I give you me, in all my fabulousness.

During my daytime stint as mermaid, at the Raleigh Pool Party, I was without my glasses. Because, really, who ever heard of a mermaid in glasses?

Nevertheless, I was able to see well enough to notice that I was surrounded by stunning, gorgeous men. I will digress momentarily to tell a story about my mother.
Mummy did her part for the war effort (WWII) by dancing with the sailors and the soldiers at the local USO. She would go with her friend Millie, who was from Tennessee, or Georgia, or some other deep south state. When Mummy and her dance partner of the evening decided to head on off to another road house, Mummy would tell Millie to pick one and let's go. But Millie couldn't choose, and she would, without fail, say to my mother, "But Florence, I cain't choose. It's just like picking flowers. Each one is prettier than the next."

At these White Party week events, I always think of Millie because, just as she said back in the day, each one is prettier than the next. And since they are all gay, the allusion is even stronger. All I can do is smell them, and not even pick a little bittie bud.

Anyway, so there I am, sitting on the edge of the stage, flapping my tail and waving prettily at the pretty boys. Many of them asked to take their photos with me, and I was only too happy to oblige.

But there was one man who didn't ask. I watched him all afternoon, and kept thinking that there was one major hottie. "If he weren't gay," I kept saying to myself, "I would eat him with a spoon. Yum, yum fucking yum."

He was dark. Black hair in white-boy dreads, little twisty ones. Black five-o'clock shadow and it was barely past noon. Built just so. I'm telling you, he was just edible.

So when I was getting ready to pack it in, I asked one of the roving photographers if he would take a shot of me and this gorgeous thing. In fact, I was quite specific: That one, the guy that I just want to lick all over because he is just so gorgeous.

I'm sorry if I can't come up with another word other than gorgeous, but that's what he was.

The photographer went over and, I assume, passed along my assessment of his looks and request for pictures. He trotted right over and sat down on the edge of the stage with me. I flapped my tail, and blushed prettily, and batted my eyelashes, and twiddled my finger in his chest hair and we started to talk as the photographer snapped.

I learned that his name is George and he is the manager for several of our DJs. I also suspect that he is not at all gay. This made things very uncomfortable for me, since I'm married and by no means available. I couldn't ask right out. I couldn't do anything except maybe pull my fingers out of his chest hair and stop flapping and batting, and so I did.

Anyway, I felt and feel like an idiot, but in my own defense, you have never seen anything as hot as George.

I was a mermaid at White Party, and according to the buzz, I was "fabulous." The photos don't do me justice, probably because I photograph like an overweight, wrinkled old hag, whereas in real life (or at least in my mind and mirror, I am none of those things.
People, let me tell you, life is worth living when you are swimming in the warm seas of admiration from gorgeous men who tell you things like "you are so working it, girl".

Yas, yas.

I was wearing the most glamorous gown in the history of me. My sweetie, Paul Gallo, of the fabulous house of Gallofornia, made a silver lamé halter dress with a tail, and fringes of kelp in silver and white and seafoam. I had on yards of faux pearls (also known as Christmas tree garlands) and an Art Nouveau crown of beads and mylar sequins (also Christmas tree garland). There were fake eyelashes with glitter, and glitter all over my exposed parts. There was way too much eye shadow in silver and teal and teal with glitter eye liner.

Opera length gloves. Silver shoes. (Sensible flats, of course, because it is just exhausting being fabulous.) I perched (ha, fish joke) around on things and flapped my tail.

I had a million photos taken with a million beautiful men. I took a tumble down a flight of stairs (bump, bump, bump on my butt) and allowed as how it was only my dignity which was damaged, whereas I have a bruise the size of a grapefruit on my ass. Hokie smokes, Bullwinkle, it hurts like a booger.

And most fabulous of all, I got to meet, shake hands with, talk briefly to and be photographed with the most fabulous Miss Yoko Ono.

She is tiny, tiny, tiny. She was wearing this fantastic straw hat, which I would have bet money was a Phillip Treacy, but which she swore was not. Her skin is absolute egg-shell porcelain, and let me tell you, she has not had any work done. She is just that delicate and flawless.

I said hello, as part of the Board contingent, and couldn't help myself... I had to swing right around and go back and gush admiration, devotion and outright awe for her works, art and philanthropic and then told her it was an unexpected honor to meet her. She looked me in the eyes, said thank you and shook my hand, and didn't make me feel like Wayne before Alice Cooper, sobbing "I'm not worthy", but in my heart, I felt that stupid. Didn't matter, I do adore the woman, and had enough presence of mind not to say "I never believed you broke up the Beatles, it was that skank Linda."

Probably would have made more of an impression, I imagine. (Ha, John Lennon joke.)

I promise that I'll post photos as I find/get them. And more stories as I make them up remember them.

No, really, it hurts. A migraine woke me up today at six. It felt like there was a band halfway around my head, just at eyebrow level. It was squeezing tighter and tighter, and trying to pop the top of my skull off.
Three Motrin, several icebags, one dark room and many hours of restless sleep later, I am awake and tentative about the state of my brain. The ice bags were a particular help: I put them over my eyes until I could feel the entire eyeball cooling from the inside and that seemed to help my head.

Too much information?

Well then, how about this: I am thankful today for the many friends I have on this amazing thing called the internet.

When I finally got out of bed, and turned on my computer, there were messages of care and warmth from friends I've never met: a woman in England who shares with me a love of cats and quilting and baseball, a message from New York, and another from California, and yet others from around Florida.

The essay I was going to write, the one about the empty places in my heart and at my table this year, that essay fell away, replaced by the love that spilled out of the laptop's screen.

Thank you one and all. May we find our hearts desires in this coming year. And may the fucking Miami Dolphins find their way out of the football equivalent of the cellar.

I'll be out of pocket for the rest of the weekend, as White Party Week is upon us. Don't worry, though, there will be photos and stories when I get back.

Took the surrogate daughters to see Rent yesterday. What happened to American musical theater when I wasn't looking?
OK, so Broadway has been gentrified and Disneyfied and all that, and Lion King and Beauty and the Beast are hits... But so is/was The Producers, and that was original. Avenue Q... ditto.

But Rent? I mean, aside from the fact that it's a lame ass grunginization of La Boheme, the book itself was awful. Act One drones on and on and on in what must surely be real time as it tells the story of one fateful Christmas Eve in a New York City that is no more real than the Disney version of Times Square.

AIDS, trannies, lesbians. Whoo-hoo. Was I supposed to be shocked or tittilated, or even interested? And the performance art piece at the end of the first act... help me out here, someone. The way it was played yesterday was as a really bad attempt at art by someone who seemed like an art-school dropout from Scarsdale. I thought the character, by other descriptions in the play, should have been played like Courtney Love: a desperate train wreck, but talented.

Anyway, we had fun on the ride home, when I taught Daughter2 the anal game. That's where you put the word anal in front of the car model: Anal Discovery, Anal Probe, Anal Lancer.... If you really want to get into the game, then you have to say what that is: an Anal Discovery is when you get the x-rays back and it's a coke bottle....

Hey. It was the high point of the afternoon, OK?

Dear Mr. President of the Hospital Where I Used To Work,

I'd just like to say what a pleasure it's been working at the hospital. I'd like to say that, but I'm afraid that I can't. You see, in the last twelve years, this institution has gone from one that made me proud to work there, to one where I cried on my way in, every day.
It was getting to that point when you came, so I can't blame you for the depths to which it has sunk. Many people do, but that isn't fair. No, the seeds of its destruction were sown many years ago, and I'm afraid that you are merely bringing in the sheaves.

Some of the senior management you inherited was incompetent and corrupt. Some of the senior management you brought in to replace those people were even worse.

One of the most recent casualties of your reign was a man I've known for twelve years. He was down in the pharmacy when your man came in. Your man tossed him out. Your man then went on to overbill the hospital on a regular basis, and even put in for reimbursement on his trips to strip clubs and fishing get-aways. My friend would have seen that and blown the whistle in a New York minute. That's why he was sent away.

What reason is there for sending him away now, after that particular whistle has been blown, and blown by someone who was left in nominal power because he was thought too insignificant and weak to do what he did?

Some of the most incompetent and stupid of the senior management you inherited, you let remain in power. Your PR director, for example. I have had a long and bitter struggle for integrity and devotion to duty with that particular bitch, and every time, she has won.

What does that say, that your PR director's position on talking to the media is "If you don't talk to the press, they can't misquote you." This institution has devolved into a bunker mentality. Is it Hitler in the Eagle's Nest, or merely Nixon praying in the halls of the White House?

I guess that I'm particularly bitter about the PR director, because it was she who told me, all those years ago: "Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. All you'll do is tell us what we're doing wrong, and it doesn't have to be done right, it only has to be done."

You were supposed to be our saviour. You were supposed to come in here and pull this institution up from the waters it was foundering in, and bring us back to fiscal health and management well-being.

I'm not seeing it. I never saw it. The old president may have been barking mad there at the end, but he always cared. You and your team have treated us like less than dirt. That was why I laughed when my VP told us that those of us who were going to be laid off were going to be treated with dignity and respect. You didn't treat us like that before you laid us off, why should we believe that dismissing us would improve our lot?

I had been ordered to put together a team to do volunteer work for Hands On Miami Day. Nobody asked if I wanted to, I was ordered to do it. I was livid with rage, that I should be asked to shanghai people to do field work on a weekend when we were all waiting for the ax to fall on our necks. I wasn't allowed to refuse, but neither did I work it like I had the first year, when I offered to do it.

Two days after Hands On Miami, I was laid off. My VP knew that he was throwing me away, and yet he still expected me to happily organize an after-hours event for the public face of this hospital. Oh yeah, respect and dignity, all right.

And while I'm venting about respect and dignity, let me tell you about my last responsibilty. My manager, oh he of little brain and pointy hair, had dicked around with the servers for a good nine months before we finally got my new content management system installed. He installed it while I was sitting at my father's deathbed. No less than 15 minutes (FIFTEEN FUCKING MINUTES, DO YOU HEAR ME, YES I'M YELLING, 15 MINUTES) after my father died, my asshole boss said, "While I have you on the phone, could you walk me through adding a row to a table in HTML?"

Is that respect? Is that dignity? Is that even fucking human? Huh? Anyway, I came back to work from my father's funeral and was given 3 months to convert the entire web site over to the new system. Yes, the PHB had taken three times that long to install the software, but I had three months to convert the site. By myself. Working longer hours, maintaining the existing site, creating hundreds of PDFs for secretaries who couldn't do it themselves, and never complaining. I did it in the time alloted too, which is ridiculous. Nobody should have been able to do it.

For my efforts, I received a thank you note from my boss. I was nominated for Employee of the Month. I didn't win, though. That honor was given to some gomer who sat in the server room during a hurricane that never hit and never disrupted power. When I finally did complain about that, the director of my department said that Employee of the Month didn't have anything to do with work, it was a perk that was doled out where and when needed for morale in any particular group.

Respect? Dignity? I don't think so.

Imagine my surprise when no less than two months after I finished that conversion, the PR director decided to outsource the web. Why another department was allowed to cut my job is something I don't like to ponder too much, but there it was. She also cut my counterpart in her own department, the lovable Loogie, my editor and bane of my existence. Imagine how much greater my shock when Loogie called me at home yesterday to tell me that she wasn't fired or reassigned, after all. She's going back to the PR office to oversee the firm that will be doing the web. She was given that news by the PR director one day after I had been separated from the company.

Respect? Dignity? Not having to do with individuals? Yeah, right. Tell me another one. I have some dry land out in the Everglades for sale, if you're interested.

In conclusion, let me say that I think it's really nice that those good old boys in management still have their jobs. My boss, I see, has been updating the web in my absence. I can tell, because it isn't done right.

But then, it didn't have to be, did it? It only has to be done.

Yours truly,

A bitter, bitter, bitter ex-employee