Not exactly conventional, but…
and…
Category Archives: My Journey
My Two Favorite Religious Songs
Not exactly conventional, but…
and…
Filed under Entertainment, My Journey, Social Commentary
Entertaining Mr Sloane
They say our pets reflect our personalities. And that over time, we and our pets become more and more alike in our personalities. I like to think we choose our pets and they choose us because of our personalities being both complementary and challenging. Our energy says we belong together.
We have three pets. Our dog is Buckley– as in Betty, not William F.– and our cats are Mr Sloane and Emily. You can see their pictures on my Facebook page. All of them are “rescued” and came to us in their maturity. I know one is not supposed to favor one child over another but, truth be told, Mr Sloane is my favorite. The minute I saw him, I knew he belonged with us.
While he loves our cats and I love our dog, my partner, Steve, is more of a “dog” person and I’m more of a “cat” person. This is probably what makes our relationship work. We are alike enough to get along beautifully, yet different enough to make it interesting. We complement and challenge each other.
Buckley is more like Steve. Wide open, excited about everything, loving and up front. You know where you stand with Buckley and Steve.
I’m more like Mr. Sloane. That is why I say he is my favorite.
I don’t mean to leave out Emily. We love her, but she is different from us both. She is willful, demanding and wide open. She is a slut. She’s anybody’s girl. As long as you scratch her ears, she’s yours. She has to be the center of attention at all times. She’s loving, exasperating and stubborn. She reminds me of some people I used to date. If you read my previous blog on Relationships, she is Category One. But she is a special cat and we love her. She balances the energy in our house.
Back to Mr Sloane.
He came to us as Sloan, the name of his recent foster family. He had to be fostered as he did not get along well in a cage or in a group environment. He was five years old. We had to adjust his name, a little, to reflect his personality. He is definitely a “Mister”. He demands his honorific. He has dignity. We chose his name, also, to make a literary allusion/tribute to the Joe Orton play.
I will readily admit I identify with Mr Sloane- the cat, not the Joe Orton character.
Mr Sloane keeps a certain distance. He is an observer. He choses what he wants to get involved in. You have to gain his trust over time and only then do you get to see his real personality. He is cautious and deliberate. He doesn’t forget or forgive being slighted.
He is a control freak…We once accidentally locked him out on the screened porch overnight. He did not have access to his litter box or his food. He did some things that cost him his dignity, but he got through the ordeal. He has never recovered from that–and I understand.
Mr Sloane dances when no one is looking.
When he becomes fascinated by something, he digs in and gives it his total focus. Nothing else matters. In his case, it’s usually his laser light. I like to think I’m a little more complex.
If you want to be his friend, you have to approach him on his terms. There is a complexity there that it took us over a year to understand. He gives hints, not confessions, as to what he thinks and wants. You have to interpret him.
It takes some effort to get to know him. But it is worth it.
Filed under Entertainment, My Journey, Social Commentary
The Long Goodbye
As many of you know, I have been a little preoccupied lately. We have finally reached the point where my sister and I are needing to transition my mother to Assisted Living due to Alzheimer’s Disease/Vascular Dementia. Being a lifelong Republican who worshipped Ronald Reagan, she’s probably almost satisfied that she has the same disease that ultimately did him in.
This is a very strange time for me. I won’t pretend or be dishonest. My mother is a difficult woman. We have had our issues, but she is my mother and we will do the right thing to be sure she is as safe and comfortable as possible during these final years.
What I find most disturbing about seeing someone at the end of their life is looking at what they missed. But I realize I can’t force my values or judgements on her or view her life too much through my own lenses. She is a product of a different era and had her own wishes and desires and probably was as happy as she could be given her expectations.
It’s the lowered expectations that disturb me.
When I watch “Mad Men” and see Don Draper and his family- at least in season one- I see our family, but in a much better neighborhood. I was always struck by how limited the options were for women in the 1960’s– and that is when she was in her prime.
I am grateful for one thing. I knew her four years longer than my sister. I knew her when she was still young and vivacious. Something happened in the late 1960’s and she became a different woman. I think it was the fact that she was not equipped to deal with change.
My mother was born in 1932 and lived in Danville, Virginia her entire life. She was raised to be get a “Mrs Degree” and she did. She had no education after high school and devoted her 20’s and 30’s to building my father’s career. When he died in the early 1980’s, she was lost. She tried religion, she tried following politics, but she never really found herself after she was no longer Mrs. H. B. Michaels. She had never really built her own identity or developed her own interests, so she had nothing to fall back on.
I also saw her and her friends from the 1960’s when I read “The Help.” I saw so many women, when I was little, who had no purpose and nothing to do, so they became obsessed with trivialities. I saw a little of Hilly and a lot of Elizabeth as representing my mother. If you looked in the medicine chest of every woman in Temple Terrace in the 1960’s you found two new wonder drugs: Birth Control pills and Valium. They were on the cusp of freedom and change, but didn’t know how to deal with it. Many of these women didn’t even get dressed until it was time for their husbands to come home for dinner. If the husbands didn’t spend too much time at Earl’s Bar and Grill and forget dinner…
My mother could be wonderful at times. She had my father build a stage in our backyard and organized plays with the neighborhood children. I think that’s where my love of theatre my have begun. She loved MGM Musicals and, as a child, I watched them with her. That was also probably the first thing that screwed up my early perception of life. It ain’t no MGM Musical, but I’m not sure she ever had that realization. She wanted things to be simple, clean and beautiful. She couldn’t deal when it wasn’t.
She did go back to work after my sister was born. Before I was born, she had been a receptionist at Dan River Mills. When she went back to work in her early 30’s, someone younger and prettier had that job. So she went to work at Hilton Hall with hundreds of other women who were smarter than their male bosses.
She was president of every Club she over joined. If she had had the education, direction and self confidence that would come with the Woman’s Movement, she would have had a different life. But she didn’t. She never could cook or run a house, but she knew she was supposed to do so. I don’t think she ever recovered from not being able to fill the role she thought she was supposed to fill and didn’t realize she should have tried something else. She went to college, briefly, in her ’50’s, but she didn’t have the self confidence to keep it up.
She became a master at denial. I don’t know exactly what went wrong around 1969, but I have my suspicions. The world was changing and she was frightened. She did not know what to do, so she ignored it and demonized any change. My father remodeled our house instead of buying her a new house. She never recovered from that. She started gaining weight. She and my father began to behave more like George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, than Ozzie and Harriett. Anyone within earshot knows this…
But she kept up appearances and dove deeper into denial. When my father became ill with cancer, I think it was almost a relief to her. She got to take care of him, deal with doctors and insurance companies and had a purpose for the first time in years. Like I said, when he died, she was lost. She didn’t have a self to fall back on. She was used to being someone’s wife or someone’s mother and had never found herself. She was not one for a Jill Clayburgh “Unmarried Woman” reinvention. She didn’t have the skill set.
I think I may, unknowingly, have been saying goodbye since 1969.
Frankly, she never dealt well with me once I told her I was gay. Her first reaction was that people would talk and what would her friends say. Then she worried it would ruin my career. Then she told me I was going to hell, so I did the same to her. I would not speak to her for more than 6 months. Then she tried to work it out. I give her credit for that. But we were never close again.
I had moved on, but she couldn’t. I loved the way the world had changed and embraced it. She was always stuck in Danville, Virginia as it had been in about 1960. I think that was the last time she was comfortable with the world.
So, it may be a blessing that she is moving to the place where she lives in the past. She was never comfortable in the present and she feared the future.
And we’ll try to continue to say goodbye with as much grace as we can muster.
Filed under My Journey, Social Commentary
My Advice On Relationships
I thought I might share some of my thoughts on relationships. I’m going to try to keep this at a PG-13 level and this advice is not intended for novices. I did not settle down until I was in my late 30’s and have been in a successful relationship for the last 13 years. Therefore, I think I can speak with some degree of authority. I thought it might help to share my “wisdom” with some of you who may still be playing in the minefields of dating.
If you are young and just starting out, this is not for you. My advice to you is to make your own mistakes and learn your own lessons. If you still think some enchanted evening, you may meet a stranger across a crowed room, etc. You are starting where I started. And that did kind of happened for me. It just took 30 some years for me to meet Steve at a Gallery fundraising event. And a couple of more years before we really connected for good. Good for you if it happens sooner. However, it is very rare for this to happen early in the game. Some of us have many and varied lessons to learn for ourselves on our journey before we are ready for Mr or Ms Right. These are merely the lessons I learned myself along the way to that “Some Enchanted Evening”.
First of all, some people will tell you every relationship is unique and/or there are many types of relationships. This is not true. I found you could– and should– determine pretty early on which of three primary categories into which a relationship might fall. These categories are:
- People you sleep with
- People you date
- People you marry
Correctly classifying new relationships is key to managing your relationships successfully and avoiding drama and unnecessary heartbreak ,on either side, as things progress.
The first category “People you sleep with” can be tricky. These are usually people you are wildly attracted to, but who are totally inappropriate for either long-term relationships or, perhaps, public knowledge or co-mingling with your friends. Face it, you really shouldn’t be messing with these people in the first place. These relationships can be lots of fun, for a while, but you have to keep your perspective. You know these people may be gorgeous, amusing and fun, but you know, deep down inside, you really have nothing in common with them. Deep down inside you also may know, or suspect, that you don’t share the same values, interests or intellect. Proceed with caution here and never let your heart, or lower regions, confuse your brain. These are the most limited types of relationships and must be recognized as such.
The second category is more problematic. “People you date” are people who you could possibly move to the later category of “People you marry”, but you have to observe them very closely. Sometimes these relationships are of a time and place– High School and College romances are frequent examples. This category also includes gay men dating straight women- or vice versa- while they work things out as to who they really are. This category usually also includes workaholics, who value career above all else, and are thus not marriage material. Sometimes this category includes people who see you as part of category 1, but whom you have incorrectly classified due to insufficient initial information. If this progression from Category 1 to Category 2 occurs for you both, good for you. That is also rare. Overall, Category 2 is a category for temporary relationships where one or both parties knows or suspects it will not be a “forever” thing. Relationships in this category may be very rewarding and may last a long time– years in some cases– but they ultimately cannot last and will not result in a committed relationship. While these relationships can be great fun socially, you must manage expectations so that it does not result in unfairness or hurt to either party. Be careful here…
The third category, “People you marry”, is the rarest and most hard to find acceptable people to populate. To be in this category, both parties must be able to envision spending the rest of their lives together and building a life and a home together. This takes a very different skill set from the previous categories. You normally progress to this category from category 2, but seldom directly from category 1. You need stringent qualifications that must be met to put someone in this category. You must never, ever compromise.
My partner, Steve, is fond of saying that, when we met, he had three minimum qualifications for this category:
- The person must have a real job– with benefits such as insurance and a retirement plan.
- The person must have their own, nice place to live-not with their parents, for example.
- The person must have a college degree, at a minimum.
These requirements are a very good place to start. Of course, I passed the test for him as he did for me. If you want to build a life with someone, you must be practical and think things through because in these relationships, the stakes are higher as you will ultimately share finances, property, pets and perhaps, children.
Most importantly, for this category, you must share common values and interests. You have to be able to talk to each other about anything. You must be able to be honest with each other and to trust each other completely. You can’t be walking on egg shells or in fear of discussing important topics. You must be sure they have a strength of character that will get you through both good and bad times together. They must understand the word “commitment” and be willing to work on your relationship every day by making your thoughts and feelings part of their every decision making process. You have to have mutual respect. With this foundation, you can move forward.
In any event, the most important thing is to follow your heart, but never ignore your head. Sex and infatuation are wonderful, but must be recognized as such. They don’t last forever in their original form. They mutate over time.
You also have to recognize that people don’t really change and you certainly can’t change them, so be sure you know what you are getting and categorize accordingly. Then determine how to proceed.
As the old saying goes, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince. But I think there really is a prince- or princess- out there for each of us. You just find them when the time is right– usually when you least expect it.
Take this advice for what it’s worth. This is how I saw the dating game and what I learned along the way. It worked for me and I hope it might help others still out there in the trenches.
It’s better advice than you’ll get watching “Sex in the City”….
Filed under My Journey, Social Commentary
Scenes from “The Temperamentals”
In my last blog post, I wrote about the off Broadway play “The Temperamentals.” I just found a few scenes from the production I saw on line on YouTube as well as some other video about the show.
Here are the links:
Filed under Entertainment, My Journey
“The Temperamentals”: My Personal Thoughts on the Play and the Gay Journey
I saw the play “The Temperamentals” off Broadway in New York last Thursday night. I’ve needed a little time to digest it before posting and commenting.
The title of the play is drawn from a time when one could not even say “gay” or “homosexual” in public. There had to be code words and phrases such as: “Is he temperamental?” ” Is she a friend of Dorothy?” or “Is he musical?” to ponder someone’s sexuality in public.
As a piece of theatre, it is a great play. It educates while entertaining. I don’t know what more you can ask. The entire cast is brilliant. It is the kind of theatre I most enjoy: It has a story, the characters develop and change, it has a heart and it has a message.
The show deals with the founding of the Mattachine Society in California in the early 1950’s. This was one of the first Gay Rights groups ever founded and the first Gay organization to stand up to the blatant persecution of Gays by the police and the Establishment.
For context, in my mind there are four key periods in Gay History:
- The Mattachine Society’s founding and open challenge to the establishment with the Jennings Trial in the early 1950’s. This was the first time Gay people publicly admitted they were gay and fought back in the Courts.
- The Stonewall Riots of 1969 when Gays- and Drag Queens- fought back against Police harassment at the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village.
- The AIDS epidemic and founding of ACT UP in the 1980’s. This tragically blew open the closet door, not by choice, but also forced us to fight to be treated, legally and medically, like everyone else. We would never be invisible again.
- The success of “Will and Grace” that mainstreamed Gay Men as the sexless pet’s of straight women, but made them socially visible for the first time to mass culture. Unfortunately, this also led to “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and the infliction of Carson Kressley on America.
“The Temperamentals”, as a play, is important on many levels. First of all, it delivers a history lesson with compelling characters. One of my chief concerns for both Gay people and African-Americans is that we/they are forgetting our history and how far we have had to climb. Fifty years ago, Black people in the South could be murdered for “sassing” a white person and Gay people could be arrested for just touching the shoulder of another person of the same gender. This is so foreign to the younger generations. They forget and can’t seem to comprehend this.
Secondly, “The Temperamentals” is just plain good theatre: A well written and performed play. Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly rare also.
People now forget how scary it once was to realize you were Gay and what that meant to your life. The choices the characters in “The Temperamentals” make vividly illustrate this challenge. People forget most Gay people once had to make the choice to either marry and “pass” for straight and/or live their lives in the shadows. They had to give up any chance at a career and financial success if they wanted to be true to themselves and, thus, didn’t fit the societal norms of the era. For some, this is still the case– look at Alabama, Mississippi and even in some small towns in North Carolina and Virginia.
This theme in the play resonated with me. I am old enough to remember when one had to make this choice. This is a choice I had to make. Thankfully, I live in an era and in a city and work for a Company that made the choice so easy. I live in a very accepting bubble. One of the main reasons I consider Danville, VA, my home town, a horrible little town is that it was made very clear to me that I could not be out and successful there. There was and is not a place for me there. And I’m very okay with that. But, people still have to make this choice and not everyone has the options I had. We forget this…and thank God I had the ability to choose to leave and build a life in a freer climate that my predecessors made possible.
I live the happy, fulfilling life I do because I stand on the shoulders of the brave Gay men and women who preceded me. Thanks to “The Temperamentals” and the Mattachine Society fighting back for the first time in the 1950’s and to the other milestones noted above, it is now relatively easy for me to be a happy, out Gay man in Greensboro, NC.
We, as Gay people, still don’t have an easy ride. Legally, we can still be fired just for being Gay. We can be denied housing just for being Gay. We can’t serve openly in the Military if we admit we are Gay. Our relationships are not legally recognized. We don’t have legal hospital visitation or inheritance rights–without lots of expensive legal documentation. We are demonized and used politically by the Religious Right just for asking for equal– not special– rights.
But we have come so far from the days of the “The Temperamentals.” We have to be thankful for this…
We just have to help our friends remember where we came from…And that we still have a long way yet to go…
Filed under My Journey, Social Commentary
The Unquiet Spirits of New York
I am blessed to be able to go to New York at least 3 or 4 times a year- for either business or pleasure. I can say, with no shame, guilt or qualification that I love New York. As I have said before, I’ve had my love affairs with London and Paris, but I always come home to New York as my favorite city. It is the most alive place I have ever been.
I know people go to New York to escape where they are from or who they may have been before. That’s part of the magic. Nothing is as it really seems. From Broadway to the Bronx, you create your own reality in New York. But it is always alive and you can’t hide from life in New York. At least not easily.
In other parts of the country, you can isolate yourself. You can’t do that in New York. You can only have so much delivered. You have to go out. And when you go out, life smacks you in the face.
See, one of the reasons New York is both so Democratic and democratic is that you can’t help but interact with people who are different from you. You are all in it–life in New York– together wether you like it or not. You run into a multitude of diversity on the subway. Walking down the block to the bodega on the corner. Sure, each neighborhood is a unique little space, but you still aren’t isolated from the bigger space. This makes you think and understand the people are both different, but the same, and that you need to work together to make life better for all of us.
One of the reasons the South other parts of the country can be so inbred and ignorant of diversity is that it’s so easy in those places to only socialize with “people like you”. That type of isolation can only happen in New York if you are very, very rich. And even then, with the influx of so much New Money, it’s still more diverse than it once was…
That’s why September 11th will always haunt that city. It was a flash point that is still real and raw. New York always goes on and goes forward. Nothing stops New York. But this last trip to New York, I was more aware of how September 11th still haunts the city than I had been in some time.
See, the last few years, when have been in New York on business, I usually stay at the Embassy Suites at the World Financial Center. It looks out over the river and is a rather peaceful hotel. This time, it was full, so I had to stay elsewhere.
This time, I was staying in a hotel that barely survived that horrible day 9 years ago. I was at the Millenium Hilton, which is right across the street from the World Trade Center site. It was heavily damaged that day and it was questionable if it would ever re-open. It did, about a year and a half later, after being stripped to the concrete and steel frame and being completely redone. I read almost 90% of the former Hotel employees returned to work there when it reopened. This week I was amazed to hear some of the less than sensitive guests-usually European tourists- trying to quiz them in the dining room. They all claimed to have been off that day….It’s scary to think people now just see this all as a tourist attraction.
My room, this week at the Millenium Hilton, looked directly down on the World Trade Center site. Looking down on the site brought a lot of new thoughts and perspective to me. I’ve been walking past the World Trade Center site for 9 years now and it just seemed a big construction site. A curiosity. It had been there so long it had become impersonal.
I’ve always been thrown, geographically speaking, since 9-11, when going back to the Financial District. I still can’t get my bearings without the Trade Centers. They were such a defining part of my journey when I first started going to New York.
When I first started going to New York on business, I always stayed at the Marriott World Trade Center. I would leave my room to walk through the lobby into the South Tower of the Trade Center and walk across the Sky Bridge over West End Avenue into the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center. From there, I could easily go to my company Headquarters.
It was kind of heady stuff for a little boy from Danville, VA and I never lost my sense of awe of the Trade Centers and being a little part of the Financial District and this amazing part of New York. I loved staying at the Marriott World Trade Center and going to the Mall under the Trade center to pick up things I might have forgotten, or to just waste time, or to catch the Subway there uptown to Broadway shows. It was all so self contained and safe. And in retrospect, very un-New York. It was safe, but sterile. We all know now, that was an illusion.
This week for the first time, I faced the ruins of all that. Literally. My room at the Hilton Millenium looked down on the World Trade Center site and the construction there. I was happy to see that, for the first time in years, progress was being made on rebuilding the site. But as I looked more closely and I became more disturbed.
When I checked in, the front desk said to try my room, but they would move me if it was disturbing. I quickly saw why they said that.
I went to my room and opened the drapes. Looking down from the 38th Floor of the Hilton, I could clearly see the footprints of the North and South Towers of the Trade Center. I could see where the Marriott had been. I had last stayed at the Marriott two months before it all came down. For the first time, I could see what had been. My geographic disorientation was gone and I was re-oriented to the way it had been. It all came back to me. And it all become more real than it had been for years…
I didn’t sleep well this trip. Looking down on that site, I could not help but feel the presence of unquiet spirits. I knew almost 3000 people, from waiters to stock brokers, from maids to Masters of the Universe, from Firemen to bellhops had died at the space I was looking down on from my, theoretically, safe luxury hotel. I felt their spirits and their energy still in the air. It has not settled yet. I wonder if it ever will.
But New York is not a settled town. It’s an old town built on top of layers of loss. It’s rare to see so much space exposed-especially in the old part of New York downtown. Maybe that is where the energy comes from. The wound that is still open and not yet glossed over. The evidence and the knowledge is still exposed that life is fast and fragile and we are all, no matter our social station, in it together. And we ultimately need each other to make it all work. I think that’s why I really love that town…
Filed under My Journey, Social Commentary
In Praise of Hot Dogs
I may not be a connoisseur of fine wines, but I am a connoisseur of fine Hot Dogs. Hot Dogs are the perfect food and I will freely admit,if I could, I would live on them. And I wonder why I haven’t lost more weight after two years at the gym.
One of the many reasons I choose to live in Greensboro, NC is that I have found the best Hot Dogs in the world, so far, at Yum Yum’s Ice Cream, less than 5 minutes from my house, across from UNC-G. They are perfection. Their chili is the best I have ever had and combined with onions, mustard and slaw, it is Hot Dog Heaven. I haven’t look much farther in Greensboro–like any good relationship, when you have found perfection, why keep looking? But I will say the ones at Stamey’s Barbeque with hot barbeque slaw, mustard, onions and chili are definitely acceptable.
Most of you know, I grew up in Danville, Virginia. Not a culinary hot spot. There is still Short Sugars Barbeque and the Danview Restaurant, but not much else remains of the memorable local restaurant scene. Today, the only culinary reason for that horrible little town to exist is for Mid-Town Market’s Chicken Salad. But Danville is where I developed my fondness for really good Hot Dogs. The Quickie Shop there had the best slaw I ever had. If they had not gone out of business, they would be in the running for best in the world. Mama Possum’s Drive In also had good Hot Dogs, but their cheeseburgers with mustard, chili, onions and slaw were really their specialty. Ben’s Place, also sadly gone now, was also very good in the Hot Dog department. Some people liked the Hot Dogs at Schoolfield Lunch, but I thought they were definitely second tier.
When I traveled Virginia working for political campaigns, I could tell you where to get the best Dogs anywhere in Southern Virginia. There was a little country store on Route 29 between Lynchburg and Charlottesville that I still recall fondly. There were also some great Hot Dogs at another little country store between Richmond and South Boston on Route 360.
Hot Dogs are also the perfect food in that they go with any occasion. Before Steve and I attended the Tony Awards in New York a few years ago, our pre-ceremony dinner was a couple of Hot Dogs from a street vendor. We were short on time, so stopped at a pushcart and we ate them using a covered trash can on Fifth Avenue as our table. We were dressed in Tuxedos eating them in front of Radio City Music Hall. I wish there were pictures. It was definitely a memorable moment. And those were damn good hot dogs! I love the ones from the pushcarts in New York, but they are very different from Southern cuisine, so not comparable in a competition.
I’ve also discovered Hot Dogs can be relatively healthy if done properly at home. I have done a lot of research on this subject. If you use 97% Fat Free Hebrew National All Beef Franks and Pepperidge Farms rolls– and are sparing on the condiments– you can have a two Hot Dog meal for less than 600 calories. I try to do them with my homemade pepper relish, mustard and ketchup to avoid the calories of slaw and chili. They are quite good.
So you see, Hot Dogs are really the perfect food. You can make them relatively healthy, eat them on the run and they fit any occasion. What more could you ask for?
Filed under Entertainment, My Journey, Social Commentary
How “Great Rooms” Have Undermined Western Civilization
Great Rooms have undermined the very fabric of civilization. When I made my list of people going to hell, I can’t believe I forgot to include the person who invented “Great Rooms”.
For generations, we understood that one behaves in certain ways in certain places and scenarios. In other words, there are walls that define social interaction. I believe that good walls, like good fences, make good neighbors. One behaves a certain way in a formal dining room or in a living/drawing room. Or in a restaurant or other communal public space. This behavior differs from how one may behave in a “den”. Most of my generation grew up with living rooms that were only used to receive guests. We learned our manners in the dining room. We understood place-specific behavior.
Great Rooms destroyed this differentiation. They have led to the collapse of manners, decorum, style and etiquette in American Society. Now people just wallow around in front of their televisions dressed in sweat pants in their Great Rooms all the time. As a result of this, they think one behaves this way all the time in every place. Since “Great Rooms” removed the walls, people now seem to think that how one behaves in one’s “den” is the default behavior. Today people think how one behaves in one’s “Great Room” is now how one behaves in public.
This should not be the case. Call me uptight or old-fashioned, I don’t care…
People used to understand that one behaves one way in private and another way in public. This created a much more pleasant and civilized social interaction. I’m sure this idea seems somewhat quaint to the younger generation, most of whom I frequently, affectionately call SJI’s (Slack Jawed Idiots) due to their lack of social skills. It’s not really their fault. The fault belongs to their parents who worshiped at the alter of informality so they could be their children’s “friend” instead of doing the hard work of preparing them for adulthood and public life.
See, people forget that how one dresses and behaves impacts the focus of their attention and how they relate to a situation– or do their job.
I’m sorry, but it’s understandable if people dressed in shorts, T-Shirts and flip-flops have difficulty behaving professionally or understanding the concept of “professionalism”. They think, “If I can talk, dress and act this way in the den, then what’s the big deal?” That’s become their only point of reference.
If people spent more time studying etiquette than watching “Jerry Springer” on their “Great Room” sofas, we would live in a better world.
The downsides of “Great Rooms” are vast. Now people think they can put their hooves on the back of chairs in movie theatres, by my head, instead of on the floor where they belong. People share the most personal secrets while speaking on their cell phones in public. People don’t dress differently for work, a night on the town, church or the theatre than they do for washing the car. This is all the result of “Great Rooms”. They have undermined society as I knew it and I firmly believe it should be.
People used to understand the importance of these “walls”, be they real or societal. Walls led to a sense of privacy and decorum. People understood that some things could be said in public and others only in private. This produced an understanding that one did not need to share the fact that they were trying to hire a Private Detective to watch their paramour while they were out of town with everyone in the break room. Or talk to their son’s bail bondsmen at full volume in the grocery store. Or reveal their sexual escapades of the previous evening to everyone in Target. The combination of cell phones and Great Room behavior has really been deadly.
My generation may have been the last one taught to always present our best selves to the public. Only our lovers, family and close friends got to know who we really were. This not only made for a more pleasant social interaction, but allowed us to purvey a sense of mystery in our public lives that was intriguing.
Without walls and a sense of public vs private, you can’t have secrets. Let’s face it, secrets can be fun. If you spill it all on your cell phone in the Great Room of life, you lose the magic.
And that may be the root of my concern. To paraphrase one of Tennessee William’s great characters, I never wanted to present realism or ask for realism in public. I wanted magic. Or intrigue. Or mystery. I wanted to pick who I took the journey of getting to really know and appreciate the fact that them sharing their secrets and revealing their true selves was a gift given to me by choice.
With “Great Room” behavior ,the magic disappears and you are left with realism. It isn’t always pretty. Or appropriate. And now, you don’t always recognize magic when you see it…
Filed under My Journey, Social Commentary
Lost in the 21st Century 
You Can’t Go Home Again
I’ve spent more time in my hometown of Danville, Virginia over the last few weeks than I have spent there in the last 20 years.
Normally, I would go up there for Christmas Eve and maybe once more during the year. I had a four hour limit on how much time I spent there. That was to preserve my mental health. After about three and a half hours, I had to head for the border to be sure I could get across to North Carolina before they closed it. I lived in fear of being trapped there. I always did…
But times have changed. We have been in the process of moving my Mother to an Assisted Living facility, so I have had to spend a fair amount of time up there and I’ve learned a few things:
This makes me know I made the right- the only- choice to leave. But it also makes me sad. I never planned to stay there, but I always thought there would be something I recognized there to go back to. There isn’t. I don’t recognize the town or it’s people anymore…
Thomas Wolfe was right…you can’t go home again.
But when you look back, you have to remember the good friends, good times and family you once had there. Some of us are lucky enough to have to have taken some of that with us-if only on FaceBook.
And we have to be very grateful for the good times we did have there and how they made us the people we are.
We can not allow those memories to be colored by how time has ravaged what was once a pretty nice little town. We can’t be petty and bitter. We have to fight those Danville genes.
We have to create our own homes and our own families We have to look forward while still trying to honor the past.
And we have to wish Danville the best for the future.
It’s going to be a long journey out of the darkness for that little town….
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Filed under Danville, My Journey, Social Commentary, Virginia
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