Handsome and Frolicking

For personal and professional reasons, most entries in this journal are friends-only. Not the way I'd prefer to do things, but that seems to be the way of things these days.

Well, tickle me leprechauns! If it ain't Seamus O'Kingfish, an' his dear pal Eddie "Shamrocks" McDane, bringin' ya the foinest Burlesque, Comedy, and Live Musical Entertainment this side o' the County Clare! 'Tis a sexy tribute to all things IRISH, and it's gonna be more Magically Delicious than Lucky Charms in the Costco-sized box! Celtic Comedy & Blarney Burlesque by:

Wiggy Darlington!
Vima Burlesque!
Tit4Tat!
Bunny Pistol!
sASSy Hotbuns!
Kiss Me McKate!
The Velvet Lilies!
Miss Balla Fire!
Sparkly Devil!
Miss Lida Fire!
Bootsy LaRue!
Alotta Boutte!
Pin Key Lee!
Honey Lawless!
Miss Mae Western!
Room for Cream!
Professor Shimmy!
Penny Lux!
...and The Hubba Hubba Go-Go Colleens!

LIVE! Whisky-Fueled Musical Shenanigans with KEHOE & THE DIRTY SHILELAGHS!

BOGTROTTER DISCOUNT! From 9PM to 9:30PM, only at the box office night-of-show, tickets are just $10!
$15, 21 & Up w/valid ID ($12 advance tickets at www.dnalounge.com )



Hubba Hubba Revue: EMERALD ISLE!
Friday, March 20th, 9PM
DNA Lounge, 375 Eleventh Street, SF
$15, 21 & Up w/valid ID
($12 advance tickets at www.dnalounge.com )


See more at:

www.myspace.com/hubbahubbarevue


HELP SPREAD THE WORD!


HUBBA HUBBA REVUE is brought to you by:


Costume Party, Dark Garden Corsetry and Big Top Magazine!

http://www.costumepartysf.com/
http://www.darkgarden.com/
http://bigtopmagazine.com/


HELP SAVE DNA LOUNGE: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53149172868

I first logged onto a computer bulletin board system (BBS) in 1993 or 94. "Alias?" it asked. Alias? I didn't have an alias. But we had just studied the Eleusinian Mysteries in my History of Theater class, and "elusive" was always a favorite word, so "Elusis" was born.

When someone began bringing Usenet newsgroups through a gateway into the WWIV BBS networks, I was "Elusis" there too. Some people on Usenet posted under their real names, but many used aliases, handles, usernames, pseudonyms, call them what you want. I had a clear policy: do not use my real name. First, last, either, EVER. I can't recall if it was even possible to delete a post that was sent to Usenet in those days, but the few times someone who knew me in real life slipped, I let them know about it. In at least one epic flame war, someone taking personal issue with me used my real name; what angered me was both the violation of my privacy, and the assumed familiarity. I didn't want my real name in their virtual "mouth." They had not earned the right to know me by my real name, as my friends had.

Back in the day on Usenet, if you tangled with trolls, you knew the importance of taking at least basic steps to protect your privacy. The alt.syntax.tactical crew and the Meow brigade treated trolling like an Olympic sport, and had no compunction about their tactics. I have used anonymous remailers, including anon.penet.fi, to protect myself, and been very relieved that they were available. At a minimum, using an alias always seemed wise, even before the advent of Google, when Yahoo's shitty index was competing with Dogpile and InfoSeek and Lycos and nobody really had a handle on Usenet.

And yet somehow, while using a pseudonym, I managed to build plenty of relationships with people online. To this day, people will run across my email address or LJ name and say "are you Elusis who used to run a WWIV BBS?" I have managed to build a small, stable online reputation that has endured for 14+ years while providing a tiny modicum of privacy for myself. I have used this name for Usenet, email, LiveJournal, every site where I have a login, DJing, and other arenas. When I took a different name in the Rogues, it felt positively bizarre.

In the early days of Live Journal, I had a "do not EVER refer to me by my real name" policy similar to the one I had on Usenet, which I've allowed to lapse somewhat over the years for reasons I can't even put my finger on. But on the one hand, I now friends-lock most of my posts, and on the other hand, I used to have my professional website in my LJ user info. So I'm not saying I have a super-consistent philosophy at this point anyway.

But I do know this: you don't out people's real names online. The sole exception I can think of is if someone is committing theft/fraud; for example if someone is selling used clothing on an LJ community but failing to deliver, and changing user names over and over, it might come to a point where it was necessary to say "look, this person goes by many aliases but if you get an invoice asking you to pay Wilhemina McDoucheyton, don't send them any money because look at all these people who have been ripped off." That kind of thing.

"Aliases" or "handles" or "usernames" do not equal "sockpuppets" or "trolls." The tradition of using an alias to which a reputation and relationships attach is, I would venture to suggest, far older than the World Wide Web and hardly solely limited to the Internet. I have been introduced to all kinds of people in real life who called themselves things other than what was on their driver's license. I had a boyfriend for a little while who, in my mind, had a silent "9" in the middle of his name because that's how he wrote it online, and another whom I thought of as "Panther" rather than "J____" because that's how I met him on the BBS's. I have known plenty of people whose DJ names I think of more easily than their real names even though we've spent hours together in the booth. There were people in the Rogues whose birth names I never did quite nail down, or who I never even realized *had* a different name than the one I was taught.

You know what characteristic a lot of the alias-ed people I know from Usenet and BBSs and goth clubbing and Renn Faire and other places have shared? Being fans of science fiction and/or fantasy. You know who should understand people who use funny names that are not their birth names and who are well-understood to be real, actual people and not some latent manifestation of a small group's delusion of persecution? SF/F people. (*koff*James Tiptree, Jr.*koff*)

So when discussion of racial issues in SF/F books turns into RaceFail '09*, which is still going on after six weeks which is like ten thousand years in Internet time, the argument that 1) aliases = sockpuppets and trolls, and therefore 2) it is OK to expose people's real names when you don't agree with them is not only laughable, self-serving, and mean, it is also coming from PEOPLE WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER. The day I go to a gathering of SF/F fans and don't have anyone introduced to me as "Lord Penumbra" is undoubtedly a day I long for with all my heart, but it is not going to happen any time soon.

Arguments about why online anonymity is important are legion. Some are chronicled here, in an analysis which includes not only coffeeandink's sensible list of the usual and reasonably well-understood justifications, but also an analysis of how for minorities, often their name and reputation doesn't just affect them, it affects their family, and it affects other members of their minority group. Stories of not just outing but of harassment, abuse, and death threats that escalated to the point of being taken seriously by law enforcement (which takes rather a lot).

It is no coincidence that many times, the worst abuse (defamation and professional assassination, harassment that interferes with one's job, being frightened so badly that the target goes underground) is saved for women. Men who get in arguments with other people online don't get threatened with rape on a regular basis. Unsurprisingly, trans people get abused in this way too. People of color get driven from online spaces** for daring to speak out, even in defense of their own intellectual property, never mind offering a critique of someone else's work, and I know there are examples out there of direct abuse similar to the links I've posted above, I just don't have them at my Google-tips.

Speaking openly is a privilege. If you claim it, fine. You don't have the right to demand that someone else claim it as well, because they may have plenty of excellent reasons for not doing so. I don't even read SF/F fan communities, and yet it has been crystal clear to me, just through my social contacts with people who do (and because my interest in social justice and anti-racism has prompted me to follow up on links) that trying to speak truth to power even in the world of SF/F fandom, backwater of mainstream society that it is, is inherently unsafe unless you are allied with some pretty powerful folks whom you have convinced to defend you at every turn, no matter how many idiotic and dominating things you do over and over.

Back in the day on rec.music.tori-amos, we had developed an idiosyncratic culture that involved far more off-topic discussion than on-topic. Most of the long-time posters were there more to facilitate friendships than to share Tori Amos info, except for the brief bits of time when she was touring or putting out an album. We knew this was disconcerting for newer people, so we developed a system of thread markers to help easily distinguish on-topic content. We published a Survival Guide that was automatically posted... weekly? to help people find their way.

But every so often, someone would wander in and start spewing a bunch of bellicose crap about how the newsgroup sucked, the newsgroup was off-topic, we should all take it elsewhere if we wanted to just socialize, blah blah blah blah. And the regulars would have Yet Another Laugh over the temerity of Some People's Children to come stomping into other people's sandboxes and start trying to tell the sandbox owners how one should play in a sandbox, because lord knows they were the Supreme Lord of All Sandboxes and we should be bowing down and worshipping their superior way of doing things. The laughter took on a certain strained quality after a few years, though.

When the Defenders of White People Elizabeth Bear And Friends started off on their "how DARE You People use fake names on your Live Journal accounts! I call TROLL!" tirades, I thought back to the days of the RMTA sandbox and thought "of course - what the world needs is people with no knowledge of a particular venue's culture and traditions to start announcing how Ur Doing It Rong and insisting that everyone play by their norms, because that ALWAYS helps." And you know, I could spend hours (have spent hours; some people have spent days and even weeks) deconstructing their dumbass arguments, especially when they change every couple of days, but in the end for me it kind of comes down to arguing on the Internet and I know where my loyalties lie and which people I will listen to if issues of race are raised, and I had more than enough information to help me start thinning out the "unread books" bookshelf a little several weeks ago, so really? I will be fighting some other fights most of the time while pumping my chubby fist in solidarity with people who are passionate about fandom as an arena for participation and change and who are doing a beautiful, if tiring, job of handing out pants to the pants-less. So if assholes are going to march around demanding that anyone they don't know personally needs to prove his or her existance, racial and gender identity, qualifications for critiquing SF/F, personal story of oppression and struggle which can't possibly be as bad as ____'s, fuck those jerks is my conclusion.

But when they started posting people's personal info in an attempt to go after specific people who defy them because "well we've never seen any of these people at Cons and so they must not be Real Fans (tm) they must be fake because how can people with fake names be real," I am going to call FUCKERY. Because Elusis has been a Real Person (tm) for 14 years now, and Elusis knows people called gUs and Dances With Cars and Sexbat and Gavin and DJ Tower and Captain Hawk, has spent fairly significant time with some of them even, and none of those names are on their birth certificates but that doesn't make them fake people and trolls, it makes them an old chum from back in the day, and my dead best friend, and one of my first goth heroes, and one of the stormiest friends I've ever stormed with, and someone who taught me how to DJ, and someone I love with all my heart.

And when a friend says to me "remember, I don't like my LJ name linked to real-life activities because I'd prefer not to let strangers know what city I live in," I go "shit, I forgot, let me fix that" and pull it down and replace it with an initial. I do not initiate freaking World War Four over it and declare that their way of handling their privacy makes them morally inferior to me and mock them for their culture of anonymity as if such a thing had just been invented recently to annoy me personally. And I definitely not go make a post stating "'harrypotterrulez' is actually Eugenia Terpsichore and she lives in Oakland California and works for the University of Colorado, I'M JUST SAYING."

Because you know what that would make me? A fucking douchebag.

*Link apparently doesn't include any of the insanity that took place in February '09 as of this writing.

** Yes bfp eventually resumed blogging but I think it's no coincidence that she ultimately began wholly new blogs and seems to have changed focus somewhat.

The cultural appropriation winds are blowing again. I started on this the last time that fatshionista went through convulsions over appropriation, but I was finally motivated to finish it today.

Please feel free to repost with attribution as desired.

simplykimberly is responsible for the furry companionship of a number of my Bay Area friends, and was the foster mama to my own Captain Koala and Princess Zorya Vechernyaya. She is pretty amazing in how much time, energy, money, and love she puts into rescuing tineh bebeh kittehs (and now some puppies too, apparently!)

But even more amazing is her kitten pusher, Amanda, a vet tech who funnels Kimberly a steady stream of helpless and hopeless, who herself not only sits up all night bottle feeding tiny chihuahua puppies smaller than a hamster, but who pays for everything from shots and spaying/neutering, on up to major, life-saving surgeries, out of her own pocket. On a vet tech's salary.

(The latest expense? Amputating the leg of a puppy whose foot had been cut off by whatever sick bastard dumped him and his litter mates.)

(She is responsible for placing Captain Pugwash, the broccoli fiend, with Kimberly. Viral kitteh!)

She refuses to accept much in the way of help, even when she is facing a blown head gasket on her car and holes in her shoes versus literally thousands of dollars in the bills on her tab at the clinic where she works (the original estimate was $800-1000 but it turns out the bill is likely more than twice that). But no one can turn down Christmas. So Kimberly is running a fundraiser via Paypal donations here, where you can read all about Amanda and the animals she helps. And you can read the followup here, where Amanda learns about the donation campaign.

Also? Each post includes pictures of ADORABLE TINY BABY ANIMALS.

Koala and Zorya just sent some help, and will be leaving Christmas wishes in the comments section.

(And: I just uploaded kitty pics from September, October, and November into this gallery.)

Dear Rhinovirus,

I did not ask to be subscribed to your mailing list. Your information about your nasal products and invitations to join your company as "a host for millions of industrious self-starting workers" are unwanted, and seem unlikely to result in any tangible benefits for me. Furthermore, your descriptions of your "recruit-a-friend" business model, in which you assure me I will benefit if I refer others into your program, sounds like a potential pyramid scheme and may be actionable by the FTC.

Also, I do not want these "free samples" you keep sending to me. The 10-day trial of nasal mucous and sore throat is already proving to be unsatisfactory. I have enclosed them with this letter and I trust you will pay any postage due upon receipt, since I did not request them.

I sincerely hope that your dishonest and illegal scam, combined with the poor quality of your product, will result in the rapid collapse of your fraudulent and reprehensible activities.

I know a young woman who died twice over the weekend, as in medically died, and who is still in a coma in the ICU.

She suffered a severe electrolyte imbalance because her lap band, which caused her to lose over 100 pounds, was restricting her nutrition so severely that she essentially experienced starvation. They say her prognosis is improving, but she's not out of the woods yet.

This is hardly uncommon. Surgically-induced malnutrition is the goal of bariatric surgery. The side effects are minimized and covered up with smiling testimonials that play on social prejudice against fatness and vastly exaggerated fears of obesity-related death, when in fact the death rate for those who have the surgery is far higher.

Prejudice against fat doesn't mean fat kills you. Weight-loss dieting doesn't work and is worse, generally, than remaining the same weight while focusing on activity and nutrition, aka Health at Every Size. No matter what, even with surgery, we don't know how to make fat people thin (or thin people fat, for that matter).

It's a far bigger problem that we culturally induce the habit of hating on our bodies and saying "I feel fat" when we're really having other feelings that we're not coping with or expressing well. It's a far bigger problem that we let medical care for actual health problems get ignored in favor of focusing on weight. It's a far bigger problem that we tolerate the medical and pharmaceutical worlds just making stuff up in order to justify trying to sell us remedies for our BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA FAT.

And it's far worse that we wind up with people hating themselves so badly because of their bodies that they are convinced they'll never be loved and spend their lives waiting to be thin.

Or, literally, dying for it.

If this woman was some kind of bizarre outlier in this situation, I'd feel terrible still but that would be the end of it. But she's not. This is an all-too-common effect of the extreme measures promoted by medicine to "cure" fat people. I talked to her dad on the phone today - he sounded so proud to tell me that she'd lost over 100 pounds thanks to her surgery. I may be a total asshole sometimes but even I know better than to say "yeah, well, if you'd just loved her when she was fat and taught her to love herself, she wouldn't be in the ICU right now." But why would he? He's taught all the same things the rest of us are taught: fat is bad, fat will kill you, fat means no one will love you and you'll die young and they'll take your body out through the living room window with a crane and laugh at you on TV. No parent wants that for their kid.

I just hope he doesn't have to wind up concluding that himself, over her casket. He's had enough heartbreak already.

In all this 700 billion dollar financial sector bailout mess, I'm seeing some snorting and hooting at "people who were too stupid to figure out whether they could pay their mortgage" and "people who were greedy and bought more house than they could afford." While I'm sure there is a helping of blame laid at the feet of some mortgage-holders, particularly the fix-and-flips and other speculators, I thought it might be worthwhile to tell my personal story of being a subprime mortgage-holder, because I really feel like I did as much as I could to do things right, and still got screwed.

So in 2005, I decided it was time to move out of Casa Chaos with the bears, who wanted some more privacy and space, and get my own place again. I knew we were in a housing bubble, and had said for a while that I couldn't imagine it would go on forever - in fact I'd been skeptical about people buying $700,000 mini-mansions on what seemed like fairly average salaries, and smelled smoke when I heard that in the UK, they were lifting a legally-imposed cap on how much mortgage lenders could offer to people (previously it had been capped at a certain multiple of your yearly income, I believe?) But I was advised from several directions that I could probably get a one-bedroom condo for very close to what I'd pay for a similar apartment, certainly for what I'd pay in rent for a two-bedroom, and I was raised with the belief that spending money on a house payment is always preferable to spending money on rent. And my credit was very nearly pristine.

So I got a real estate agent, who got me a mortgage broker, and we sat down one afternoon to do the numbers. I had a very small amount for a down-payment (not nearly 20%, not even 10%, but a few thou), but he urged me to hang onto it, because it was cash I could access without barriers whereas equity requires hurdles to tap in an emergency. He drew lots of diagrams on notepaper, showed me the movement of real estate markets and interest rates on various software programs, and talked about the types of mortgages available. I was extremely skeptical of the whole "interest-only" approach, as I knew that was a sure way to wind up upside down on a place after making payments for years, but he convinced me that with borrowing both 80% of the home cost and 20% for the non-existant down-payment, I'd be better off with the 80% loan as interest-only, so I could pay down the 20% loan (which would be at a higher rate) faster. That made sense in my book, so I agreed to it.

He also told me he'd be getting me fixed-rate mortgages for five years, with the possibility of increases after that time. "But don't stress out about it," he said. "By then you'll be able to re-finance, probably even tap into some equity if you want to make improvements or pay off other debts. The housing market has climbed for the past (blah blah) quarters, and there's no reason to believe that's going to change, so your home will have appreciated in all likelihood." "Isn't the market getting over-saturated with new development?" I asked. "There's always a market for starter homes and condos for new buyers like yourself!" he replied. "And besides, don't you think that in five years, you'll be making more money than you do today?" "Well I hope so!" I answered, buoyed by his enthusiasm.

Then the subject of proving my income came up. As a self-employed therapist who also had income from some contract work, I knew I'd be in for more hassle than your typical person with a paycheck sent out every month by an employer. I'd been through it before, when my father acted as co-signer on a mortgage for a two-family house we bought in Syracuse, so I could live there while going to grad school while renting the other unit out. My job for the previous two years in Boulder had been as an independent contractor, and I remembered trotting out a year's worth of bank statements, both year's tax forms, and lots of other documentation in addition to documentation of my Syracuse scholarship. So I was ready for it.

And then the mortgage broker said "I think you'd be better off with a no-document loan." I thought to myself at that moment "what the hell? I just tell them I make X amount of money and they believe me?" but he assured me this was a fairly standard practice for self-employed people. He never told me how it would affect my interest rate, or looked into what kind of information I *could* provide to try and qualify for a more conventional mortgage; he just steered me into a loan that required no proof of income, just a couple of months of statements to show what I had in the bank. And what did I know? I had my one experience of buying a house previously, but he was the expert, so I didn't push it.

He asked me what I could pay per month, which was between $800 and $1000 or so. He figured how much I could borrow given that needed to be my final payment with insurance and taxes rolled in. And so I qualified for around $110,000, and found a 700-square-foot place listed at $114,000, and made an offer and yadda yadda. My payments were going to come out to right around a grand, just at the top of what I could afford.

The real kicker came the day before closing. He emailed me documentation on both my loans, and when I read them over, they were BOTH listed as interest-only. I flipped. I called him and told him this wasn't what I agreed to - I'd understood that I would be getting one interest-only, and one regular loan. He kept insisting that I must have understood wrong, that in order to get the payments I could afford, both needed to be interest-only. I told him I knew better than to do that, and would never have agreed to it, but he said the only option was to scratch the deal (and with the movers lined up in just a couple of days, that was hardly an option from my perspective.) He said "well just pay more than the minimum on the smaller loan!" "If I could afford that, I would have told you I could afford more per month!"

Eventually I think he got my agent on the phone to talk me down, and she encouraged me to go ahead (remembering that I had already spent around $2000 in "earnest money" that I'd lose if I walked away from the deal), and so we did the closing. And I paid $100-200 extra per month to try to get some equity slowly built up rather than just paying on the interest. I put some tax refund money into the equity pool too. Meanwhile my payment on the 20% loan seemed to keep creeping up every single month instead of going down - turned out they were re-setting my interest rate every month. No one had ever mentioned that as a possibility - in fact, I thought I was getting two fixed-rate loans for the first tive years. In the first year, my payment went up by a total of somewhere around $100 a month.

So I was digging deep to keep my mortgage in the black, hewing to terms I wasn't really sure I'd agreed on. And then the news stories started coming out about sub-prime loans - 80/20s, interest-only, no-document. Sub-prime loans. MY loans. I was floored - here I had been with a modest but reasonable income, absolutely superb credit, and apparently I'd been steered into loans that could be considered sub-prime! No one had ever said to me "look, you simply don't qualify for a really top-notch loan; are you willing to take on this other type?" In fact I'd been steered away from putting my best foot forward by documenting my financials adequately.

The real kicker was when, two years after buying my place, I went to sell it because I'd gotten a job in California. I knew that type of scenario was possible, and had talked about it with my broker and agent. They didn't think it would be a problem. After all, there's always a market for condos, right? And I had kept mine very nice, painted it beautifully, made some improvements in the bathroom. I listed it at $120,000. It appraised at $100,000. An identical unit next door had been sold for the same price as mine a few months after I made my purchase, but had then fallen into default and was sold for only $98,000 at auction. A smaller unit down the hall from me, which had been trashed by the defaulters and needed massive repairs, had sold for only $78,000. Default on two units destroyed my "comparables."

In the end, I wrote a check for $8000 (drawn on a credit card account I opened for the purpose) in order to sell my house. Through my efforts, I had actually built up a little equity based on my original mortgage, but it was all washed away thanks to those two other defaults in my building. I moved out to California with an extra $8000 in debt to start off my new life here.

So to recap: I got steered into dodgy mortgages when it's possible I might have qualified for better ones (and if I didn't, I might have opted to rent rather than buy!). The terms my mortgages were written for don't square with my memory of what I agreed to, which I only discovered too late in the process to call things off. As a result my payments were always more than I had really comfortably planned for, and yet I managed to make my payments on time every month. In the end, other bad mortgages destroyed the appraisal value of my property, and forced me to pay money to hand over my place to a buyer (who, fortunately, was a friend and someone I could unequivocally say did absolutely nothing but try to make the deal work out in my favor; she even paid all the closing costs when we found out the devastating news about the appraisal.)

I suppose people might find much to criticize in this story. It's always easier to armchair quarterback. I'm not ultra-naive about finance but I'm not super-savvy either. I felt reasonably sure that I understood the terms of my loans and that what I eventually got was not what I agreed to, but would a court of law find that I was misled, or that I misunderstood? I could have been more forceful about wanting to try for a conventional mortgage rather than the no-document, but when you're looking at dozens of hours of work and phone call after phone call for more pieces of paper, with someone saying "it's fine to do it this way," what choice would you make? When you're sitting across from an expert who's done hundreds of loans, would you second-guess them?

I wasn't trying to over-reach; I knew I couldn't afford a stand-alone house or even a two-bedroom. I bought a well-kept but modest place - no jacuzzi or covered parking or fitness club or new appliances or bathtub with jets. I had been concerned about the market for some time, but the experts I was with told me I needn't worry. And when I found out what the real terms and costs were of the loans I signed, I made every effort to pay them, even over-pay them, to do the financially-responsible thing.

So where is my bailout? Where are the stories like mine in the media,? This crisis isn't all about wealthy investors who don't know where to park their four Escalades now that their 7000 square-foot home was repossessed, or people who somehow thought they could buy a five-bedroom house on a bank teller's salary. When the bank that held that $8000 in debt I had to take out to get rid of my home fails, will I get to stop paying that card off? Even if Congress eventually puts in aid to homeowners to help people stay in their homes, what good will that do me? My bad loans are long ago declared paid and quit. Maybe the guy who brokered the loans for me is feeling the breeze blow through his fancy suite of offices, but I don't see him getting fines, or jail time. I can't imagine he's going to be forced to pay reparations to people like me who got stuck in the sub-prime debacle before it became bad enough to warrant media attention.

I've been calling my Senators and Representatives all day to say "HELL NO" on this bill. Because they haven't "sweetened" it for anyone but Republican donors (banks, and people with more than $100,000 in the bank). Screw this shit. Give us a New Deal, give us regulation, give us public inquiries and jail time and fines that go all the way down to every single shady loan salesman who roped folks like me into this mess.

Gmail users:

Go change your account settings to secure ones now please.

Looks like it's about to get real easy to read your emails if you don't.

Stuff that's coming up!

This Thursday is MEAT, the third MEAT of this MEAT-tastic month!

I would like to go to the free Stern Grove show this Sunday, August 3. The performance lineup looks awesome - tango electronica! - and it makes for such a nice day.

A week from Friday is the Shoebox Studio student show. It's easy to remember: 8/8/08 at 8pm! For 8 performances! Two of which are professional companies: Damage Control Dance Theatre, and Unmata! Plus I am in two pieces, danger_mousekin is in two pieces and has a solo, and you can see choreography and dance by the ever-amazing cera. You can get details and tickets here.

I am performing at Hubba Hubba: Creepshow Peepshow on August 15th wiht the help of danger_mousekin and the Cutest Boy in the Universe! http://www.hubbahubbarevue.com

August 16th it looks like there may be a clothing swap at rivetpepsquad's place? Is that still on, RPS? We were talking about 5pm, because afterwards is the Drag King show at DNA.

September 6th the Yard Dogs Road Show is at the Fillmore. I wanna go!

I'm also going to be in Hubba Hubba: Old Tiime Revival on September 19th. Gimme that old time religion!

Good times, folks. Good times.