The Reluctant Receptionist

i don’t quite know where to start writing about our trip to san francisco last week. it was, to use a really strangely disney-ish adjective, magical. the whole trip, i mean, not just part of it. not just the city, or my time with phong, or hanging out with his friends, or the food. all of it.

until i went there, i couldn’t understand why phong misses san francisco so much, why it has been so hard for him to adjust to living in new york city. i completely understand now. after one day, i was plotting and planning when we could come back, how much time we could spend, where we’d go eat, where we’d stay. there’s just something about the place that i absolutely fell in love with. first off, there’s the city itself. the architecture is a mix of victorian and modern, candy-colored wood houses butting up next to glass and steel, all on hills that scare the shit out of you when you’re driving, most of the neighborhoods (including phong’s old one) offering stunning views of two bridges and the bay, and beyond that the ocean. the streets are cleaner; the subway’s cleaner. something i loved about the subway is that the biggest cars are two cars long, and all the lines eventually break free from the tunnels. not like they do here, elevatedly, but literally onto the street. you’re chugging along underground, and suddenly the subway you’re on is not only above ground but is at street level, and the floor turns into stairs and it lets you off just right there, like a bus. i kept thinking, it’s like the subway got sick of being underground.

more than the city itself, though, i fell in love with the city’s pace. it’s a city, to be sure, but it’s a little slower than new york city. the sidewalks, even downtown during rush hour, aren’t as crowded, even when there are 300 tourists standing in line for a cable car ride. anywhere you go—the subway, restaurants, it doesn’t matter—there are a few more gay people around. our last morning there, a saturday, i saw three gay couples walking down the street holding hands. not walking down the street in the castro; walking through the subway at powell street. and no one gave it a second glance. i found myself lightening up, less on guard, more able to just enjoy being with phong and the beautiful weather.

then there are the bars. my favorite night, by far, was trannyshack at the stud. it’s a drag show, but not just lip-synching. the emphasis isn’t on being “real” or “beautiful,” but on being creative. these bitches held nothing back, and the show was filthy and funny and shocking (and i’m not easily shocked). that goes for the rest of the gay scene that i saw. there are way fewer cookie-cutter gays out there than there are here. people were actually dancing at these bars, not standing around posing. and there were hipsters and a/x fags and lesbians and trannies all there together. it’s like, i wish that someone could go to a san francisco gay bar and then go to G on a saturday night and tell me which one you’d rather spend your time at. (the last line of G’s website? “no dancing.”)

i could go on, of course, with my open-ended love letter to san francisco, but i won’t. what i’m going to try to do, though, is to remember what i felt like in san francisco: how i was open for an adventure, smiley and relaxed and excited. i’m going to try to remember that feeling when i’m crammed on a bus (this morning) or deciding whether or not to go out instead of stay in (tonight). during this vacation, i felt more like myself than i have in a long time. and it felt really good.

if i had to characterize today’s weather in new york city, i would call it ‘soggy.’ or maybe, ‘steady, soaking rain.’ either way, it fucking sucks. we luckily got a new bus stop (yes, i take the bus. every single day. and i can’t stand it in case you were wondering.) which provides a lot of shelter from the pouring rain. i sit here at my desk, though, staring out the window at the currently-being-constructed new yankee stadium in the bronx and it is an ugly, ugly day. it’s kind of crazy how far i can see from my desk. we’re on the tenth floor toward the tip of manhattan, so one side of the building can see jersey and my side of the building can see all the way past yankee stadium to the airplanes landing at laguardia. every time i see the airport these days i get excited for our upcoming trip to san francisco. even though i’m flying out of JFK because i got a direct flight from there.

i find myself counting down the days until we go to san francisco for vacation. not even necessarily because i need a break from work. work, as you know, i’m sure, isn’t all that stressful. i come here, i do my work, i take a lunch break, i go home. my singing career, while busy, isn’t stressful, either. it’s fun stress. maybe i need a break from new york city, from our daily grind. its going to work coming home practicing cooking dinner doing something or watching tv going to bed then going to work routine. or maybe it’s because i’m so excited to see san francisco from an insider’s view.

the only other time i’ve been to the bay area was for the creating change conference in college. we went for like two days and were in a conference building all day long. mel, my english professor and sponsor of our gay group, and i went out in the castro one night, but i was only 20. we couldn’t really do anything but wander around. what i remember most are how many homeless teenagers i saw in the castro, most of them gay. it struck me how close we were in age but how different in circumstance. here i was on an all-expenses-paid trip for a gay conference; here they were out on the street because they were gay.

and so i fly out to san francisco on my birthday, two weeks from yesterday. phong has a love affair with san francisco that he might never have with new york. he likes living here because of the things we can do—broadway shows, the opera—but he misses san francisco still. i have a feeling that i’m going to fall in love with it, too. but that’s what usually happens when you take a vacation away from new york: you look at where you’re visiting, at how much nicer the weather/roads/restaurants/subways are, and go “why the fuck do i bother with new york city?” then you come home and get over it.

my sister’s g-mail status message (jenny beck said the other day, ‘i guess i can’t call it an away message, because you’re there.’) right now says, “i miss my grandmother’s kitchen.” first, i had to wonder to myself which grandmother she meant. she’s had a strained relationship (everyone has) with one set, so could she mean that one? and the other one isn’t exactly known for her culinary skill. she’s an amazing woman, but cooking is not among her strengths. if i were to miss something about her house, it wouldn’t be her kitchen; it’d be the gas-log fireplace we all sit around whenever we’re together, drinking white wine. last christmas, my grandmother had accidentally punctured the bag of the winebox (yes, we drink wine from a box) and it had gone everywhere; she’d had to salvage what she could by pouring it from the punctured opening into huge plastic travel mugs. so we poured wine into our glasses from these plastic travel mugs all christmas.

so i think that it must be our other grandmother’s kitchen she’s talking about, and i know what she means. i miss her kitchen, too. i miss the way that she used to force-feed us ice cream after every meal; the way that the palette she’d laid on the ground for us to play on, consisting of blankets and a quilt that our nana had made, felt. (apparently playing on a palette is an oklahoma thing. cory and i discovered this earlier this winter when he laid out a palette for us to hang out on and everyone else was like, ‘what the fuck?’) mainly i miss the connectedness i felt at their house when i was younger, before i knew what it meant when my grandfather said racist things. before i knew i was queer and knew that when my grandfather would lambast “queers” he was talking about people like me. as i got older, figured myself out, i started to pull away, until the only time i would see or talk to them would be when i’d fly home for christmas. there was just too much of my life they couldn’t know about. so i miss them. i miss what they used to be to me.

and now they’re sick and shit is fucked. so i know what my sister means: i miss my grandmother’s kitchen.

lest i leave you on a downer, we start rehearsals tonight for st. matthew passion in brooklyn. it’s going to be really fun, i think: making music with some really good musicians, many of whom i went to grad school with. it’ll be like a little reunion. in brooklyn. singing bach.

this morning, having woken up fifteen minutes late (7:34 instead of 7:19, because phong hit the alarm and claims he said to me ‘it’s 7:19, time to get up,’ even though i think it’s a bold-faced lie), i decided to watch cbs sunday morning, the program i dvr every sunday and watch in small doses in the morning, instead of subjecting myself to the twittery chit-chat of the today show. it’s a dorky move, i know, choosing charles osgood (who always says today’s date like, “the thirteenth day of january twenty oh-eight.”) over meredith and al and ann. if only ann curry would move to cbs and replace charles osgood, it’d be my dream morning show. in-depth profiles of reading-man’s movie stars? check. 30-second shots of ducks? check. ann curry? it’d be perfect.

anyway, i was watching cbs sunday morning while phong was running around getting ready to go to the hospital and they were profiling the artist that directed the diving bell and the butterfly, a movie about a guy who had a stroke that left him conscious but completely paralyzed. he wrote a book using nothing but the blinking of his eyelid and an assistant, which the diving bell and the butterfly, which became a bestseller and now a movie by this guy that also directed basquiat. it looks absolutely beautiful. will i see it? it’s in french, so probably not. why this director can’t make a movie in english (he also directed _before night falls, in spanish.) i’ll never know. he’s american. and i—get ready to lose all respect for me—hate seeing foreign language films because i hate having to read subtitles. there, i said it. i’m not seeing this movie.

anyway, this director was kind of pretentious and self-important, but he said something that really struck me: why, in the new york times is the arts section called “arts and leisure?” “i’m sorry,” he said, “but the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. there is no leisure in being an artist.” i know why the paper lumps them together: the paper is written for people who are attending the arts, not making them. for those people, it is leisure. it’s us—the artists—who have to work so hard to make something that people can look at as an escape.

it was just fun for me to hear someone who’s spent a lifetime making art—both visual and on film—talk about what hard work making art actually is. think about it, singers and musicians: we are busting our asses—practicing, taking lessons, taking coachings, spending decades working toward perfecting an art that will never actually be perfected, going to thankless auditions, singing for thankless rich people—to beg to be allowed to do something that will, in the end, pay us little or no money. if we actually land a singing gig, we’ll have to quit our day jobs even though taking the singing gig will probably be a major pay cut. so why do we do it? because we have to. because not doing it isn’t an option. because not doing it would mean wasting what little time we have on this earth. because we can.

first of all, really, iowa? really? huckabee. that is the man that you want to see ruling the country? and i do mean ruling the country because, let’s face it, with the changes george bush has made and with the supreme court he’s set up, if the next president is a crazy republican he’s going to be the closest thing to a dictator this country has ever seen. there will be no stopping him, and all of the poor faggots like me and my boyfriend will see every single right that we’ve fought tooth and nail for ripped away. so that’s what you want, iowa? well, thanks. fuck you, too. i know that this caucus doesn’t really determine who’s going to win the race for the nomination, that it’s only the first, but it’s still disconcerting. i think we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place: there’s no way that middle america is going to vote for an african-american. those of us on the coasts don’t get it, but seriously: i’ve lived in oklahoma and in the midwest, and underneath a thin veneer of courtesy beats a terrifying artery of racism. they won’t admit it to the news cameras or the gallup polls, they’ll claim that they’ll get in there and vote for obama, but when it comes time to pull the lever…

now, i’m not saying that it’d be any better with hillary. i don’t think that they’re going to vote for a woman that they all think is a “bitch.” they hate her like they hate martha stewart: she’s a powerful woman who goes after what she wants and is vying for a seat at the table with all the men, so she’s a bitch. maybe what our country needs right now is a leader who’s a bitch. and a leader who has even a shred of respect for foreign policy.

i know that a lot of you are going to think that i’m ill-informed, and maybe that’s true. i don’t watch a lot of political discussion, and i only watched highlights of the debates. maybe i see things too simplistically, and maybe i’ll be surprised by the outcome of this presidential race. i hope so.

christ hanging off the cross it is cold outside. i hate to resort to talking about the weather, because i know that it is the safest, most boring topic ever. it’s what people talk about at cocktail parties when they’re on their first drink. then it’s on to the second drink where you talk about work and by the fourth drink you’ve got your hand down each others’ pants. or maybe that’s just me. no wonder i never get invited to cocktail parties anymore. anyway, it’s like fifteen degrees here in new york city. last night, waiting for the train in queens, i wore the black wool coat that i’d worn out to astoria under my huge black puffy down coat. the black marshmallow, as robin calls it. i’d gone out to retrieve some of my kitchen stuff from the apartment and bring it to phong’s, so that i could start cooking there, but i couldn’t figure out a way to effectively carry such heavy things. i refuse to be one of those people who carries a granny cart onto the subway. so i went to the grocery store out there because it’s so much cheaper than the gourmet garage, which is our only real option over at phong’s. so there i am, standing there on the subway platform wearing two coats and carrying my chock-full-of-shit messenger bag and two grocery bags, shivering in the fifteen degree weather. i am fucking hot in the winter, let me tell you. i have to turn down a modeling contract twice every time i leave the house.

phong’s friends are still in town from san francisco, so we’re meeting them tonight for a late dinner and drinks possibly at therapy. i had a crazy time trying to go to sleep last night for some reason—i laid there and watched the clock spin until like 2am, knowing that i had to be up at 7. i must’ve fallen asleep, because when phong’s alarm went off at 6 i was deeply dreaming, fairly sure that i had been snoring and possibly talking in my sleep. nothing will ever compete with robin’s sleep-talking, especially the time that we were in france and she was speaking fake french in her sleep. that was brilliant. my sleep talking, i’m sure, would be much more pedestrian. it would be talking about the fact that i’m out of cute outfits for all the dinners out and friends we’ve been seeing. boring things like that. but seriously, i’m out of cute outfits.

did i mention it’s cold outside?

i know that i should be doing work. i have so much to catch up on here at my dayjob, people i should be calling, papers i should be pushing, things to print and spreadsheets to update. you’d almost think that i know what i’m doing reading that sentence, but don’t be fooled. my spreadsheets are laughable, the stuff of high school (ok, junior high) computer classes, although they’re beautifully color coordinated. i really will start to do work, i promise. it’s just that i’ve been a little stressed out this week, as i’m sure you can tell.

i have another audition today. after it’s done, i’ll only have three more to go until the end of the year. of course, since every single one of those will lead to not only a contract but a position in the starting lineup at the met, i’ll never have to do another audition again. so i’m looking forward to that. in all seriousness, i have to say that i feel like i’ve already triumphed, having gotten waitlisted somewhere. no, i’m not actually going to go sing somewhere. but fuck, this was my first time doing auditions in three years and i got waitlisted. what could possibly happen next year? i may even make it to the top of the waitlist.

i keep trying to make myself slow down and enjoy the fact that it’s the christmas season. i can remember years when i was a kid (and even in college and grad school, since we got off for so long) that december felt so long, the wait for christmas seemingly interminable. we had an advent calendar that hung from the pantry door and used to argue over who got to move the pillowy mouse doll to his next position down the calendar. this year i don’t even have a christmas list (besides the obvious: a kitchenaid artisan stand mixer in pistachio. is that so much to ask?), much less an advent calendar. i’m just kind of going on overdrive until december 16th, the day after our church choir concert. as amanda says, i’m pretty much constantly in a state of warmed-up-ed-ness, ready to sing at any given moment. “wake up, robert, it’s 6 a.m. and you have to sing bach RIGHT NOW!” “SIR YES SIR! J.S. or C.P.E., sir? Yes, sir, stupid question, sir.”

don’t ask why i’m calling phong sir at 6 o’clock in the morning. it’s a personal thing between only us.

meanwhile, feast your eyes on my mother’s new christmas tree, of which she just sent me pictures this morning. it’s the whitest tree ever, and i shall start calling it the “white supremacy tree,” though never in her presence because she would be mortified.

since it’s friday, i decided to treat myself and get a starbucks (grande decaf cafe americano with an inch of hot skim, thank you very much). my friend from choir, chad, works at starbucks and is apparently being transferred to the one by my work to help with its efficiency, which is great news because that means i hopefully get some free coffee. or at least some better service.

so i’m walking up broadway just now, on my way to work, sipping my foot-long starbucks (grande decaf cafe americano with an inch of hot skim), with the collar to the expensive coat my father bought me last christmas turned up, wearing the expensive boots i bought last fall, fiddling with my brand-new iphone. and suddenly i’m like, ew. i’m that guy. with all my talk about being a poor, starving artist, i’m actually the kind of american that buys a new, really expensive gadget on a whim and only contributes to charities like new york public radio.

this isn’t buyer’s remorse. this isn’t me wishing that i hadn’t bought an iphone. i love the goddamned thing. i surfed the net all last night during the world’s most tedious “runthrough” of our show. (if by runthrough you mean “finish staging significant chunks of act I,” then sure. it was a runthrough.) this is probably all stemming from watching the play last friday about the gay egyptian guy and his british lover. here i am, worried that i might not be able to buy an iphone (as cory said when he found out i bought one, “what do you mean ‘this summer was hard?’ hard as in you couldn’t buy an iphone a month for the summer?”), when people are being arrested and tortured and killed for nothing more than being gay.

if anything, i guess, the play made me realize (again) exactly how blessed i am to live the life that i do: to live somewhere that i can walk down the street or ride the subway with my boyfriend, that i can worry about trying to make it as a classical singer instead of worry about where my next meal is coming from.

christ, listen to me. it’s not even thanksgiving yet.

for a few months now (and by a few months i mean the better part of a year, since when you’re 27 your life has started to speed up to an unbelievable pace and suddenly you’re 30 and BARREN) some of the gays at my church have been trying to get a gay group together. the problem is that nobody has really taken the lead, and nobody really knew if it was going to be a social group where we met at restaurants or had potlucks or picnics or if it was going to be a covenant group, where we’d sit around discussing readings and things. we’ve tried to have a few social gatherings, but with one exception they’ve mainly fizzled. the “bowling night” didn’t work out because of this insane blizzard that actually shut down the trains in queens. and the picnic that we planned in central park kind of backfired because not many people showed up and then nobody showed up with food that could be eaten on a, um, picnic.

so i finally decided to take the bull by the horns and start planning the stuff myself. i mean, sophomore year in college i led the gay group at depauw and i managed not to run it into the ground. and trust me, we were facing much more adversity from the university back in ye olde days (1999) in rural indiana than we do at my church. we used to have to sit in meetings with the v.p.’s of the university—19 and 20 year olds, mind you, meeting with university trustees and shit—in between classes, just trying to get funding for like a movie showing. back then, we couldn’t even find gay movies to show during our film festivals; we used to have to drive to indy just to rent, like, go fish. and we had to walk to school uphill both ways in the driving snow.

anyway, i decided to start planning things for our church gay group myself. then, during a quick email exchange with our pastor, it was decided that our gay group would turn into a more formalized version, a covenant group. then, suddenly, i became the “facilitator” of this covenant group, which led to my inclusion in a covenant group facilitator retreat that’s happening upstate in a week, during which we will learn how to create a sacred space.

me. creating a sacred space.

what’s most frightening is that none of this seems that odd to me, really. i mean, i grew up going to methodist church, i love my current church, and i actually feel like i belong there. so why is it weird that i’d take a leadership role in the gay goings on there? why do i feel so…i don’t know, uneasy? i think it’s probably because i’m not used to it being alright to be openly gay at church. ever since i was a teenager, church has been a place where, if you’re in oklahoma, anti-gay rhetoric is actually preached from the pulpit. it wasn’t even okay to have gay friends. so the thought of a methodist church actually supporting the spiritual growth of a group of GLBT people is just so…i don’t know the word i’m looking for.

but maybe the word i’m looking for should be “amazing.” or “wonderful.” or “just what i’ve been looking for.” maybe.

okay, readers, stop chomping at the bit. i know how much you hate it when i wait until 12:45 in the afternoon to blog, and for that i’m truly sorry. i know that until i blog you all just sit at your desks at your day jobs, hitting refresh over and over until you see a new post, and that, now that you’ve all spent the last four hours hitting refresh, some of you have been fired from your jobs. look at it this way: you’ll all have more time to follow your various and sundry interests, like classical singing or scrabble or fruit. see now? i’ve done you a favor.

i actually spent a good chunk of the morning playing around on ancestry.com, after cory told me that he (drunkenly) found out a ton of his family history using it. i’ve seen other geneology websites before, but they were a total pain in the ass. all they really did was help you organize the stuff that you’d already found after hauling your ass to the public library or calling your local senator. this website, though, is crazy: it has scanned public records dating all the way back to the mid-1800s, including immigration ship registries, censuses (censi?), birth/death records, and more. if i knew their actual names, i could find out which ship my great-grandparents came to america on.

but therein lies the problem. i have a fairly small family, a bunch of wasps who don’t really talk about, well, family very much. we all love each other, but we don’t sit around and discuss great-great-grandpa wallabe and what it was like when he came from australia (if we did, i’d know that my family had completely lost it, finally, because we’re all irish and english and eastern european). for this reason, and because my family tends to reproduce fairly late in life, i only really knew one great-grandparent; my father, in fact, never even got to know his own grandparents. so while trying to research my family tree, i’m having to start pretty much from scratch, which has made the process very slow indeed.

i found a couple of interesting things, though: my grandfather’s mother’s name was kate, and she was the daughter of millie and abraham sklute. both sklute and my last name are russian jewish names (which i learned by the fact that everyone in the census EVER who has the name sklute or my name are always russian immigrants), and i’ve come one step closer to figuring out the real story of my grandfather’s parents and his parents. remember, though, that “russian” back in the late 1800s didn’t really mean what we think of as russia today. so, since i’ve always told people that i’m “eastern european jewish” by descent, that’s still probably true. they were from somewhere in western russia, i guess.

then again, i could be completely wrong on all of this. in which case…does it really matter? no. not so much.