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If you live in or near New York City, you should hasten to buy a ticket to next Tuesday evening’s WYSIWYG event:

I will be singing a song I’m writing (here, you should understand “writing” to mean “vaguely considering thinking about beginning to try to have an idea or two for”), and many other fine bloggers will be reading.

The name comes from the fact that this is the one-year anniversary of the WYSIWYG talent show. It’s been run thrillingly every month by the sexy triumvirate of Chris Hampton, Andy Horwitz, and Dan Rhatigan. The show has deservedly developed quite a following by presenting readings of consistently high quality.

And, hey, if I can figure out what the hell I’m going to write, it’s entirely possible I won’t ruin their track record.

The summer after my junior year of college, I spent a couple months in Berlin learning German at an intensive language-immersion program. When I arrived, I got myself into the intermediate class by faking my way through the placement test. Unfortunately, since I had done so by relying on the German I knew from Bach and Schumann songs, whenever I opened my mouth I sounded like a raving lunatic.

“Kind sir,” I’d ask the teacher, “hast thou a pencil? For, woe betide me, I have left mine own in the apartment of my landlord.”

“Faustus,” he would say, looking at me as if I might at any moment sprout a third arm, “it’s ‘in my landlord’s apartment,’ not ‘in the apartment of my landlord.'”

“But why should it not be as I spoke it?” I would insist. “One says rightfully ‘in the kingdom of my Father,’ does one not?”

The teacher would sigh. “Faustus, when are you going to start speaking normal German?”

“Nevermore.”

I honestly wasn’t trying to sound like I’d just stepped out of Werther; this was simply the only vocabulary I knew. In the end, my prediction turned out not to be completely accurate, as eventually I began to understand that patterns of twentieth century speech and of eighteenth century religious poetry were different. I also learned how to say things like like “cock” and “fuck,” and by the time I left my German actually wasn’t half bad.

Then I took a terrific German class fall semester of senior year, with a professor who gave us handouts like this.

Then I took another German class spring semester, with a professor who hated my guts. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this out until I got my first paper back with his scathing comments on it. That night I had dinner with my friend A.N., who told me that this man had been in the Hitler Youth as a child. She also told me that he had been on former President Bush’s committee to determine what to do when the flying saucers came.

Unfortunately, by this time it was too late to drop the class.

By the way, when I created a link in this post to what I called a “fabulous evite,” I wasn’t just linking to evite’s home page. I really was linking to an evite I’d spent hours crafting. Since no one commented on it, I’m going to assume no one followed the link because everybody thought I was posting to some lame evite page (because of course the other option is that no one commented on it because everybody followed the link and was so appalled that silence seemed like the best option, and that is a thought too horrible to contemplate).

In any case, please take a moment and look at the evite I created for the event that never happened.

Well, my birthday happened. Just not the party.

One of the many jobs with which I keep body and soul together (or at least within spitting distance of each other) is a gig for a company that helps students prepare for standardized tests. I work with the programs for elementary and middle school New York State math and English tests; this means I go into schools populated by poor kids of color and subvert the racist and classist educational system by teaching them test-taking tricks that rich white kids get for free with the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of education their parents buy them.

The main thing that worried me when I first started working for this company was that I would have to come into contact with actual children, a population I both fear and despise with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns. Luckily, however, I ended up in the “professional development” branch; this meant that I simply went around New York City training teachers in using the company’s materials. This has been a fairly satisfactory: though the commute is often unpleasant (once I had to go to Canarsie, for God’s sake), the money is good, and the sessions rarely last more than two hours, so if I get stuck with a particularly obnoxious teacher, I know that in less than 120 minutes I’ll never see him or her again.

Then, three weeks ago, I made the terrible mistake of accepting a different kind of assignment: I would go to one school for seven Wednesdays in a row and work with teachers in the classrooms, making sure they were using the program correctly and generally being a cheerleader (a function I can still perform even after being kicked off the gay cheerleading squad). I would also do some teaching myself.

I never used to have a strong opinion on corporal punishment in schools. Well, I thought, I don’t see the harm in smacking the hand of a kid who misbehaves. On the other hand, I also understand that that’s probably not the most effective way to win kids’ trust and respect. In other words, I really could have gone either way.

I have been to this school for two Wednesdays in a row, and now I think that children who misbehave should be put to death instantaneously, in as painful a way as the imagination can compass.

I can’t even begin to tell you how horrible it is. I’m dealing with four classes of sixth-graders. One of them is almost bearable; they sit quietly and listen to me as I talk to them about math, and they answer my questions. To be sure, there are occasional outbursts of youthful vigor, but my heart is not made of stone; I smile indulgently and continue with the lesson. Two of the classes are made up of heartless recidivists; half the time they listen, and the other half they shriek wildly amongst themselves, gibbering in their utterly incomprehensible adolescent language, impervious to any pleas on my part for silence and attention.

They pale, however, in comparison to the fourth class, which is populated solely by monsters in human form. They laugh and scream and run around no matter who is in the room. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them rise up as one and eat whoever they decide is the runt of the bunch. Or me, for that matter. Even their regular teacher, a lovely woman who clearly adores children and has the patience of a saint, can’t control them; how then can I possibly dream of doing so except by judicious application of a machete? I wake up in the morning thinking about them and fearing the day I next have to see them. I loathe them. I abhor them. I would give my immortal soul not to have to see them ever again.

On the other hand, the school principal is a totally hot latin daddy type, so maybe I can stand another Wednesday or two.

Oh, my.

Distasteful, my ass.

I sense a porn movie in the offing.

For those of you who haven’t seen Judy Bachrach’s delectable savaging of Brigitte Quinn on the subject of President Bush’s second inauguration, go here. I promise it’ll be worth it. It’s safe for work, unless of course you happen to work in, you know, America.

And regarding another matter: two more people have done this. I now have a wonderful DVD of The Royal Tenenbaums, which I have already watched, and a wonderful vegetable peeler, with which I have already peeled three cucumbers (for entirely innocuous purposes, I promise you). But, again, there were no names or return addresses. While I love receiving gifts, I love being able to thank people for them even more. So if you sent me a pie protector, a vegetable peeler, or a DVD, would you mind too terribly emailing me your name and address so I can write you a proper thank-you note?

Thank you.

At the beginning of the autumn right before his freshman year of college, my brother (who is four years younger than I) and a few of his friends decided they would play a prank on the high school we’d both gone to. They would buy an inflatable sex doll, inflate it, and attach it to a tree in the student parking lot so that kids would see it as they came to school. They planned to put the doll high up in the tree so that only attentive students would see it; this would also mean, more importantly, that school administrators wouldn’t find out about it right away and take it down.

The day appointed for their doings arrived. They went to the local dirty bookstore in the dark of night to make their purchase. (The local bookstore was called, if memory serves, C&C Video; one hesitates to ask what the two Cs stand for.) When they got there, they found a curious gap in the prices of inflatable sex dolls. The cheapest white inflatable sex doll was $100; prices went up from there. The cheapest black inflatable sex doll was $20. (This was South Carolina, after all.) They being unemployed kids about to leave for college, they naturally went for the cheaper option.

They drove over to school–it was about 2:00 a.m. by now–and got to work. Everything was fine until they’d finished inflating the inflatable sex doll and realized they didn’t have anything with which to attach it to the tree. (I believe they’d planned to use Crazy Glue, but whoever was assigned to bring it had failed to do so.) Unwilling to abandon their plan, however, they cast about for a substitute; somebody found a sufficient length of rope in his car trunk, and they were good to go. They finished the task they had set themselves and went to their respective homes, looking forward to the sleep granted those who have done their jobs well.

The observant among you will have noticed that what they did was tie a naked black woman up in a tree with a rope.

My brother realized this on his way home and started to freak out. He woke me and our father up–it was about 3:30 by this time–and asked us, with a tinge of panic in his voice, to tell him what to do about the fact that he’d just lynched a black woman in effigy. I am not at my sharpest at such an hour, and so I suggested, voice blurry with sleep, that it would be a shame to destroy such hard and ingenious work, but that he should go back and leave an anonymous note explaining that there was no racist intent behind the prank. Our father vetoed this plan, pointing out that South Carolinians sensitive to matters of race were few and far between and that anybody who read such a note would know instantly that it was from someone in our family. In the end, I think we all decided–I could be wrong about this–that most of the people who went to our school would be neither culturally aware enough nor bright enough to make the association, and that he should just leave well enough alone.

In any event, school administrators found out about it right away and took it down.

Remember what I said here?

It’s still true.

This is far too much fun to stop now.

Higgledy Piggledy
Wardell B. Pomeroy
Envied Al Kinsey like
Dirt envies air;
Though he could hold his own
Sexologistically,
He was no match for the
Doctor down there.

Ozzily Tozzily
Wicked Witch (West, not East)
Spies on Miss Gale, feeling
Down in the dumps;
“Hmph,” she remarks, somewhat
Unfetishistically.
“Long way to go for some
Lousy red pumps.”
 

It was about a year and a half ago that I first stumbled onto one of my favorite blogs during a fit of insomnolent meandering. I happened to arrive just after the flurry of activity in the comments for a post about double dactyls had died down. Despite my tardiness, I contributed a few examples in the comments for some subsequent posts, as the double dactyl is one of poesy’s most sublimely ridiculous forms. (I have yet to find a description of the form online that is both complete and correct, but this one comes close.)

Some of you may remember the blogathon I did two summers ago. During the blogathon, I posted, over a period of 24 hours, 49 haiku about gay dating, in return for readers’ pledges to support a theater company some friends and I were starting. Since the blogathon seems to be hibernating, at least for the moment, I decided to do it again on my own. But this time, instead of posting haiku, I would write and post 49 double dactyls about famous and/or influential gay people from the past and present.

This became a nightmare more quickly than you can imagine. First of all, finding 49 gay people with double-dactylic names (or names that could somehow be made into double dactyls) proved to be well nigh impossible, as there are only so many historically interesting Christophers. Second, and worse, where the haiku practically wrote themselves, a good double dactyl can take (for me at least) days of continual work. I got two done and was halfway through a third before I realized that if I ever wanted to accomplish anything else in my life I had to abandon this project.

And so, in lieu of 49 double dactyls, here’s one:

Hickory Dickory
David’s beau Jonathan
Told his dad Saul, “Dave’s got
Vigor and vim;
Further, in matters of
Priapicality,
Trust me–Goliath’s got
Nothing on him.”

If this inspires one of you to give a dollar to a gay person with an unfortunate haircut, then I’ll consider my time to have been well spent.