratch between his ears.

“Where did you come from?” I cooed to him, patting his side as he leaned into me.

“Jackson!” I expected Jill to come tottering around the corner, but the smile on my face quickly faded when I saw her poking her head over the picket fence that separated our properties.

“I am so sorry!” She whistled at Jackson, pointing her finger back at the yard he had escaped from, “He doesn’t listen to me.”

“I’ve got him,” I led Jackson carefully over to the yard as she unclasped the gate and let him back inside.

“Thank you,” she smiled at me, “He doesn’t like me, I don’t think.”

Jeryd came walking out on the porch, leaning against a column casually, drying his hands with a dish towel, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms. He watched the scene unfold, his eyes darting between his wife and I.

“I’m Hannah,” she said, offering her hand out to me.

“Liv,” I noticed her hands were soft and small as we exchanged a clipped handshake. Her eyes were kind, everything about her screaming out the picturesque vision of domesticity that I would never be able to achieve. Imagining her on her knees in a head shop bathroom in Provincetown was like imagining myself being the First Lady; so very wrong and out of place. She and I would fill our respective roles in a man’s life that had no regard for either of our feelings at the end of the day. A man so unsatiated that he would have his cake and demand he be able to eat it. That’s the only thing Hannah Mencken and I would ever have in common.

She bobbed her head at me, “Law school Liv. The previous owners gave us a run down.”

“Right.”

“Well, it’s nice to be able to put a name with a face.” She assessed me, walking back to the porch to take her place beside Jeryd as her eyes roamed across my face and down my figure.

I smiled up at them, nodding as I turned the other way, running as fast I could before the tears inevitably came falling down.

_________________________________________

He started out by flaking. On my first day back at the university later that week, he called in sick. I only found out when I walked in and was greeted by a substitute. My texts went unanswered, and each call was forwarded to his voicemail. Any headway we made in Hyannis was quickly replaced with regret and remorse.

I cried the entire way home that evening, breaking the vow I had made to him a few days prior in Hyannis.

When he attempted to talk to me from his vantage point on his front porch once I arrived home and mustered enough strength to get out of my car, I fully ignored him.

When I walked into his classroom the next day, he looked at me as if to say ‘I know, I know’ but I was quick to shut down his attempt to rectify the situation.

I quite simply didn’t want to hear him speak.

That didn’t last long. When he slid his hand into my slacks, opening me up with deft fingers against his desk, I felt all the tension leave my body.

“There’s my girl,” he cooed as I came around his fingers, looking over my shoulder with a sly smile as if I died and came back to life under his ministrations.

At one point, I reasoned with myself that I couldn’t possibly be in love with him, chalking up my moments of weakness to the different ways he found to get me off. And boy, did he find new ways to get me off once the stakes were higher and his wife was home. Like he knew I would eventually tire of the secrecy and lies if he didn’t make it worth my while.

“You get wetter now that she’s back,” He whispered against the nape of my neck as he angled his fingers deeper, one orgasm following the next, leaving a trail of my arousal slathered across my skin as he drug his fingers across my asscheeks and up to the small of my back.

“Don’t fucking say that to me,” I turned around and shoved myself away from his desk, repositioning my pants as I grabbed my bag.

“Where are you going?” He asked as I made my way to the door.

“To hell.”

_________________________________________

If the situation wasn’t already complicated by Hannah’s presence, my mother arriving home added a new element to the entire charade.

“You don’t look so good.” She said as she appeared in the kitchen.

“Thanks. I didn’t have the luxury of going on a two week cruise.” I had been sitting at my laptop at the kitchen table for over an hour preparing the last few batches of PowerPoints for Jeryd’s lectures. With The Marina reopening on the Fourth of July, which also doubled as my twenty-third birthday, I planned to give my notice at the university the following day.

She stopped and looked at me, shocked that I would hit back that deeply. “That wasn’t very nice.”

I had become so used to hard-hitting sarcasm as a defense mechanism, a tactic I had learned from him, or maybe to protect myself from him, that I had forgotten how to have a normal conversation without any dour undertones.

“You’re right,” I said, rubbing my temples, “I’m sorry.” I closed the laptop, offering her a kind smile.

“Tell me about your trip.”

For the next hour we worked in tandem around the kitchen. She chopped onions and I sautéed mushrooms, listening intently as she recounted each port the ship stopped in, tenderly going into detail about each little thing that reminded her of me.

“I really wish you could’ve been with me, my love.”

I wondered if she would still love me unconditionally if she knew what I had been up to. If a mother’s love truly knew no bounds and if she would forgive me for hurting another woman the way my father had hurt her.

“Me too.” I said honestly, knowing I had been out at sea in regards to my own life for the duration of her trip.

We dined together in content silence, sipping wine, enjoying one another’s presence. For the first time in a while, I didn’t think about Jeryd.

But he was there, like he always was, peeping cautiously through his kitchen window at us, like he knew I was debating on coming clean to my mother.

Luckily for him and I both, I decided to live our lie a little longer.

_________________________________________

“You could’ve told me, Olivia,” A few brisk steps and he caught up with me as I made my way down the hall, towards his classroom.

His use of my full name still had a weird effect on me.

I surmised the department head had let him know about my resignation because everything else in my life, big, small, or undefined, he knew about. The more my legs opened for him, the more secrets, or lack thereof, he seemed to pry out of me.

I waited for him to unlock his classroom door, his eyes never leaving mine as he turned the key in the lock.

“You knew I would be going back to The Marina as soon as it reopened.”

He let me enter first, tossing his keys and phone onto the desk with a loud huff of frustration.

“But you could’ve told me first. Seems calculated, no?”

I shook my head, “I knew you’d try to talk to me out of it if I told you first.”

“And you knew I’d be successful.” He seemed almost pleased with himself as he said that, a wry, sly smile pulled at the corner of his lips.

I let out a full body sigh, watching his movements in the reflection of the window I was standing beside, “This was fun once, wasn’t it?”

“In the beginning, maybe?” I continued, willing myself to turn around and look at him. It was a genuine question.

Everything blurred together when I looked at him. Days, weeks, months, years could have passed by and I wouldn’t have had a clue. I had been so wrapped up in him that nothing else had mattered.

He searched my face as I stared at him. Before he could comment, his students began to pour into the room, effectively shutting our exchange down.

I wanted to care about him, I truly did. There was a part of me that wished that he would be an unbearable asshole all the time, just so I’d be able to walk away a little easier. I was tired of the constant battles and pitfalls that existed between us, the need for me to continue waging my internal battles, as I fought for control of my own life and feelings. I was tired of navigating through broken promises and shattered expectations, letting my own guard down only to quickly rebuild it, reminding myself of why it was there in the first place.

I filed out of his classroom with the sea of students once class was over, not willing to face him to hear his answer.

_________________________________________

I kept my distance as July approached, longing for him to want to see me, to need me the way I had convinced myself that I needed him, but my pride wouldn’t allow me to beg myself for an ounce of his attention. I had gotten so used to everything being on his terms, I had forgotten that I was a willing participant in our affair. That I mattered just as much as he did. My needs remained unfulfilled and knowing that he was merely hundreds of feet next door at any given moment sent me into a maniacal spiral filled with thoughts of bursting into his house, of spilling my guts to his wife. Just to hurt him. She was an innocent bystander that my bulleted speech would maim. I lied to myself, my mind assuring me she deserved so much better. That I would be doing her a favor. At the same time, I assured myself he was exactly what I deserved.

If that doesn’t say something about the way I viewed myself then, I don’t know what else does.

_________________________________________

It was hotter than usual that Fourth of July.

“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” My grandmother said to my mother as I walked into the kitchen, grabbing the cup of coffee she slid over to me.

Her southern accent was a means of comfort to me, until she eyed me up and down, “You don’t look so good, Livvy Lou.” Even her sweet cadence couldn’t sugarcoat the fact that I was falling apart.

She continued to eye me over the rim of her teacup, sitting it down long enough to insult me again.

“You look terrible. Like you crawled up from the grave. Was that you throwing up last night?”

“Nope,” I lied. “Must have been the neighbor's dog again.” Knowing good and well I had cried so hard that I had vomited sometime during the witching hour.

She only hummed in response, not looking away as I quickly downed the coffee that had been placed in front of me, grabbing my keys from the counter.

“These were on the porch this morning,” My mother came from the living room holding a bouquet of red roses and a book, neatly bound together with a simple piece of silky red ribbon.

“Who sent this?” I grabbed the book, pale yellow, with the words DOSTOEVSKY: LETTERS AND REMINISCENCES emblazoned on the front in sage green calligraphy.

“Don’t know. It was on the porch when I went out to grab the newspaper this morning.”

“Strange.”

All it took was flipping the book open to notice his handwriting scrawled out on the first page:

‘Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.’

_______________________________________

“Did you get my gifts?”

About an hour before my shift was scheduled to end, he showed up, requesting a table by the window in a secluded part of the restaurant, in my section.

“I did.”

I looked around at my other tables before gazing back down at him with a soft smile, “Thank you.”

“Do you have any plans tonight?”

“Dinner with my parents and grandma at that Italian restaurant next to the jazz bar on MaryAnn street. I might go out with Heather and her family on their boat to watch the fireworks after.”

He nodded at me, sipping his water to maintain the illusion of casual coolness between the two of us.

“Right, well,” I nodded as I took off, dancing around my section under his prying gaze for the rest of my shift.

I delivered his check, watching as he inked his name across the bottom, letting out a measured sigh as he began to speak, “We need to talk.”

_________________________________________

“You’re going to do this to me on my birthday?”

Per his request, I followed him to the university, its parking lot empty due to the holiday. For a split second, I thought he had wanted to see me, spend time with me, or maybe he would drag me to the backseat like he had on the way home from Hyannis. But as I followed his car closely, those four words, “we need to talk” ringing in my ears, I realized what was coming. I knew it the moment I climbed into his car, when he couldn’t look at me, barely acknowledging my presence as I waited for an answer.

“It’s not personal, Olivia.”

“Stop fucking saying that to me,” I seethed from my place in his passenger’s seat.

He didn’t let my anger phase him. He looked straight ahead, his hands pressed flat down on his thighs, his eyes scanning the empty parking lot.

“Spit it out,” I wanted to sound brave and hardened, like I could take whatever he threw at me, letting it roll off my back in stride, but my words came out as nothing more than an airy plea.

I braced for impact, waiting for the speech about my age and future. The setbacks our tryst would eventually unravel and what lost potential would come along with it. The disappointment of it all.

“Let’s be honest,” he cleared his throat, finally looking over at me, “this thing had an expiration date from the beginning.”

I met a whole different side of him that day. The Jeryd Mencken who is so full of himself, so wholly pompous and removed from any vulnerability, that you start to believe the things he says. He believed himself, at least, in saying that we had an expiration date. So much so that I sat there in silence, running through each word we had shared, every interaction, for any indication that this whole thing had been given a strict timeline.

I laughed incredulously, scoffing at him.

“God. Fuck you, Jeryd.”

I grasped the door handle, clawing at it in an attempt to get away from him.

“She’s pregnant.”

In grim slow motion, I turned around to stare at him, jaw clenched, my entire body coiled up and ready to strike.

“What the fuck did you just say?”

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actually women's week provincetown could fix me

A Conversation With Nan Goldin on the 30th Anniversary of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

A Conversation With Nan Goldin on the 30th Anniversary of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

The book of Nan Goldin’s influential, intensely personal visual diary marks its 30th anniversary. Here, the photographer on the story of its making.

How Photographers from Nan Goldin to Jamel Shabazz Captured the Rebellious Youth of the ’80s | Artsy

From a Polaroid of a young, denim-clad Madonna to an image of two boys riding the NYC subway with a giant boombox, these images perfectly capture this era of rebellious youth.

Photo: Nan Goldin / Aperture C.Z and Max on the beach, Truro, Mass., 1976 Things were probably a little raucous, probably also a little reverent in those rooms, as soundtracks spliced from Maria Callas, the Velvet Underground, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, James Brown, and Yoko Ono played to a deeply personal visual diary of Goldin’s life, the late nights, the mornings after, the romance and sex and drugs and violence. The first audiences mirrored the characters in the photographs, her closest friends and chosen family—downtown artists and actors and filmmakers: Cookie Mueller and girlfriend Sharon Niesp, David Armstrong, Suzanne Fletcher, among them, all calling out which pictures of themselves they liked best. The photos were made largely in the years before Goldin went into detox. It was also the height of the AIDS crisis; many of the subjects of the photographs died young. “The book had become for me a volume of loss, a ballad of love,” Goldin writes in its afterword. Her color slides go straight into their bedrooms and before their bathroom mirrors, to the bars, to the street. As the title suggests, Ballad feels musical in form, too, a narrative made up of distinct movements, heightening the division between men and women, which resonate in drastically different evocations of the same experiences, intimate and spontaneous. There are separate sections of women getting ready to go out, of men getting ready to go out, of women alone, of men alone, of women bruised and beaten, of men bruised and beaten, of women with guns, of men with guns, of women and men in and out of love, living and dying.At the heart of the story is the photographer, who points the camera at herself from the same unflinching vantage: “The photo of me battered is the central image of the Ballad,” she writes. Goldin had been badly beaten by a lover, abuse that necessitated major surgery. That photograph is the hinge of the slideshow, of the book; it is also a visual echo of the loss of her sister, who killed herself when she was 18 and Goldin was 11. Shortly after, Goldin was seduced by an older man, and it’s that tension between pain, loss, and desire that propels her work. Terrified she too would die young, Goldin left home before the age of 15; eventually she moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she became close to the drag queen scene; and to Boston, where she studied with photographer Henry Horenstein, who turned her on to the work of Larry Clark; and to New York City, where the Ballad would take real shape. Now she lives between New York and Europe.Since those early days, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has been shown all over the world, the book reissued in multiple printings. This year it was on view again at the Whitney, in the inaugural exhibit at the museum’s new downtown home. Tonight at Terminal 5, it will be screened with live performances by Laurie Anderson and Martha Wainwright and other musicians, at Aperture Foundation’s celebration of the 30th anniversary of the publication of the book. Last week, when I called Goldin in New York, we talked about the evolution and constant re-editing of Ballad, the bar where she was working when she made it into the Whitney Biennial, and the relationship between photographs and memory in her work. I found her to be as open and honest as her pictures.I’ve seen Ballad in a museum setting, I’ve seen it as a video, but I’ve never seen you, in a room, screening the slideshow. And in that sense none of us will have the complete experience of some of the early slideshows. So I’d like to talk a bit about all the different forms it’s taken over the years and also how the slideshow itself has evolved.You say it can’t be seen in its early versions, which is interesting. But I actually found some recording tapes recently, though I haven’t watched or listened to them. I made them on reel-to-reel tapes for years—the soundtracks. I have different versions of them. I tried different lengths of time. Sometimes it was an hour and a half, sometimes it was 20 minutes; until 1986 I had the drag queens in the middle, between the men and the women. And then a man named François Hébel wanted to show it in Arles, France, and he said, “What do you think about moving that section?” He was scared to ask—it is a bold thing to ask an artist to change their work—and I had quite a temper at that time. But I did it. And it was a really smart move on his part.One of the things that’s so compelling about this work is that you’re making it from within. This is the world that you were part of, and yet you were able to go outside enough in the way that an artist has to go outside to some extent, enough to be able to fully see. You were outside-inside. And those early shows, the ones I wish I could have seen, were often seen by the subjects themselves.Yes, the only people in those early audiences were people in the pictures. They were shown at a downtown space run by an amazing man named Rafik who is no longer with us. I think it’s a place to buy film equipment now. But at the time there was a screening room and I would show it regularly there. I’d be holding the projectors in my hands and the bulb would burn out and I’d run home and get another bulb. And the audience would wait. The slideshows were all really handmade.I was just remembering the early black-and-white slides that were in the middle of the show then. They didn’t really have a way to make black-and-white slides at the time, so they were very high contrast, really scratchy; they were very primitive and very personal. People would say, “Oh, I like that one of me.” In a way that was what it was made for, so that people could tell me how they felt about it. They became part of it. I edited it for my friends. And sometimes friends who were living with me in the mid-’80s would help me edit it. Vivienne Dick, a Super 8 filmmaker, was a huge influence on my use of music.I read somewhere that one of the reasons you turned to slides is that it was cheaper, that you didn’t have money for paper and darkroom supplies.No, that’s not true. I started it when I was at art school in the ’70s in Boston. I went to Provincetown and then I decided to spend a winter there. Basically I learned how to drink at art school; teachers at the school collected old cars and we’d sit in the cars and drink. But I learned how to print color. And I’m still friends with people I went to school with there. That was really art school.I went to Provincetown and lived there through the winter. The way the school worked is that you would show your work three times a year and the teachers would grade it, or they’d give you advice or they’d tell you were making shit. I had no access to a darkroom there, so that’s when I started showing slides to the teachers. And a friend of mine would help me make the music. When I screened the slides at the famous “Times Square” exhibition in 1980, a boyfriend of mine was the DJ. So that was the very beginning of the slideshow. At first it was really just a series of pictures.You start taking pictures, and then you start taking more and more, and then they accumulate, and then eventually you start to shape the whole thing. I’m curious about the moment you recognized that this was becoming a body of work, and about how you arrived at this particular form?All I made were individual prints until 1978 except the ones I showed for credit. At my school, every year you’d hang your work in this huge armory in Boston as an installation, and if you won a prize you’d get money to travel. At that point I started making color prints and showing them on the wall, and I got the travel money and I went to London. There’s a series a museum wants to buy—it’s lots of skinheads that I was hanging out with then. The two months in London were some of the wildest times in my life. Literally. And I documented the whole thing. But I was always inside the work. It was never strangers. Even the skinheads. It wasn’t like I went out looking for skinheads. I stayed with them briefly until they became the soldiers for the National Front. I witnessed that. In that period I lived a really wild life. Much wilder than anybody knows.It’s a visual diary as you’ve described, but was that part of the initial impulse to photograph, “this wild time, this is going to disappear one day and photographing is my way of holding on to it”?I talk about this a lot in the intro to the Ballad and it’s true. It was not about the wild times. I never thought they would end. I was living in the moment, not documenting for the future. I think having an early death in my life, of my sister, made it more important to hold on to people. I’m aware even now that when I’m getting ready to leave a place, I photograph much more.At the same time you wrote that a photograph—That I thought it could save the person somehow. That I thought I could keep people alive. I really believed it until recently. I would light candles in churches, too. I still do that. And I also thought I could preserve the memory of the person through a photograph. But without the voice, without the body, without the smell, without the laugh, it doesn’t do much. Well, it keeps a memory, but then it becomes a memory of the picture at some point. It’s important to understand when I took the pictures I was not thinking of their later use of preserving memory because I was in the moment—I didn’t know what would be lost!You know Sally Mann in her memoir earlier this year said essentially the same thing—how photographs destroy actual memory. She was talking specifically about her friend, the painter Cy Twombly. She said the reason she remembers him so well is that she has so few pictures of him.Yes, I just did a text for my new book, Diving for Pearls—which is only out in German now, it will be out in English very soon—and I write about the difference between pearl diving and cultured pearls and I make an analogy between analog photography and digital photography. The pictures I took that came out all black, sometimes I remember those moments more strongly than I remember the ones that I photographed. It happened during some of the most important moments of my life, when the film came out black. I went to New Orleans for three weeks once with Cookie and Sharon and they were lovers at the time and they were breaking up. That was an incredibly wild three weeks and I photographed constantly. And I got 30 rolls of black film back. Except in the middle of one of the rolls there’s a picture of Cookie looking in the mirror and putting on lipstick, and written next to her on the wall it says “Angel.” It’s the only picture that came out of these 30 rolls. And the camera worked perfectly before I went and it worked perfectly when I got back. It had to be voodoo.That’s so haunted.And so my last statement in the book is, “Will voodoo ever work on digital photography?” The reason I call it Diving for Pearls is that David [Armstrong] used to say getting a good picture is like diving for pearls. You take a thousand pictures to get a good one, like oysters with the rare pearl. It’s true, and I used to say I’m not a good photographer. If anyone took as many pictures as I do, they’d be standing up here, too. It’s a lot to do with generosity, just taking thousands and thousands of pictures, and then where the art comes in is the editing.I think of them as distinct narrative forms: the individual pictures; the book; the slideshow, which is somewhere in between still and cinema. There’s that word, ballad. It’s a musical form in one sense, it’s a literary form, and especially when you talk about photographs making their own memories, well, you’re reshaping these memories all the time into new stories. Where does, say, the book fit in for you, in relation to the slideshow?It’s a book of a film, and that’s what it started as. Now it has its own life, and I love it. I want to make films; that’s my life’s dream. I haven’t made that step yet, but I’m about to. I’ve found a collaborator and now I have to find a screenwriter. But that’s all I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid and that’s why I’ve never particularly cared about photography. That’s why photography is easy for me to do. It’s not as important to me to make great pictures as it is to make a great film, which has stopped me all these years. So this is my form of making movies. And Jim Jarmusch told me in the early ’80s that he saw the slideshow as being a little bit like Chris Marker’s film La Jetée, which is also made of stills. It’s not really, because each slide is shown at the same time and it’s not repeated. I mean, I would love to make something like La Jetée, but it’s a lot more complex in the way that it uses the still.Who inspired you when you were a kid, when you first had the impulse to make films?I went to a hippie free school and we didn’t have any classes. I mean, we once had a class in Italian—once, in four years; we once had a class in American expatriates in Paris, and once a class called “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny.” We had school meetings every week, and that’s where I learned to talk, which was very important for me. Because I was practically silent; I was so shy in those years. And then David and I went to the movies three times a week. So at 15 I’d seen all of Antonioni, Jack Smith, Warhol, Morrissey, Bertolucci, Bergman, John Waters (of course), Fellini, and all the American superstar women—all the Bette Davis, all the Joan Crawford, all the Jean Harlow, all the Greta Garbo. So that was my education—cinema, from the ages of 15 to 18. And it still is. I wrote an article for Cahiers du Cinéma, they asked me to write about my favorite films. And I said that films taught me how to live. They taught me what relationships were. I learned everything I know from films.Jack Smith was at some of your early slideshows too, wasn’t he?Yes, he and I did a screening together at Rafik’s for Thanksgiving once. Things were very different back then. Artists hung out, we were all hanging out and very supportive of one another. And I remember the time the first person we knew went with a gallery and it was shocking to us. When I moved to New York in ’78, I started with a gallery, Castelli Graphics, because Marvin Heiferman, who is a genius about many things but especially about photography—Marvin became my dealer for all of the ’80s. In ’85 he invited all these curators to Rafik to come see my slideshow, and that’s how it got into the Whitney Biennial.And what else were you doing at the time, apart from the world of the pictures?I was working as a bartender, at Tin Pan Alley, this tough bar on Times Square—back when it was Times Square, not Disney World—for this amazing woman who politicized me. This was Maggie Smith. I worked at the bar first, and then Kiki Smith worked there, and Ulli Rimkus, who later opened Max Fish, and Cara Perlman and other female artists. There were a lot of street people, a lot of prostitutes and pimps and gang kids. Some of them really didn’t like what happened to the bar. It was a neighborhood bar. Maggie cooked. It was on 49th Street and there was nowhere to eat. So people from CBS Records and all these places started coming because it was the only place with good food. And it was in this Japanese tourist guide, so suddenly a lot of Japanese tourists would come in, and the Clash would come in, and the bar changed and the regulars didn’t really like it, having all these arty women working there.Well, the regulars never like a change.No, they don’t. And there was a guy who’d come in and drink something like 30 Heinekens and pass out every day. I was doing the stills for a film. I used to do stills for downtown filmmakers like Bette Gordon and my work was at the Whitney, but I was still tending bar. One day I went back to the bar and that guy had gotten up and gone behind the bar and opened the wooden case where my cameras were stored and pissed on my cameras. And I screamed like an opera diva—you could hear me all over Manhattan—and I quit. That was my way out.That’s incredible.It was. That bar really toughened me up. You know it was a lot of street prostitutes and their tricks, it was a lot of johns. Mostly they didn’t even turn tricks, they would rob them and the johns would come into the bar just screaming. And the pimps always drank Hennessy and the prostitutes drank Long Island iced tea; they wanted to get as drunk as possible on one drink. That was a very tough life people were living, sex workers and all that. At a certain point I wanted out of the bar. I still dream about it. I still dream I have to get there at a certain time.How long did you work there?Five years. And in the first few years after my shift I would go to an after-hours bar and work there and it was a lot of bad cocaine, and when it closed at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning, we’d go to breakfast and everyone would be reading the racing forms. That went on for years, and then I started working the day shift at the bar, and that’s when I met the guy Brian who’s in the pictures.That world is resonant in the pictures of Ballad, of course, but you just described another dimension of it so vividly. I’m curious, as time went on, what influenced some of the other changes you made in the sequencing of the slideshow. There are such distinct movements—the men, the women, the babies, the abuse, the sex, the moments of dark and light, of love and loss—that emerge throughout, and like you say, the editing of that narrative is so key.Maggie really politicized me. She is the one who helped me see the work is about gender politics. And I had talked to people in Provincetown about that in the ’70s. After she became involved, I started making it more and more obviously political, to speak to her. Sometimes it was really hateful toward men and sometimes it was really positive, depending how I was feeling. Each showing was different. I made slideshows specifically for people, too. I’d put in a lot of pictures specifically of that person and dedicate it to them. It could be anyone, a friend or a lover. In ’83 I started traveling in Europe and showing it. I showed it many more times in Europe than in America. I showed it in European museums as one-off shows as early as 1983, and in underground cinemas and clubs all over Europe. It was accepted there earlier than it was in the U.S. One of the people who later became a lover of mine in Berlin, he raised his hand and said, “I’d like to be in the slideshow.” And he was, afterward!Well, that’s a pretty great come-on line. And given all those versions, given its ever-evolving status, what is your relationship to Ballad now?I thought I’d stopped re-editing it by 1992; the last soundtrack was from 1987. But I re-edited it when the MoMA bought it in 2008, and they wanted it to be the same, they wanted it to be really dark—no pictures with light. Peter Galassi and his two assistants came down to watch as we were putting it together, and every picture that had light in it, he’d go, “No.” But we put all those pictures in and they didn’t notice, or they loved them anyway. We made one copy in 2008 for MoMA and one for a friend who’s one of my biggest collectors in the world. We made that one much tougher, because he’d been a big part of the ’70s and ’80s at the Mudd Club, so we made it much more about that period. And this year I sold one to the Tate Modern and could not stop myself from editing a few categories in the analog version.That’s what I keep coming back around to: the uniqueness of each slideshow, the uniqueness of what happened in the room each time you showed it, how it was all affected by where it was being shown and who was there, and what was going on all around, what it felt like. All the things I wish I could go back in time and experience—in that sense I suppose I really think of it as a performance.That’s true. But then it became like Amy Winehouse. I felt such a strong connection with her because, you know, at the end I showed up at some fancy place in Chicago and I was too drugged to finish the slideshow, and there was a huge audience, and I know exactly how she felt when she showed up wherever it was and she couldn’t perform. I mean, I had an audience of 500 and she had an audience of probably 50,000, but it was the same feeling. And it happened to me twice. It’s really painful. I loved that movie.I haven’t seen it yet. I want to. I recently lost a friend who had dealt with some similar things, and I’ll watch the film at some point, but I can’t yet. But there was a slideshow for this friend's wake, with music playing, pictures from these very wild, free, happier, beautiful times.Oh, that’s good, it’s good they showed those.I couldn’t help but think of Ballad then, how it’s a record of loss, but of desire and love and light.Right. It can’t only be the dark moments. There’s a lot of light there, too.This interview has been condensed and edited.

Autumn is Provincetown’s secret season

Those who love Provincetown's incredible beaches, alfresco restaurants, art galleries, boutiques, and legendary LGBTQ+ openness know that summer doesn’t end on Labor Day. P-town has a secret season, a second summer that extends through October. Insiders consider it the very best time of the year to visit. They come for the warm sands, glorious Cape Cod weather, vibrant queer life celebrations, and a bevy of art, literary, and food festivals. 

Tennessee Williams Weekend, September 22-25, 2022

The 17th season of this festival features a lineup of plays written by Tennessee Williams. Entitled “Tutti Frutti Tennessee Williams,” which translated to all the flavors of Williams, it’s the first all-Williams festival since 2006, ranging from the 1930s to the 1980s. They range from his Broadway hits like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” to more radical works such as “One Arm.” As Williams would have put it, the selection includes “the strange, the crazed, the queer.”

Mates Leather Weekend XXV, September 29 - October 3, 2022  

The 25th edition of Mates Leather Weekend promises a kick-back, have a good time, and meet some new friends kind of weekend. It’s aimed at those who want to hang out, socialize, relax or party with other like-minded people in leather and rubber gear and uniforms.

ArtProvincetown Festival, October 7-9, 2022

The second annual ArtProvincetown Festival will include museums, galleries, studios, and a marketplace for artists and artisans. The festival welcomes artists, collectors, designers, and art fans of all forms, and it will feature exhibitions, receptions, and parties. The mission of the ArtProvincetown Festival is to highlight the diverse and beautiful art that Ptown has to offer.

Washashore Music & Arts Festival, October 7-9, 2022

The Washashore Music & Arts Festival takes place the same weekend as ArtsProvincetown and is an annual gathering celebrating live music, queer artists, beer, and the singularity of Provincetown. Calling itself “A 3 Day, Town-Wide, Genre-Bending Queer Music Festival,” the event is presented by Provincetown Brewing Co., Crown & Anchor, and Tangle-Made Productions.

Women’s Week October 10-16, 2022

Women’s Week is the ultimate festival in the US to celebrate women. There are more than 150 events scheduled for the week. The highlights include shows, film screenings, dance parties, music, comedy, dune tours, sailing excursions, food events, and sports events. Women’s Week brings thousands of women together—singles and couples alike. As an added attraction, Fox Fest will run October 14-16.

Single Women’s Weekend October 12-15, 2022

The annual Single Women’s Weekend has emerged as a fast, fun way for single lesbians to meet other single lesbians – live and in person, and it’s now a vital part of Woman’s Week.

Fantasia Fair, October 16-23, 2022

Launched in 1975, Fantasia Fair (a.k.a. Fan Fair) is the original transgender event. It offers anyone who identifies as trans (as well as those who don’t) a place to gather. Daily keynote speakers and workshops are features of the busy week-long schedule, filled with fashion shows, formal banquets, lunches, and a cabaret/talent show. It’s an immersive event, considered the longest-running transgender event in the world.

Spooky Bear Halloween Weekend, October 28-30, 2022

Spooky Bear Weekend features parties, dances, a haunted house, a costume ball, and shows. It ushers in the town-wide celebration of Halloween, which may well rank as the most festive and colorful night of the year on Commercial Street.

Provincetown Food & Wine Festival, November 2-6, 2022

The second annual Provincetown Food & Wine Festival has “Celebrate Portugal” as its theme, acknowledging the origins of the town's Portuguese fishermen and their families. Yet it also salutes the varied tastes and wines found on the entire Iberian Peninsula. Many restaurants will be offering specials and prix fixe menus. Events include an Uncorked Opening Reception, a Gallery Sip & Stroll, Across the Pyrenees Fine Wine Tasting, Spanish Wine Dinner at Tin Pan Alley, Iberian Fine Wine Dinner at Strangers & Saints, The Grand Tasting, and the Cava & Sangria Drag Brunch. The festival also includes a daily Tea Dance at The Boatslip and the welcome news that the ferries from Boston will be running that weekend. Details at Provincetown Food & Wine Festival.

Reunited souls / Harry Gardner x Reader

Summary : The reader and Harry knew each other back in uni before she met her success by also moving into Provincetown. Their reunion takes a little turn and maybe this town isn’t as populated as everyone thinks.

Warning : None

Enjoy 🤍

Harry knew something was wrong with him. Not to mention, ever since coming to Provincetown to escape his own reality in order to proceed his screen writer’s dream and yet there he was sitting right in front of his laptop. Troubled minded by the sound of violon coming from upstairs and he knew that the only way to end this madness was to call out his for daughter’s name.

With such aggression coming from his voice, his daughter became quite aware of her own father’s bothers. However, she knew a little too much how to put words together, thus resulting often for Doris to intervene and without any more fuss dragged her daughter for an afternoon walk.

You noticed the family’s arrival when the previous house owner called. “You’re gonna see they are a lovely family.” She said with much confidence you reassured her and also relieved to finally have another “normal” neighbor without having to stalk to their main’s window in order to keep your safety at peace.

Meeting The Gardner almost became one of the best things you could’ve wished for. The kid just as smart and artistic as her father’s, Doris who you learned coming back from Sommers’s house and both of you clicked.

On a faithful night they have invited you over dinner. Recently the poor innocent family were being stalked or should we put formally had intruders hungrily coming at their fresh flesh. Being a screen writer yourself, Harry’s name came fairly familiar in your head and within a few seconds from being at their house for dinner his eyes wide with excitement.

“You’re, Y/N! No reason your name and voice sounded so familiar. We worked in a few shows prior during our years in university, remember. Mentor Gardner by any chances?” And that is when it clicked, all of the memories from your past glueing itself bits by bits.

Flashing your signature smile at him remembering indeed, letting out a soft chuckle a confused Doris looked at the both of you. “Of course I do. My apologies, just ever since I decided to settled in here things just escalated so quick.”

Harry whom listened to your words in inspiration, as if the one who mastered you for years now was you when you you under his wings. “Mentor Gardner?” Doris interrupted and by the sound of her voice, laughed at the sudden name her husband had and never thought to hear in her life.

“Oh right,” Exchanging a look to Harry nodding comfortably for you to explain how this even came up to giving him the title. “Let’s just say when we were in the same program, he was well known for his screen play and writing. Most of the plays out of the classic known of course, was all from his own mind and words. Even the teachers offered him to be a Mentor for the first grade students and which I came in the picture.”

Now fully understanding it Doris feeling exhausted from her day, the stress from the baby she excused herself kissing her husband’s forehead and leaving you both alone in silence the house now corrupted beneath your feet.

Glancing at your friend’s laptop you noticed a blank page. Noticing where you were looking, Harry let out a sigh. “Having a creative block. And thought that this town was every writer’s place. Or as Sommers says it so well. It’s Muse.”

Wait… did he already… No it couldn’t. It was too early you thought to yourself. Austin would’ve mentioned him about now. Or was it a surprise both Belle and him wanted to keep before the right time?

Just as you were about to say anything let alone protest at the how in the world he knew her friends so soon, he let out of his pocket a pack of plastic with way too familiar pills. Pills you also used yourself.

Eyes widened, noticing your quick reaction he interrupted the now unnoticeable silence you both had completely forgotten. “You know these pills?”

And just with that you imagined yourself as if you were in the place of a victim being questioned for a moral you barely knew to be seen as bad or worse illegal. With a sigh enough to be a respond to Harry he himself let out a dry chuckle which confused you more. “What?”

“I’ve been using them these past weeks. Aren’t they amazing? Austin and Belle told me about you. An elegant lady so innocent on the outside yet a rebel on the inside.” This smirk, a smirk you never thought in your right mind Harry could’ve pull up quick.

The Harry you knew was a good man, not a monster nor a soon to be a vampire. Regret and remorse came rushing through you, if there was one person you didn’t want to fall into the whole of Belle’s was definitely him. But with such unfaithful events he did, Belle knew what she was doing and Austin being a little too protective of your own sake knew it was best to not say a word nor interfere her work.

“You know I already have two offers for a big Plot on Netflix and it’s so exciting. We should co-write something together and by dawn we could be the next thing the world needs.”

Looking at your friend in a completely new perspective nothing but excitement and a fake yet subtle smile came into view as the father now a hungry yet innocent monster that only wanted fame took you into a hug. A hug as he took into your arms and twirled you around and whiting a slip of a second, his lips his lips brushed yours with lust he never felt before.

You knowing it was just a clumsy act of his, let out a chuckle and with much happiness for him congratulated him. “I’m really happy I really, am. You know I still wonder how in the world you know-“

“For another time. For now we have another amazing story to invite and write about, how about I offer you a drink? It’s all on me.”

Cut by surprised all you could now was to nod and just as then he linked his arm with yours. Looking at the man as you both walked out of the house, with either confusion yet awe knowing that not only you and the two women he loved the most and within his new condition had to protect them from his doing.

“I’m sure Belle and Austin would be glad to see us tonight.”

“Oh I am sure they will.”

And until sunrise all four of you did you errands, a lost soul you each were craving for no matter it’s care and sorrow. Just two lost souls running until it’s exasperation.

Linda Zuern, a supporter of former President Donald Trump and a protester against COVID-19 vaccines, has died of coronavirus. She lived in Bourne, Massachusetts. She was 70.

Zuern reportedly contracted the virus after visiting her mother in South Dakota, following the death of her father. During their return trip to Bourne, both women contracted the illness, the Cape Cod Times reported.

While her mother survived, a MedFlight had to transport Zuern to a Boston hospital in early June. She fell into a coma and was placed on a ventilator until she died. She hadn't gotten vaccinated against the virus, her friends told the aforementioned publication.

Zuern opposed local vaccinations efforts, both as a member of the county government council, the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates, and as a volunteer with a local conservative group called United Cape Patriots.

Last December, while serving her third term on the Assembly, she pushed for local doctors to use hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients. Trump had also promoted the same anti-malaria medication for that very purpose. But in June 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said that scientific evidence didn't indicate any significant benefits that outweighed the drug's potential risks.

In the same meeting, Zuern also criticized the Barnstable County Department of Health for not examining methods to prevent people from contracting COVID-19. The department's director, Sean O'Brien, said the department's prevention plan was focused on testing and rolling out the newly-developed vaccines.

Last week, Zuern was one of four people who protested in Provincetown against the state's VaxBus program. The bus is a mobile vaccination unit to help inoculate rural residents who might lack access to nearby health clinics.

On her social media, Zuern shared posts claiming that COVID-19 was a man-made virus used by "globalists" to push the "UN Agenda 2030" for a one-world government. She also shared posts pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory, opposing Critical Race Theory in schools and repeating the claim that voter fraud "stole" the 2020 election from Trump.

"Although we did not agree on much politically, we shared the same views on being fiscally responsible," Patrick Princi, speaker of the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates, told the Times. "Linda was a great advocate for protecting taxpayers' money and will truly be missed in that aspect."

As of July 20, Massachusetts ranks 15th among the states with the highest overall number of COVID-19 infections. As of that same date, it ranks 12th among the states with the highest overall number of COVID-19-related deaths.

Newsweek contacted the Barnstable County Department of Health for comment.

Lady of the Dunes

July 15, 2021

On July 26, 1974, a family was walking their dog in the Race Point Dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts when the 12 year old daughter came across the decomposing body of a woman. Initially, the family dog had wandered off and began barking to which the 12 year old followed. She originally thought the body was a deer, but getting closer realized it was that of a human body. 

The remains of this woman were found yards away from the road and there had been lots of insects already drawn to it. There were two sets of footprints that led to the body and tire tracks that were about 50 yards from the scene. 

There’s conflicting sources but many believe the woman had been there anywhere between 10 days and three weeks before her discovery. 

The woman was laid face down on half of a beach blanket. There were no signs of a struggle which led many to believe she was either asleep when she was attacked or had known her killer and was comfortable with them, not suspecting herself in danger. 

A blue bandana and a pair of Wrangler jeans were underneath her head. She had long auburn or red hair, which was in a ponytail with a gold-flecked elastic band and her toenails were painted pink. Police claimed this woman was around 5 feet 6 inches tall, weighed 145 pounds and had an athletic build. 

She had lots of dental work done in her life, including crowns worth $5000-$10,000. Dentists called this the “New York style” of dental work. Several of her teeth had been removed and her both of her hands and one forearm were missing. This leads many to believe whoever had killer her knew what they were doing, possibly having done this before and knew what to do to ensure she wouldn’t be identified easily. She was nearly decapitated, possibly from strangulation and one side of her head had been crushed with some kind of tool. They determined this head injury was what had killed her. 

There were also signs of sexual assault, likely after she had been killed.

Sources believe she was anywhere between 25 and 40 years old at the time she was killed. However, she could of been as young as 20 or as old as 49. 

She was dubbed the Lady of the Dunes, and was buried in October 1974 because the case went cold. In 2014 funds were raised for her to have a new casket, as the one they buried her in was rusting and deteriorated. 

Police looked into thousands of missing person cases around that time and looked through a list of vehicles that had driven through the area to see if any tires matched the tracks. They found nothing. The sand and the beach blanket she was found on had not been disturbed, which many believe the killer or killers moved the body to that specific spot. 

They first created a facial reconstruction of the woman in 1979 with clay. Her remains were exhumed in 1980 but no new clues were found. Her body was exhumed for a second time in 2000 for DNA. 

In May 2010, they did a CT scan for her skull that generated images used by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for another reconstruction. 

In 1987, 14 years after the Lady of the Dunes had been found, a Canadian woman told her friend that she saw her father strangle a woman in Massachusetts around 1972. When police got a hold of this information they tried to find the woman making this claim, but the woman apparently had moved out of her house and could not be located. 

Another woman came forward believing the reconstruction looked like her sister, who had disappeared in Boston in 1974. 

Some believed the Lady of the Dunes was a woman named Rory Gene Kesinger, who was 25 years old at the time of the murder. Rory had broken out of jail in 1973 and police thought she resembled the victim. They tested DNA from Rory’s mother but it did not match the Lady of the Dunes. 

There were two other missing women, named Francis Ewalt from Montana and Vicke Lamberton from Massachusetts, but both of these have been ruled out as well. 

One of the most interesting theories about this case came to light in August 2015 from Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill. Joe believed that the Lady of the Dunes may have been an extra in the 1975 film, Jaws, which had been shot about 100 miles south of Provincetown, between May and October 1974.

While watching the film’s Fourth of July beach scene Joe spotted a woman in the crowd who was wearing a blue bandana and jeans, similar to those found with the Lady of the Dunes. Some investigators believed this was an interesting theory, though there is no evidence and back then extras were not credited as much, so there is no record or list of names to go off of. 

In 1981 investigators found that a woman who looked like the Lady of the Dunes was seen with a mobster named Whitey Bulger around the time the victim had died. Whitey was known to murder and remove his victim’s teeth. There is no official link between Whitey and the Lady of the Dunes and he was murdered in prison in 2018.

Tony Costa, a serial killer around that area was a suspect for a bit, but later eliminated. He died on May 12, 1974 and the victim was found in July 1974. 

A serial killer named Hadden Clark confessed to the murder, stating that “what the police are looking for is in my grandfather’s garden.” In 2004, Clark had sent a letter to a friend that he had killed a woman in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He also sent this friend two drawings, one of a handless, naked woman sprawled on her stomach and another of a map pointing to where the body was found.

In April 2000, Clark had led police to a spot where he said he had buried two victims 20 years earlier. He stated that he had murdered several others in various states between the 1970′s and 1990′s. Police say that Clark suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and it is possible he is falsely confessing to murders.

The 47th anniversary of the discovery of the Lady of the Dunes is next month and no one has ever been convicted of the murder. This case is currently unsolved but there is hope that it can be solved. 

If you have any information about this case you can call the Provincetown Police Department at 508-487-1212 or 508-487-1213. You can also email them at [email protected] 

If you want to contact the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for this case the phone number is 617 267 6767 x 176 and the agency contact person is James Pokines. 

Devoted: Postcard (Katlaska) - Kamylove

Fourth in my collection of unrelated Katlaska one-shot ficlets.

"Well hey there, toots. Can you tell me if this sinful show is appropriate for my sinful children?"

Alaska heard the familiar voice and looked up to see Jinkx hugging Katya.

"For your children, yes," Katya said. "For actual human children, try Scarbie down the street."

Jinkx feigned confusion and pointed in the wrong direction. "That way?"

"No. That way you'll only find rotted whores like Jinkx Monsoon." 

"Never heard of her," Jinkx said. 

"Scarbie's the other way and better than me or the rotted whore. But take this for after you drown your sinful children."

Jinkx accepted one of Katya's little postcard flyers. "These came out great!" they said. "The fake RuPaul quote from your YouTube series, oh my God."

Alaska couldn't see Katya's face but knew she was beaming. 

"Are you coming to the show tonight?" Katya asked Jinkx.

"Absolutely. It's the only night you're not my direct competition."

There was a pair of day-tripping women a few feet away who were showing interest in Katya; they looked like they'd escaped their kids for the day and needed a good drink and a good time. Katya offered them flyers and started her sales pitch. "Best drag show you'll see between 8:30 and 9:15 tonight within 100 yards of this location!"

Jinkx started on their way but heard Alaska shout, "Jinkxy!"

"Alooska!" Jinkx peered over the iron fence behind Katya. "I was wondering which suitcase she'd locked you in." 

They steered their bike towards the entrance and spoke briefly with the host, who let them wheel it into the outdoor bar area--completely against the posted rules.

"She's working hard," Alaska told Jinkx. "I'm hardly working."

Jinkx parked the bike with the kickstand and sat at Alaska's umbrella-covered table. "This does not seem like an equitable arrangement. I thought you shared the housework equally."

"I was a distraction."

"For Katya, or for the customers?"

Alaska grinned. "I can't help it if I can't stop laughing at her."

"Such a smitten kitten," Jinkx said. "Aren't you hot?" They were wearing pedal pushers and a light t-shirt under the red, windblown hair.

"Oh, my God, it's awful," Alaska said. She, stupidly, was wearing tight black jeans, a black t-shirt with Katya's face on it, and the black boots she wore everyday. "I figured, right on the water..."

"You incomer. The buildings block the wind. At least you're not in drag."

Alaska held up the roll of paper towels she was keeping on the next chair. Katya had used up half the roll and stuffed the sweaty ones into her bra, much to the amusement of passers-by. She was dragged up, wigged up, and wearing three pairs of tights but thankfully no sleeves while she hawked her wares on the sidewalk, a local drag tradition. 

"Poor thing," Alaska said. She tore off a wad and held it out to Katya, who took it without turning around. Then she put the paper towels with the stack of Katya's flyers on the table in front of her, well away from her iced tea and fries. 

"Your turn to suffer for your art next week," Jinkx pointed out. "How's the house?"

When Katya and Alaska had agreed to spend part of their summer in town--Katya performing solo one week, Alaska the next, and then a third week just for vacation--Jinkx had set them up with a realtor who, they said, worked with all the queens. Jinkx had been performing here all summer for years.

"The house is perfect," Alaska said. It was slightly run down in that beach house way, and the windows caught the breeze off the water. "There are so many hangers and wig forms, queens must stay there all the time."

"Think of all the filthy hookups that have happened on your bed," Jinkx said. "As soon as we all have a mutual day off, you have to come with me to see the sunset at Herring Cove."

"Deal," Alaska said.

A well-tanned waiter asked Jinkx what they wanted to drink. Alaska told him to add it to her tab.

"Well, there goes the neighborhood," another familiar voice said. 

"Varla Jean!" Alaska stood up to hug Varla and her husband and pet their dog. They already had a flyer from Katya, who had disappeared down the street to hawk some more. All part of the job.

"Are we still on for this weekend?" Varla's husband asked as they pulled up chairs and joined the table. Varla had been a Provincetown grande dame for literal decades, so she owned a little house here. They'd invited Alaska and Katya for brunch and an afternoon by the (minute, Varla had warned them) pool.

"Fuck yes," Alaska said. "I'm sure brunch will be lovely but I cannot wait to jump in a pool, my God."

"Always 15 degrees hotter on Commercial Street," Varla said. "I warned you!"

"So did I," Jinkx said.

"Everybody warned me! Katya warned me while I was getting dressed! I promise I've learned my lesson and I'll wear nothing but hot pants and flip-flops tomorrow."

Varla's husband spotted someone they knew and waved him over. It turned out to be the host of the longest-running show in town. Alaska was excited to meet him. She'd heard a lot.

"So you really can sit in one place and run into everyone you know," Alaska said.

They all said yes with varying degrees of enthusiasm and disgust. Alaska ordered them drinks. She decided she was going to like it here.

Her phone dinged. The text said, "DYING. Bring water and PT."

"I've been summoned," Alaska said. 

"By the Art House," the next text said. 

"I think she's trying to steal your customers," Alaska told Jinkx. 

"Gasp!" Jinkx said. "I'll walk with you."

They all said goodbye. Alaska bought two bottles of water from the bartender and told him to keep her tab open and add anything the table wanted.

Water, paper towels, and flyers in hand, she and Jinkx strolled down the street. Absolutely nobody took notice. The day-trippers didn’t recognize them out of drag, the gays and the locals were either respectful of their privacy or unimpressed (mostly unimpressed, Alaska was sure), and the summer workers were too tired from their three full-time jobs.

Katya, of course, stood out. 

"She really is trying to steal my customers!" Jinkx laughed when they saw where Katya was standing, right in front of a poster of Jinkx and her pianist. 

"Oh my God, thank you," Katya said. "Look! I've sweated out at least three gallons and I'm ruining my flyers!" She grabbed the water and started gulping down.

"But you look gorgeous," Alaska said as she took the damp and slightly warped flyers off of Katya's hands.

Jinkx waved and swung up onto their bike. 

"See you tonight!" Alaska called.

Katya was still chugging. Alaska handed her another wad of paper towels.

"Dying," Katya said when she came up for air, and started patting her face.

"I'm sorry. I should have been helping you."

"You really were a distraction. I wanted to tear your ridiculous clothes off as soon as I saw the first bead of sweat fall from your brow." She opened the second bottle of water.

"Well, my break's over," Alaska said. "Go back and cool off before the show while I talk you up out here."

"You're the best," Katya said. "Lazy as fuck, but the best lazy fuck." She took off her heels, took back the flyers, and set off for the venue in her stocking feet, swinging the shoes by the fingers of one hand.

Alaska only watched her for a second. "Best drag in town!" she shouted. "One-week engagement starting tonight! She'll make you laugh, she'll make you cry, she'll make you sick! Massachusetts' own, beloved of RuPaul, Kataya Zamolodchikova!"

Had heard her in Maryland once then invited by a few women early in Provincetown women's week and again as I left the library on the 13 Oct by the author herself. She had a nice goddess silver pendant. But next time I do new moon magic in circle I'll ask the goddess to separate her MISANDRIST STAFF from her.

Brasswood Inn

174 commercial near post office before noon on Saturday 16th Oct.

Bought coffee after checking my mail. Got to the Brasswood Inn. The guy that showed where to go said the 1st row is reserved. A bit later, a woman came up saying a part of not all of the 2nd row also was reserve.

Told guy as I filled my pipe that if cross the street near parking lot to smoke. A moment later same woman said No. You can't smoke here

After smoking once entering she came again demanding of me.

So, I said loud enough the deaf woman & the male employee could here. You've made me feel entirely unwelcome. I'm leaving. But this will be posted in my blind and visually impaired travel blog for the LGBTQ community & friends.

And no I'm not deaf but rather a legally blind 67 year old Queer man that was spoken to as if she was a total misandrist.

I was married to a lesbian to have access to signing if our 3 children needed medical care. She was the cousin of my domestic partner Jerry. One of those children is bisexual, one is heterosexual and the last trans: f to m.

I'm not a misogynist. Most of my friends are female.

But also being an autistic savant I have no coping mechanisms for aggressive or hateful words or behavior.

It may not have been her words but the emotion, timbre and demanding way she said them.

So, LGBTQ community and friends or supporting family members I strongly suggest you avoid going to a book signing or purchase any of this author's books due to the staff she has working for her.

"A Lesbian Belle tells"

My comments are a Queer family counselor, retired prof of both art & biology, a musician/artist and Autistic Savant: "He tells of her workers 'tell tale heart'," perfect for October.

(disclaimer had heard her once before sans the MISANDRIST FEMALE SETTINGS UP BEFORE HER STORY TELLING/BOOK SIGNING at the Brasswood Inn, 174 Commercial St., Provincetown, Massachusetts 02657. That I left before hearing due to the words & deeds of her support staff just before noon today, 16 October.

If you're invited and male and legally blind you may encounter the banshee I did. Come prepared or avoid the verbal castrative manner of this female. I refrain from calling a woman. My best friends are women. I'm strongly implying her not being human to mirror her not being kind, accommodating or humane.

Hoping any of Elizabeth McCain, the author's friends will share this with her. She lost a sales of a book I was going to purchase for the Provincetown Library and me as a former fan. I had posted in social media earlier this week to inform.

Now I post in regrete.

I saw you say something about “The largest lesbian centered events company in the greater Boston area”. What’s the company name so I can follow?

It's funny when I posted that comment I was thinking I should go back and add links for the lesbians. Sapphic Nights Boston hosts roughly 1-4 events every week. Mostly club nights with a theme (emo, woc, Slavic, masc, pop, Latin, bailefunk, etc). They also do events like drag race viewing parties, sip and paint events, yacht parties, there's a retreat weekend. The events are mostly in Boston with a few happening on a regular basis in Providence, Worcester, and Salem. I think they just finished a weekend in Provincetown. Second place is Lesbian Night Life who does more day parties, brunches, singles events, and over 30s events. Snatched Entertainment does 'queer poc' events but they lean more towards women.

Dani's Queer Bar is a lesbian owned bar that's supposed to open soon. Until then if you're willing to drive there's Femme Bar in Worcester. In addition to typically club nights they have lots more lowkey stuff like boardgames nights and book clubs. In the Jamaica Plain neighborhood is lesbian owned Drawdown Brewing that does some women's events. I've been there to watch women's hockey and they also have non-alcoholic drinks.

Maxwell Bodenheim

In Letters from Bohemia, Ben Hecht declares his friend Maxwell Bodenheim “more disliked, derided, denounced, beaten up, and kicked down more flights of stairs than any poet of whom I have heard or read.” In his lifetime Bodenheim was at least as well known for his drunk and dissolute behavior as for his writing. Today he’s mostly remembered for the tawdry way he died.

He grew up poor and Jewish in smalltown Mississippi. He was bright but viciously boorish, physically handsome yet repulsively slovenly, and argumentative to a fault, with a genius for the insult that could end any discussion, usually with his being punched in the mouth. As young men Bodenheim and Hecht were the pranksters of the Chicago Renaissance. According to Allen Churchill’s The Improper Bohemians, they once filled a hall for a literary debate on the topic “Resolved: That People Who Attend Literary Debates Are Imbeciles.”

Hecht strode center-stage to announce that he would take the affirmative. Then he stated, “The affirmative rests.” Bodenheim shambled forward, scrutinized his confident opponent, and said, “You win.”

Bodenheim – Bogie to his long-suffering friends – was twenty-two when he blew into Greenwich Village with other Chicago émigrés in 1915, and instantly made a name for himself in the neighborhood as a poet of promise. Reading his facile, gaudy verses now, it’s easy to think that it was the brute force of his sociopathic presence, rather than his poetry, that convinced the best poets in the Village at the time that he was one of them, potentially even the greatest of them:

You have a morning-glory face

Whose edges are sensitive to light

And curl in beneath the burden of a smile.

Remembered silence returns to the morning-glory

And lattices its curves

With shades of golden reverberations.

Then the morning-glory’s heart careens to loves

Whose scent beats on the sky-walls of your soul.

Tellingly, those not directly in his orbit seem not to have been fooled by the clever romance-novel sham of such verses – and neither, apparently, was Bodenheim himself, though he would go on roaring about his genius for decades. Hecht records that after entering 223 poetry contests and failing to win a single one, he took to signing his letters to editors “Maxwell Bodenheim, 224th ranking U.S.A. poet.”

He did have a real talent for scandal, easy enough to generate during Greenwich Village’s prolonged drunken orgy in the Prohibition years. His haughty, insulting demeanor, and his habit of trying to steal other men’s women right under their noses, got him regularly socked on the jaw and thrown out of bars, soirees and the fauxhemian revels at Webster Hall.

Turning from poetry to prose, through the 1920s he wrote a string of best-selling, sensational potboilers like Replenishing Jessica, about a free-loving bohemian, Georgie May, about a fallen prostitute, and Naked on Roller Skates, about a middle-aged “onetime hobo, circus-pegger, doughboy, sailor, anarchist, con man, all-time sensationalist and wanderer of the world” who leaves a small town with a much younger woman who “wanted to try everything at least once.” They sound better than they read. Hecht called them “hack work with flashes of tenderness, wit, and truth in them.” When the Society for the Suppression of Vice brought Bodenheim to trial in 1925 on an obscenity charge for Replenishing Jessica, his defense lawyer used a familiar tactic of demanding that the prosecutor read the entire text aloud to prove his case. Judge, jury and the reporters covering the trial dozed as the prosecutor droned on and on, and the unaroused jury voted Bodenheim not guilty. Mayor Jimmy Walker agreed with the verdict. “No girl was ever seduced by a book,” he quipped.

For a bohemian poet, commercial success and celebrity could bring on a full-blown personality crisis (as it would do Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac and Kurt Cobain). Bodenheim squandered the money he made from his novels on drink and gambling, as though he couldn’t throw it away fast enough. He preferred to demand loans and cadge drinks from everyone around him, like a true bohemian poet should. Meanwhile, his reputation in these years as a daring, risqué writer attracted a cloud of what we’d call groupies today, many of them the sort of teenagers from the outer boroughs and the hinterlands who flocked to the Village in the 1920s to throw off the shackles of mainstream morality and abandon themselves to the neighborhood’s non-stop pagan revels.

He took his pick. One was Gladys Loeb, 18, from the Bronx. In 1928, he ended a brief fling with her, adding that her poetry was doggerel. Her landlady soon found her with her head in the gas oven, barely clinging to life, and to Bodenheim’s portrait. A few weeks later he did the same thing to twenty-two-year-old Virginia Drew, who threw herself into the Hudson and succeeded where Gladys had failed. When police went to question Bodenheim about Drew’s suicide, he’d slipped off to stay with fellow Villager Harry Kemp in Provincetown. Gladys, having recovered from her own suicide attempt, followed him there – trailing her irate father, cops and reporters. Bodenheim talked his way out of their clutches, but not out of the newspapers all over the country, which had a field day with lurid tales about the Greenwich Village Lothario.

Then came Aimee Cortez, widely feted as “the Mayoress of Greenwich Village.” She earned the title by stripping naked at private parties and Webster Hall shindigs and gyrating a wildly erotic dance. According to Churchill, this display sometimes ended with her going off with some lucky male, but other times she’d stop abruptly, with a look of terror and confusion, and run off. In a later era she’d be prescribed a drug for this clearly disturbed behavior, but in the Village of the late 1920s, where “a hideous lust… pervaded the air” as Bodenheim’s My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village put it, she was merely celebrated as the queen of the modern-day bacchantes. Not long after Gladys and Virginia made the papers, Aimee was found with her head in her own oven, also clutching Bodenheim’s portrait. She was dead at nineteen.

Bodenheim was indirectly implicated in the sad end of another lover, a teenager from the outer boroughs with the improbable name Dorothy Dear. When she wasn’t with him in his MacDougal Street apartment, he wrote her love letters that she carried in her purse. One afternoon she was aboard a rush hour subway train heading from Times Square to the Village when it derailed at a faulty switch, killing sixteen passengers, including Dorothy. Bodenheim’s love letters were found scattered around the wreckage.

By the end of the 1920s Bodenheim was a wreck himself. From the 1930s until his death he was a fixture on the streets and in the bars of the Village, by turns annoying and sad-making, decaying before his old friends’ eyes into a stinking, toothless ghost, “tottering drunkenly to sleep on flophouse floors, shabby and gaunt as any Bowery bum,” as Hecht put it. Still, Hecht gallantly added, “Bogie hugged his undiminished riches – his poet’s vocabulary and his genius for winning arguments. He won nothing else.” He cranked out more cheap novels, drank the money, and stooped to hawking his poems to tourists in Washington Square for a quarter each. Wiseacres in the bars fed him gin and laughed at his drunken mumblings and rants, which sometimes yielded a famous line like “Greenwich Village is the Coney Island of the soul.”

Poets were the main entertainment at Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard in the mid-1930s. Gordon couldn’t afford to pay them; they performed for whatever change the patrons tossed at their feet. Poet Eli Siegel, later founder of the Aesthetic Realism movement, was the emcee in the early years, but the crowd really came to see three ghosts of the Village Past – Joe Gould, Harry Kemp and Maxwell Bodenheim. They hung out there because Gordon tolerated them and his patrons were easy marks for a few free drinks. In his memoir Live at the Village Gate, Gordon describes how Siegel would call Gould out of the crowd with the cry, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Harvard terrier and boulevardier, Joseph Ferdinand Gould!” Gould would shuffle up to the spotlight and do his schtick, while Bodenheim, tall and imperious, would stalk the shadows at the back, “point his finger, and shout, ‘Eli Siegel! I hate you, Eli Siegel. You rat!’” Gordon continues:

Eli would wait for Bodenheim to shape up so he could call on him to recite. But it was no use. Bodenheim, swirling crazily, eyes glazed, arms outstretched, would suddenly stop and point his finger at a frightened girl who had refused him a dance during intermission. “Rat!” he’d shout at her.

Despite the frightening deterioration of his physical and mental hygiene, Bodenheim still attracted a certain type of desperate woman, usually in decline herself. He met the last of them in 1951 when Ruth Fagan bought a poem from him with her last quarter. She was thirty-two, he was a fifty-nine-year-old derelict, and within a couple of weeks they were going around as Mr. and Mrs. Bodenheim, though it’s not clear they ever bothered to make it official. They decayed together for the next couple of years, chronically broke and drunk, descending from cheap rooming houses to flophouses to sleeping in hallways and doorways. She turned tricks when she could, and he beat her when he found out. In 1952 they made a horrific spectacle of themselves at a fancy reunion for surviving members of the original Chicago Renaissance group, where he panhandled the guests while she propositioned them.

If the Bodenheim of the early 1950s was a disgusting or amusing clown to the tourists, and an embarrassment and bother to his old friends, he was something of a martyred saint to the generation of bohemians who came to the Village after World War Two. In his headlong descent into the abyss, his lust for the extremes of degradation, his lust for lust itself, he was like a dark archangel of negative capability for them, representing the ultimate rejection of bourgeois virtue and mainstream values, even to the point of total self-destruction. He comes up several times in the published diaries of Judith Malina, co-founder of the Living Theatre, from this period. One night in 1951 she and her husband Julian Beck were in the San Remo, the dark and smoky bar at Bleecker and MacDougal Streets that Bodenheim often haunted:

A ragged drunk approaches our table. In terrible shape. Ash blond hair askew. He lurches forward, his hands resting on the table. Directly to Julian: “What’s your name?”

“My name is Julian Beck.”

“My name is Maxwell Bodenheim. I’m an idiotic poet.”

And he turns and moves off before we can speak.

The late Roy Metcalf, who was a young newspaper reporter in the early 1950s, also encountered Bodenheim in the San Remo. “Bodenheim had a great face, an alcohol-ravaged face,” he recalled. “Once a guy from uptown wanted to see Greenwich Village, so we went down to the San Remo. There was Bodenheim. He said, 'Bring him over, let’s buy him a drink.’ He expected Bodenheim to say something. Bodenheim by that time was so paralyzed by alcohol that all he could do was bray, 'Aaaaargh.’”

In 1953 Malina went into the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue, where artists hung out. The food was lousy, the lighting made people look so bad they nicknamed it the Waxworks, and the other patrons tended to be bums, drug addicts, tough guys and cops. The staff was not particularly welcoming to arty boho types. So naturally that’s where Bodenheim and Ruth went to celebrate his birthday. Malina writes that a friend stole a pumpkin pie from the counter as a present for Bodenheim. “A cop sees him, but is somehow content with my explanation that Maxwell Bodenheim is a great poet and that his birthday should be celebrated. The counterman is not so generous: 'I ain’t doin’ this for love.’ We all eat. Ruth Bodenheim curses the cafeteria. Some junkies come and tell horrible tales of hospitals and arrests. One taps his eye with a knife to show us that it’s glass. Ruth Bodenheim smiles in an aristocratic manner: 'I’d never have believed it wasn’t real,’ as if she were consoling the owner of false jewels.”

“Do we not idolize Maxwell Bodenheim although we are sometimes loath to talk to him and always ashamed of our condescension to him?” Malina wonders in another entry. “What we admire is Bodenheim’s refusal to resist. We fight all the time, resisting temptation. We admire those who don’t. Even if it’s suicidal.” And later: “Even self-contempt when fierce enough is magnificent. The virtue of the extreme is its extremity. Nature loves extremes as much as she loathes a vacuum.”

In 1953, Ruth took up with a violent, mentally unstable dishwasher named Harold Weinberg. One night in the winter of 1954 the three of them wound up in Weinberg’s room off the Bowery. Bodenheim roused himself from a drunken stupor to see Ruth and Weinberg having sex. He attacked Weinberg, who pulled out a .22 and shot him through the heart. Then Weinberg stabbed Ruth in the chest. The last photos of Bodenheim show him and Ruth lying dead in the squalid room.

“The hideous death of Bodenheim blankets the Village in a funereal spirit,” Malina wrote. “Who dares confess to the wrenching excitement of seeing a companion’s mauled corpse on the front page of every newspaper, and all of us knowing that the worst has again triumphed?”

Cops picked up Weinberg a few days later. At his trial he called his victims Commie rats and shouted that he “did the world a favor” by getting rid of them. He sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he was led out of the courtroom and off to Bellevue.

Today, Bodenheim is remembered more for this tabloid end than for any other achievement. Even his memoir was a dispiriting sham. My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, published posthumously in 1954, was ghostwritten by a hack who, like everyone else in the Village, had bought him drinks to listen to his drunken ramblings. It’s a loose collection of vignettes, anecdotes, and racy gossip that was already antique when the book appeared. His old friend Hecht, who sent a check for $50 to help pay for Bodenheim’s cheapjack funeral, based his 1958 Off-Broadway play Winkelberg on him. (“There was never a man as irritating as Winkelberg.”) It ran for a month at the Renata Theatre on Bleecker Street, then sank into oblivion along with much of Bodenheim’s own writing.

by John Strausbaugh

2019

It seems impossible that I was offered a job eight months ago, that I moved in with Eddy four months ago, that the end of 2019 is already here. Post-college years continue to speed by at an alarming pace.

It was a good year, though, and I was especially grateful for all the unique opportunities I had to travel--to Switzerland and Italy, Saratoga Springs,  Provincetown. I went up to New York for the last weekend in June, and spent two magical autumn weekends in the woods--Vermont in October, New Hampshire in November.

I made friends with a sweet fluffy homebody, and I took still more steps toward building a satisfying, adult life for myself. I was in Houston last week, and felt more peace there than I’ve been able to find in a long time. I think part of it is that I finally feel secure and stable in my life in Boston--I finished school, found a permanent job that I love--and so I’m able to “visit”  without any underlying anxiety about my precarious position in life.

Books

It was a really good year for books--no pictures because many of them were library books but here’s the list of favorites:

Caroline by Sarah Miller

This is a retelling of Little House on the Prairie from the perspective of Laura’s Ma. The author was inspired to write it after realizing that, although Laura changes the timeline in her fictional retellings, Ma had actually been pregnant with Baby Carrie during their journey from Wisconsin to Kansas. It’s the kind of historical fiction I have always wanted, covering the unique hardships of pioneer life for women and including details like the oilcloth rags Caroline prepared to line her underwear after Carrie’s birth, and her swollen breasts bouncing painfully in the wagon after she leaves the top two hooks of her corset open.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

I’ve watched Hank’s videos for years, and I loved his debut novel about navigating unexpected fame and the responsibilities of having an audience through the perspective of a young woman in her 20s. Also, it’s really, really funny.

The Signature of All Things by Liz Gilbert

I . . . adored this book. And I’ve definitely recommended it the absolute most of any book I’ve read this year. It has the voice and the humor and the warmth and the wisdom I’d expect from Liz Gilbert, as well as an exhaustively researched and utterly immersive period setting (19th century Philadelphia). It truly feels epic in scope, and if I try to describe it for too long I sound like a lunatic but it’s about botany and about sexual longing and I think about it every single day.

City of Girls by Liz Gilbert

I was fortunate enough hear Liz talk about this book in person when she went on tour! See the above--this book is amazingly funny and wise and smart and just so fun to read. It’s about showgirls in New York in the 1940s. (On tour, Liz talked about interviewing a bunch of nonagenarian former showgirls for research and wondering beforehand, “Oh God, how am I going to get these grandmotherly old ladies to talk about sex?” and then wondering after, “Oh god, how am I going to get these ladies to talk about anything other than sex?”)

Circe by Madeline Miller

This book is so precious to me. Madeline Miller’s take on Circe is the best rendering of a divine/immortal character as narrator that I’ve ever read. And she does it in first-person. Also, if you ever have an opportunity to hear this author speak publicly, you should take it. She is so smart and well-read, and so steeped in this mythology, and strikes an amazing and refreshing balance between reverence and irreverence for the source material (when writing for the character of Medea, for example, she explained that she was having difficulty understanding her, “until I realized what a bozo Jason was”).

Dune by Frank Herbert

Haha. I read the first four books of this classic sci-fi series this year alongside Eddy. The weirdness chart for this series is an exponential curve and I found the fourth book so deeply weird as to be borderline unreadable, but all of them are special and the first one, in particular, sticks in your brain.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

I’ve been waiting for the author of The Night Circus to publish a new book for a long time, and this one was worth the wait. I love love love Erin Morgenstern’s eye for details and aesthetics, and the way she builds story around setting.

Television

I watched and enjoyed more TV shows in 2019 than any year in recent memory, but I think it's partly just the alignment of streaming service releases and my taste than any other factor. Eddy and I finished watching FullMetal Alchemist: Brotherhood at the beginning of this year. There was one weekend in May where all I did was watch Good Omens and bake a rhubarb cake (both very good). I binged all of Fleabag in two days and then I made Eddy watch it, and we're both completely captivated by it. July 5 was officially "Stranger Things Day", and Danielle, Eddy, and I woke up at 9 am, ate donuts, and watched the entire new season in one day (and then went to Veggie Galaxy for emotional recovery). The third season of The Crown dropped a few weeks ago and I spiraled even further into my Olivia Colman obsession, and Eddy and I finished the first season of The Good Place right before we left town for the holidays.

Movies

My movie-watching has declined significantly since I graduated and left behind my Film Boy pals, but I managed a short list of favorites: I adored BOOKSMART, and it immediately jumped to the special place in my heart where coming-of-age stories about smart young women live. I watched THE FAVORITE on a plane and it was fantastic. And then a few nights ago Danielle and I went to see the new Greta Gerwig-directed LITTLE WOMEN and predictably adored it, and it was basically the highlight of my trip home. But I didn't see much in theaters, and I don't feel like I missed out.

Games

Another surprise for me this year was how many games I played and enjoyed. I grew up playing video games and watching my siblings play, but when I moved to Boston for college all I had was a 3DS, and my consumption of games, with the noticeable exceptions of Stardew Valley and Pokémon Go, went into hibernation. That all changed this year, when Eddy bought me a Nintendo Switch for my birthday, and I spent January playing many blissful hours of Let’s Go Pikachu. Other favorites include:

OXENFREE - Branching storylines! Choose-your-own-adventure sans cutscenes so that it all feels totally immersive and high-stakes! And a creepy, existential, Arrival-esque mystery to boot.

THE FLAME IN THE FLOOD - All of my favorite books growing up were about kids who run away to live in the woods à la My Side of the Mountain, so this post-apocalypse survival adventure story featuring our hero, Scout, brewing dandelion tea to cure her snakebites, making snares out of saplings, and using cattail tubers to make braided cord was right in my wheelhouse.

UNTITLED GOOSE GAME - needs no introduction

In Conclusion

Happy new year, all--I hope 2020 brings us all joy and truth.

On the Road Again

On the Road Again

  I just returned from a long road trip- almost 4,000 miles by the time I got home. On the way east I enjoyed the gorgeous foliage of New York in the rain and in the company of a very sweet older cat, who now lives with my daughter. It was a joy to transport the little cutie from her old home to her new one.

      I experienced a few hours of Women’s Week in Provincetown. I managed to run into…

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Do you have any tips on how can I meet a girl? Or girls. Because I’m still in the closet. I live in a almost small city, and I don’t have it in me to go alone to some place I can meet people and be like: hey, can I be part of your inner circle? I have very limited options. I just want to see if you have any tips or an advice. I’m starting to feel lonely and that I have no idea how to have a romantic relationship with people.

Are you located in the States? I ask because I’m not sure how what apps work where, but if you’re in the states, here’s what I would do (and have done). I’d first do a Facebook search for any local queer Facebook groups. I’m apart of FOUR queer sports team in my town, and I’m from a small city in the south. Now a days, depending on where you’re located, queer groups are becoming more common, and many of them are closed, which I think means the public can’t see who the members are. I’d also check out MeetUp. It’s web based and app based, so you can do either. You can look up specific types of social groups by town and category, so you can search for something like “lgbt group” and “lesbian group,” “trans group,” etc. and see if anything comes up. Lastly, if you have the means and ability to make this feasible/worth looking into, check out non-local events. For instance, Women’s Week in Provincetown. Depending on where you are, they’re may be events one state over that you can drive too. If you’re not a minor, you can also check out A-Camp. Those are just some starting points. I know how hard this can be, believe me. I have a hard time socializing, but I’m getting better. It just takes a little bit of research, elbow grease and practice. Good luck and keep me posted!