Orlando Ahoy!

Off to Orlando today with Kip to visit my brother and his family--which includes my two year old nephew, who is amazing. We're doing Sea World on Friday, I believe. Despite my mixed feelings about places like that. Be back at the end of the week. In the meantime, I leave you another of Shehani Fernando's pictures.

The End Has Come

Last Sunday in Washington Square Park, Circus Amok ended its 2006 season with two amazing shows. We had to stop the first one in the middle for the rain, but we waited 10 minutes and after it passed, we continued. The four o'clock show went beautifully. Olympia Dukakis and her husband, Louis Zorich, were in the audience, looking surprised and delighted and she looked totally Oscar-winning. Also there were Cynthia Nixon and her partner, Christine Marinoni, along with their children. Several weeks ago, at Union Square, Debra Messing was in the audience. How exciting.

I thought the shows this year were extremely sucessful. At the St. Mary's Park show we were introduced to Louis, a 16 year-old local kid who explained that he'd been coming to see Circus Amok in that very park for the last ten years. After the show, after Cindy does her juggling act bit about the LGBT-Q-456-N-R Fund for Justice, Louis asked Michelle if that was, um, how everyone, uh, identified. "I'm gay too," he said, "but my mother doesn't accept me." He thanked us for coming. It was all bigger than the words.

Someone asked me once "But how do you know if you're changing people's minds?" and I told them that I didn't really care about that, because it had changed me. It is easy to forget when you're a part of it, that Amok is really an extremely subversive, renegade, and although sometimes we feel like we have to move the damn crash pad one more time, we're actually--ACTUALLY--bringing theater to neighborhoods which otherwise might not see something like that. It's a beautiful kind of activism.

It's sad when it ends, and yet you're left with all this accomplishment. (And banged up toes and knees and scratched elbows, but that's another story. Don't even mention the lower back stuff.) Plus we tend to see each other throughout the year in other contexts. But it's not the same concentration, which is what people will miss. It's what I miss.

Best. Birthday. Ever.

After the Amok show in Rufus King Park, everyone -- all 26 of us it turned out -- went to have dinner at Tangra Wok, an Indian/Chinese fusion restaurant in Rego Park. Jenny, the musical director, and I have the same birthday, which is the best way to have a birthday if you're a person like me who doesn't really like to celebrate his birthday. The energy isn't all focused on you, and you actually have someone to share it with.

Everyone was starving, still covered in glitter and make-up, and the delightful waiters at Tangra Wok, were ever so willing to push together basically EVERY one of their tables to suit our party, which kept growing as the night went on--as other friends poured in from other circles.

Then the food began to arrive. It was truly a banquet. A huge long table, with fifteen people on each side, bowl after bowl of incredibly spicy food, with flavors so layered, so elegant. There was much oohing and ahhing, and grunts of satisfaction all around. There were Spring Rolls and Chicken Lollipops, Papaya Salad and spicy sesame chicken, incredible garlic noodles which were so spicy that the same bowl of them went around the entire table. Manchurian sauces. Thai Curries. Lemon Coriander soup. There was Chili Cauliflower, Honey Lamb, Ginger Lamb, Chicken with the chef's special sauce. Beer after beer after beer.

The Amok crew bought me a massage at the Nickel Spa. Kip brought some Sesame Street stuff for us to wear/play with/enjoy. We sang Happy Birthday to each other, and there were two other birthdays in the restaurant, so we sang once more for each of them. They stood, they laughed. We all stood and laughed. Jenny and Susan and Jessica sang the Chowder Song, and people looked at is like we were all crazy--and we might be.

Finally, there were cupcakes and candle-blowing, and the waiters brought this huge ice cream bombe with mango, pistachio, rose and coconut ice creams. We sliced it up into about 30 pieces and passed it all around. And for a moment there was only the sound of spoons on melamine.

One for the history books.

103rd Precinct

I wouldn't know if the 103rd Precinct in Jamaica, Queens, is a particularly busy one. If it's violent, quiet or maybe odd. My guess would be that it is not. I guess this because for two days in a row I've been trying to secure a sound permit for the Amok show in Rufus King Park on Thursday--also my birthday.

As I sat there, glancing at each policeman walking past--oh, yes, some of them are dreamboats--a woman came into the lobby. "I've been kidnapped," she said. Strangely, or perhaps not strangely, none of the officers did much of anything. One of them, a woman, came around the front of the desk and began talking with her. The woman--the potential kidnapee--hadn't actually been kidnapped. This, I gathered from the reactions of people around her. No urgency. No paperwork. Probably she was homeless--they acted as if they knew her. She was one of those egregious displays of irony that NYC offers: an unwashed, maybe crazy, maybe unmedicated, disheveled old lady carrying her belongings in none other than a Takashimaya shopping bag.

Night Court, I kept thinking, even though this was the police station--that ridiculous sitcom from the late 80s, which I always watched after school. With Marsha Warfield as the bailiff. I always liked tough women on television. We watched it at my grandparents sometimes, and Empty Nest, which I think came on Saturday nights at 9:30, and after it was over we had to go to bed. That or the Golden Girls, which was when I really started to figure out what exactly a gay sensibility was. This is what happens when you sit for long periods of time watching all this--your brain drifts and doesn't stop. Memories are like that--you can connect one to the next forever if you want to. You don't even have to want to.

Someone came to lead me upstairs, and so I didn't get to see the end of the possible kidnap situation. Then, sitting at the second desk in the community affairs office, Officer Lowe was finally writing up my permit--a truly nice guy who seemed like he'd do anything for us, despite his inability to help me out the day before, because, simply, there was no hard copy of the park permit form him to Xerox. "Daddy's Girl" written on a mini NYS license plate, thumb-tacked to the corkboard behind him.

"What happened to the bearded lady?" he asked. "She's still around," I answered. "She's off in Battery Park today trying to get that site settled." "Okay," he said, "well, tell her I said hello. Maybe I'll see her next year."

Where I was sitting--someone else's desk, someone who was, as he said "in the field"--there was a Post-It note stuck to the monitor which read: "Mary needs wigs for prostitution."

Buy the Book!

You can now hold in your very own hands, your very own copy of my new book: Collection. It's a limited edition anthology of essays and excerpts, and you can only get it directly from me or my website LeeHouck.com. It's arty and underground like that.

At the site, you can read the introduction, click around to other parts of my writing life, Paypal over the mere $12, and I'll send you a book, signed just for you!

For those of you who live in NYC: you can also buy the book directly from my very own hands for only $10 Please let me know if you want me to reserve one for you.

Hooray, just what you've always wanted.

September Resolution

I've decided that this fall's project will be to stop biting my nails. The winter air wreaks havok on my fingertips, so much that last season I resorted to sleeping in those creepy gloves, first slathering my hands with vaseline, or some Origins stuff, or some other concoction--I've tried everything. It's not bad, but I'd still rather fix the habit.

I do it primarily when I'm thinking about something--in movies, watching TV, in pauses between writing. People have suggested that it's anxiety--which I'm certainly not short on--but it's more a way to focus, and at this point I've made it almost impossible to shift my brain into that analytical mode without stuffing a finger in my mouth. How childish.

So if you see me out in the world, eyes glazed over, somehow distant, moving from one finger to the next, in obsessive maniacal despair--remind me that I'm supposed to be giving it up.

The Ruins

I want to write a bit about Scott Smith's new novel, The Ruins, which--according to dopey reviewers on Amazon.com--isn't particularly worth reading. Totally unbelieveable, they cry. Not scary! Not scary enough! But they're wrong. The novel is dark, brutal, almost without any hope. It is merciless.

What I keep reading in one inane review after another--except they aren't reviews at all, but really a few sentences about what the reader thought the book should have been like--is that the plot is unbelievable. I never understand this arguing with the writer thing--I do it myself, but I also know that I have to back off.

Take a brilliant, sad and redemptive novel like Ian McEwan's Saturday. At one point, the plot begins to turn--the burglary--and I remember distinctly saying to myself: Stop! I don't want things to go this way! But I'm not the decision maker, I'm just along for the ride. I have enough respect for McEwan to go with him where he wants to take me. Because one thing always leads to another, and sometimes the only way through is the unpleasant way through. And good writers know this.

How did the democratization of reviewing turn into readers not trusting writers?

It frustrates me--well, it pisses me off--that people look for novels to be so true to life. I think the main tragedy is that people--the general Amazon reviewing public--thought they were going to be eating popcorn and soda pop, but what they got was richer and meatier, bitter and difficult to digest. And they felt cheated.

But that's what I want from art--I want to be surprised. I want to be put somewhere else, somewhere outside of my regular existence, where the colors are a bit more saturated, the characters a bit smarter, or not smarter, and the flowers just too red to be true. I think of Toni Morrison saying that she didn't want her novels to be books you dipped into for fifteen minutes before bed. You know, if you want a slice of life, look out the fucking window.

Amok Pics

This year we are fortunate to have with us Shehani Fernando, who is doing a photojournalism masters at a university in London--with Circus Amok as her subject. She is as lovely in person as her photographs, and has blended seamlessly into our Circus family. Here are some of her pictures:

Sick Passenger

On the way home from Coney Island on Monday night, as the F Train curved around the tunnel between Church Avenue and Ft. Hamilton Parkway, I started to feel a little sick. No, not a little sick, but really sick. I had that feeling you get just before you throw up--that body awareness that says "You have about 30 seconds to get ready for what I'm about to do to you."

Then, moments later, as the train passed through the 7th Avenue station and out onto the above-ground station at 4th Avenue, I found myself being held up by Kip and Amy, slowly taking my own weight again, the train stopped, a policeman standing there, everyone staring.

I had passed out. Or fainted. Or something like that. Later, on the couch at Kip's house, with my toe raised and iced--I had slammed my fourth toe on my right foot into part of the ring curb during the 5pm Circus Amok show, while wearing this ridiculous goat mask which obscures basically all your vision, and we wondered if it might be broken--I realized that since breakfast, I'd hardly eaten anything.

Stranger, however, was that I have no memory of losing consciousness at all. In fact, in my mind, I was alert during the whole thing. I remember feeling nauseous, I remember telling Amy that I felt really sick, and then I remember thinking "Wow, this train is really shakey." What was really shakey, of course, was the three of them--Kip, Amy and a stranger--lifting me out of the seat and carrying me onto the platform. Even though there was a disconnect, my brain was still quite alert.

This makes me wonder about what happens when you die. No wonder people see a tunnel of white light, or hear voices around them. Thank goodness I was with friends, and thank goodness some stranger lept to the rescue.

I felt fine later that evening, and still today I'm okay. I'm sure it was the combination of the not eating and the strenuous task of doing two shows in the hot Coney Island sun. It's odd--when have you known me to skip a meal?

New Anthology

I have an essay, "Inheritance," in the anthology From Boys to Men, recently published by Caroll & Graf.


Here's some of the jacket copy: "More than an anthology of coming out stories, From Boys to Men is a stunning collection of essays about what it is like to be gay and young, to be different and be aware of that difference from the earliest of ages. In these memoirs, coming out is less important than coming of age and coming to the realization that young gay people experience the world in ways quite unlike straight boys. Whether it is a fascination with soap opera, an intense sensitivity to their own difference, or an obsession with a certain part of the male anatomy, gay kids — or kids who would eventually identify as gay — have an indefinable but unmistakable gay sensibility. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes it is harrowing, and often it is deeply moving."