Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

Andrew and Tracie in the late 90s In the late 90s, Andrew claims someone stole his credit card. He called Citibank and strenuously denied making the following purchases:      --A hair weave      --Lunch at Popeyes      --One jug of kerosene      --Four tickets to a Luther Vandross concert      --One honey ham. Eventually, his creditors believed him, but the incident cast a lingering psychological shadow that stretched across the years like long sticky fingers. A snippit of the provided 400-point protocol to safely enter the Tracie/Andrew domicile which history would reveal to be somewhat flawed. So it is no wonder that Andrew froze, traumatized, when ADT called to say I was breaking into his house. He was at a big work conference, possibly swanning about the banquet hall enjoying a plate of vanilla macaroons when the dreaded security ale...

I found myself hauling ass down East 9th. My morning had begun with time to spare, but so quickly can a simple errand turn into an excursion whereby I whip out my credit card and the salesgirl advises me that the best way to officiate a wedding is to "go rogue."  My original itinerary was solid. Before meeting Tina at MoMA at noon, I would go to Meg and drop off Darcey's dress. The zipper needed fixed and everyone had agreed that I was to wear this dress, Darcey's dress, to officiate Karen and Anna's hitchin' next Saturday. Except I decided to just buy the exact same dress because it really is a fantastic dress and there was only one left and they will never make this dress again, ever.  The whole affair proved time-consuming. Add an extra five minutes for me to gleefully imagine the moment when I informed the wedding party that I would not wear the dress I was supposed to wear. I would wear another dress. That was exactly the same. In my mind, t...

©Full Bunny Contact My first choice for Friday night was  Full Bunny Contact , but Tom didn't want to go. He said my parents wouldn't enjoy Easter Egg cage fighting. I said we didn't have to actually get in the cage, we could just watch. I also said Dunk the Savior looked like fun. You get 2 balls for a buck and a chance to see if Jesus really can walk on water. No one agreed so I hatched Plan B: A short experimental theater piece entitled " Odor in the Court ." The one-act began with Judge Rita, a 6'2" Cissy Houston protegee, bellowing a few soulful songs concerning Hiney Hiccups, Butt Trumpets and crop dusting. Then, her skinny and pale bailiff hooked thumbs in gold glitter suspenders and broke out into a lilting ballad about the great boxer, Gaseous Clay. I glanced at my dad. He was hunched over in his seat taking notes.

James Bond LinkedIn Profile Photo Mitch: "You should not be wearing a tuxedo in your LinkedIn profile photo." Me: "Why not?" Mitch: "It looks like you're trying to be an international spy. It's a reach." Me: "What if you're James Bond? Would you criticize James Bond for posting a photo of himself in a tuxedo on LinkedIn?" Mitch: "James Bond is a highly competent international spy. He would not be dumb enough to put a photo of himself on LinkedIn."

For an entire week, I have been isolated within my own space-time continuum. I have been entombed in static electricity and paper-flavored apathy.  The flu struck me down. It attacked just like a short chick in a black & white striped shirt at a punk show:  Out of the corner of your eye, you see her jump off the side of the stage near where you are, way outside the moshpit.  You think she's skinny and harmless until she shoves like a bullet through the crowd and clips you at a weird angle. Suddenly you're wobbling off balance wondering how the fuck that just happened.  When you're sick, day and night coalesce. At some point, I dreamed I lost my coat somewhere and was walking around in short sleeves. I wasn't super upset because I didn't really like this coat anyway. But I had no idea where I'd left the coat, and that bothered me. I had things to do, but I kept considering retracing my steps to find the coat. It was somewhere in midtown near the park. A...

Last Thursday, we swanned about the Diamond Horseshoe, a grand ballroom beneath the Paramount Hotel. We wore our most courtly attire and took our repast with the Queen. The  Queen of the Night .  The whole affair was  hotly smarmy,  faintly slimy, yet oddly charming. Half the time I had no idea what was going on.  I could imagine the show designer standing back and with lavish windmilling arms describe his vision. He would say, "This black and white umbrella balanced on a sexy man's nose surrounded by writhing trapeze artists and mud-covered jugglers ... it represents lightness and darkness. It also represents the delicate balance of life and its evanescence. It also represents a penis." Bubby Recalls the Diamond Horseshoe My Bubby was also at the Diamond Horseshoe. Except she was there in 1944. "It is not the Diamond Horseshoe Club. It is just the Diamond Horseshoe. Your grandfathah was not with me when I went there. He ...

Usually, I don't pay much attention to chauvinists I encounter. Nothing I say or do will change their outlook, it won't be fun, and I'm nothing if not picky about how I choose to waste my time. The most annoying chauvinists are the ones who don't even know they're chauvinists. How occasionally rather smart men can be so fucking dimwitted is beyond me, but this phenomenon is not uncommon in the wild. Let's take my former tax accountant as a case study. He fancies himself an advocate of women. He has volunteered for organizations supporting women in business. You see, he can't think of a better way to spend the afternoon than with some sexy ladies. This is what he informed the female controller and bookkeeper who work for me. He smiled indulgently and brandished his belittlement like he was their king delivering a coveted grace. Had my controller mentioned this incident earlier, I would have fired that flabby ass accountant months ago. As it was, it...

"You threw your pick-ax off the side of the mountain and now you are trying to mine with a bed." - Jackson, 6, gives Uncle Tom some Minecraft insight

The first thing I noticed were Megan's special blue cocktails. The stemware twinkled blue. And everybody wore blue.  The evening was bona fide, especially after Shannon expertly stuck a blue dragon glitter tattoo on my forearm. Although I've never had a book signing thrown for me before, I can state with some confidence that it will probably be all downhill from here. Fyire Blue cocktail at Megan's Three days later, over by the bench presses at the gym, a big dude in a doo-rag asked if he could take a closer look at my dragon tattoo. He studied it carefully and asked a lot of "how to" questions. I felt like I was on some kind of sweaty arts-and-crafts show where the next segment would feature "quarterbacks who crochet" or how to t rompe-l'œil  a hunting blind. Looking all tough guy at the gym with my 3-day-old Dragon Glitter Tattoo I guess I shouldn't have been surprised after what happened Saturday night. We wedged ourselves ...

I will begin with a damning photograph. Here is the inside of my dishwasher when I opened it up expecting to see a sparkling load of clean dishware: Next, I will show you a photograph of the detergent employed in the achievement of the above fiasco. Please glance to the right.  Of course, I immediately snapped into action and wrote a scathing review on Drugstore.com. I accused Arm&Hammer of shilling a substandard chunk of a product that clots like an oxygen-starved deep vein embolism on the door of my dishwasher. I stated with lavish fervor that all my still-not-clean dishes were now coated with a thin film of calcified white foam, reminiscent of nuclear fallout. I wrote something about how the only thing accomplished was turning my dishwasher into a bacteria pleasure palace. Bam. I closed up my computer and threw out the rest of the Crystal Burst. Several weeks later, I received a spam-style email from drugstore.com notifying me that the Crystal Burst was ...

Was it simply the long hairy arm of coincidence? On the exact same day I learned I do not walk properly, I found out I can't brush my teeth right either. Last December, the 14th if you must know, I was sitting in an oversized comfortable chair reading the unabridged Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and underlining majestic clumps of words like " amiably drunk ," " vivid vermeil " and " coltish subteens ." I twisted upon a plush velvet cushion, reached for a glass of pomegranate juice and heard a terrible grinding noise in my hip that hurt like a white-hot bitch.  I hobbled around for months. Whenever anyone asked, I had to admit I had been incapacitated by an incident involving soft upholstery. Every day I would wake up in incredulous denial. Occasionally I tried to go running. That was a medically poor decision. In March, I finally doddered to a doctor and discovered my left hip joint is a pocked and battered warzone. The lounge chair had little to do...

On Friday, December 13 at 8pm, Tom and I saw Daniel Kitson's new one-man show Analog.ue at St Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn. On Jay Street. Analog.ue is rapid-fire monolog that glorifies moments in time. Kitson cherishes moments in time. He nabs them with tweezers and jams them in preservative jelly. Then he studies them, up close. You can see his breath condensing on the specimen jars and you know he's so into it he doesn't notice. He also doesn't see his fingerprints on the glass. Daniel Kitson.  Very interesting guy. Kitson ruminates fiercely over the idea that no one's life is remembered in a comprehensive YouTube video. You can't buy your own Truman Show. Like mine, all your moments in time are scattered across the memories of everyone you know.  On Saturday, December 14 at 3pm, Nina and I attended the Emoji Art & Design Show at Eyebeam Studios on West 21st Street. Before emoji, emails and texts and Facebook statuses were all rat-tat-...

Last weekend, right after Karen told a story about a lost fig, I told Anna that Stevie Wonder had been burning up my headphones for two entire weeks. Stevie has an extremely large catalog. I also mentioned that my friend Michael Goodson inspired this motown marathon. To which Anna replied, "Of course he did." Apparently Michael Goodson has been behind a lot of noteworthy pursuits. At grandma's house, I slouch over my computer at the dining room table getting bitch-slapped by the Google Play registration application. I turn on some music. My tinny little computer speakers kick out the middle of a Stevie song. Instantly, my pop, who perches on a chair in the livingroom, says, "Little Stevie Wonder, Fingertips Part 2, 1963, 3 minutes and 13 seconds in length." Pop's well known to rattle off long lists of random facts, but seriously what the fuck? This is the question I pose. Pop says that when he was in college, living in a house he called the Su...

At Swedish Club on Saturday, I mistakenly ordered a shot of whiskey in a pint of Guinness. Obviously, I don't speak Irish Pub. Nonetheless, I felt like Alexander Skarsgård's grandmother . Every day, that feisty bitch rolls her wheelchair to the farmers market and puts down a couple shots of Fernet-Branca with a beer chaser. Not mixed together though, so I'm clearly rougher. I got into a conversation about charts and graphs. No Saturday night is complete without a little chat chat about curves. I wanted to say something about outliers. I do not know how to say outliers in Swedish. I resorted to my old trick, make up a word and hope for the best. I went with "ute" (out) + "liggare" (someone lying). Unfortunately, uteliggare means "homeless person" in Swedish. Everyone became sensationally confused and that was the end of that. I went back to figuring out how to get whisky with nothing else in the glass. Little did I know at the time, but the ...

When I grow up, I would like to be a geriatric scarlet. Iris Apfel will act as my godhead in this pursuit. I waffled briefly— one time I drifted off for a second, dreamt I was Helen Mirren and felt incredibly calm and collected. But as Iris Apfel says, "More is more, calm and collected is a bore." Actually she doesn't say that. As a geriatric scarlet, I intend to pursue the following activities with great vigor: 1) When I arise in the morning, I will part heavy midnight blue velvet draperies. The tassels will be brocade. Obviously. 2) All meals will be eaten on china. I'd like to dine on a pattern featuring small fluffy foxes with keen eyes. Foxes are overlooked when it comes to decorative dishware. I saw a taxidermy raven encased in a thousand sparkling crystal marbles at the Met. There will be one of these about. 3) My friend Stuart told me the other day, "When you're retired, somehow you can spend the whole day going to the post office." Perh...

Imagine a few mildly porny terms. A word or two you'd find on packaging at the Ben-Wah Balls  Sex Emporium. Back in the spicy section. Now picture your grandma. Now picture looking over your grandma's shoulder and seeing these words printed on cards she is holding in her hand.  So that happened. It was all my fault but I'm going to blame it on Tom anyway. I had separated out all the more depraved squealing hog kinds of " Cards Against Humanity " playing cards. Except I didn't include Tom in my plan. He saw a bunch of loose cards lying on the table and put them back, all tidy in the front of the box. And then I dealt Grammy those first cards with no visual inspection.  She  laughed so hard she choked on a piece of potato knish. S tay street, Grammy. Meanwhile my mother, on the other side of game table, somehow managed to get dealt 20 cards and refused to give any of them up. She hoarded "Helplessly giggling at the mention of the Hutus a...

Let us begin with the review in question.  It is a one-star review of Sleep No More by Amaria M : "I'm hot, sticky sweet, from my head to my feet." - Def Leppard A few weeks ago, Tom and I slipped onto a 1 train uptown. Tom sat down next to a saucy minx with an enormous quilted tote bag nestled in her lap. She twisted like a corkscrew in her plastic orange subway seat, squeezed some savage duck lips, lined up her Android and snapped a selfie. With the flash. Her hair swished left, her ample flesh went right, a re-duckeling of the lips. Another selfie. With the flash. Sexy squirming. Repeat. 17 glamour selfies in the time it took to get to West 72nd. Most of the humans in the subway car who were not blinded by the strobing flash were extremely busy taking Vine videos of our MTA starlet. Mostly, I was just confused. Such activity simply could not be happening without " Pour a Little Sugar on Me " blaring like the voice of god. I think it...

Rumors persist that Cher has Indian heritage. Are they true? If you watch this video, the whole half breed thing strikes you as a little dubious: Cher rocks the outfit, but she's precariously perched on what appears to be a horse that is almost dead. It makes you wonder what kind of Indian would run down to a ponyride, toss aside some ten year old birthday girl and commandeer her mount. Cher's riding style is also suspicious. It is excessively upright. But let's look at the alleged facts: If you reference Wikipedia , you will find that "Cher's father, John Sarkisian, was an  Armenian  truck driver with drug and gambling problems, and her mother,  Jackie Jean Crouch  was an occasional model and bit-part actress with Irish, English, German, and   Cherokee  ancestry." Yahoo Answers reports: " Her mother is of French and Cherokee descent. Her father is of Armenian descent. Cher was born in California and her father left her and her mothe...

Pre-Foosball. Mark on Pier 57 We were on our way back from Pier 57, a pock-marked slab of ancient asphalt and the perfect place for Mark to learn how to ride his spiderman bike. There had been a lot of motivational shrieking. The kid almost pulled off a Triple Donut Dare, but then his chain snapped and that was the end of that. Wheeling Mark's freshly dead bicycle across a park by the west side highway, we spied a lopsided foosball table tucked amidst the shrubs. Of course we stopped for a game. It was me vs. Tom and Mark. I won, final score 5-3. I scored 7 of the goals. I'm a wild kicker and Tom and Mark were missing half their little guys.

Dear Apple, Maybe you think you are making my life easier with these automatic backups and lack of a "Save As" option, but in actuality, you are causing me to go insane. Every presentation I give is a variation of an earlier one. So my workflow is this: open up the deck I presented last week to a prospect with the filename "Deck for Mary Smith," begin to edit it for Sam Jones, save-as the new deck "Deck for Sam Jones." Except with the new Keynote, this workflow is impossible. As the lesser of evils, I selected the workflow option to make an automatic backup of the deck I open up. So as a first step in the new workflow you've forced on me, I have two files: one named "Deck for Mary Smith"  and the other named "Deck for Mary Smith-backup." Except the "Deck for Mary Smith-backup" is actually the deck I presented to Mary Smith, and the "Deck for Mary Smith" is actually the deck I want to present to Sam Jones....