2003-11-09 - 9:23 p.m. - The highlight of 2 October weeks - John Cameron Mitchell!!!

Well, it’s been a while – so much to catch up on. The end of October was just a blur – very busy, but fun as well. The weekend of 10/18 was what I came to call my "friends weekend" – one of those enjoyable weekends where you get caught up with friends you haven’t visited with in a while. I had my former housemates over for a pizza lunch - the girls love to play with my kitten, Opal. She’s the star attraction now, but since she is the cutest cat in the universe, I’ll step aside. After lunch I met another friend and we watched her husband’s band play some great music outside of a health foods store. He is the former Mr. Married Right, but my feelings for him have subsided a bit. Now we have the statue Mr. Married Right I talked about a couple of entries ago. I still love the former one – in fact, I once asked a psychic about him, and it seems we were once brothers in arms back during the Crusades. Centuries later, we were happily married and lived in the court of the King. I’m not sure how much, if any, I believe in what the psychic said, but it could explain how I sometimes feel like he’s a brother and other times I feel this deep passionate love for him. I guess I’ll always love him, but given that he’s happily married with 3 daughters, and given that I’m good friends with his wife, there’s no crossing the line there! Perhaps in our next life….

In any case, it was a beautiful day – almost too nice to be going inside to catch a late matinee, but we already had it planned so we stuck to it. We saw "Winged Migration", and it was fabulous. It made me wish I were a bird. The scenery is breath taking and it gave me a real appreciation of what these birds do during the migrations each season.

I dropped my friend off at her house and visited a little longer before meeting up with three other friends to play cards and wish one of them a bon voyage as he was leaving for France the next day for 2 weeks. On that Sunday I walked with one of my best friends with whom I hadn’t spent time with recently and then we made dinner together and ate with yet another friend. All in all, the weekend felt so rich and wonderful with all of these amazing people. I got no work done at all, but boy did my heart feel refreshed!

On 10/22 I attended my monthly poetry workshop. Our homework assignment had been to write about the acquisition of language. I was a bit stuck on that one, but ultimately decided to stretch the concept of language to mean "music" (truly the universal language) and wrote about learning how to play the piano back when I was about 10 years old. I got a lot of good feedback on it and will share it at some point in this journal. That was also the night I heard about Elliot Smith committing suicide. One of the workshop attendees had heard it on the radio on the way over to the class. She was a bit upset as he was a favorite artist of hers and she knew of him in the circles she hung around in here in Portland. I saw him play in Heatmiser, but never saw him perform solo. I can’t say I know much of his music, but I know a lot of people thought very highly of him as an artist. Dumb-john wrote an amazing poem about him just the other day. Click %%diary-dumb-john%% to read it.

Then on Thursday, 10/23, after doing the stats for a water polo match after school, I headed to Jackpot Records on SW 9th Avenue – just down the street from Powells. There was a special release of a CD whose conception was brought forth by Chris Slusarenko – a local guy who thought it would be a great idea to have various artists cover songs from the Hedwig and the Angry Inch soundtrack. With John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s (both who wrote the play, songs and starred in the original play and movie) blessing, he went ahead with the project. The profits from it all benefit the Hetrick-Martin Institute which is home of the Harvey Milk School in NYC and serves lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth. Mitchell, Trask, and Sulsarenko are producers of the CD, and they were able to gather such a wide-range of artists to contribute to the project - from Frank Black to Cindy Lauper and The Minus 5 to Yoko Ono to Sleater-Kinney & Fred Schneider (of the B-52’s), to Rufus Wainwright to Jonathan Richman. The CD is AWESOME and the best part about the evening of 10/23 is that I got to meet and briefly speak with John Cameron Mitchell – the original Hedwig!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had to wait in line over a half-hour for this honor, but it was totally worth it. He was there signing CD’s and started at 5:30. I didn’t get there until 6:30 and even then I had to wait outside in a line which wound around the block!

John Cameron Mitchell was sitting at a table, and he seemed so much smaller in real life. He looks pretty much like he does at the end of the movie, Hedwig, when he takes off his wig and finally realizes he is whole. But then again, Hedwig is so much larger than life, I guess anyone would look small in comparison. When I finally got up to the table, I thanked him for staying around so long signing stuff. He said he had it easy given that he’s been sitting the whole time. I asked him if he had met Wade McCollum who played Hedwig in the local production here the last couple of summers. He said he had. I told him that Wade was amazing and that he (John) would have been proud of the performance Wade did. Afterwards, I was thinking I hadn’t used the best phrasing – "proud" should have been "impressed", but I was so excited to be talking with him that I wasn’t thinking all that clearly. I had him sign the CD for me, and a small Hedwig poster for my friend who is away in France. It was for his birthday that was coming up in a couple of weeks. I left the store extremely excited – it’s strange how much meeting someone whom you admire a lot for their talent can affect you. At least I was able to talk with him and say something somewhat coherent. I met John Cameron Mitchell – woooohoooo!!!!!!!!

"And you’re shining

like the brightest star

a transmission

on the midnight radio.

And you’re spinning

like a 45

ballerina

dancing to your rock ‘n roll."

I just have to end here…not much else topped that for the week.

30-something - 2005-03-01
the holding back the the flow of tears - 2005-02-20
song survey - 2005-02-15
song for the day...or perhaps the year... - 2005-01-25
something new - 2005-01-24
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