leftovers

It's just unfathomable that I haven't, until now, composed the Tiffany entry in my "How I Fell In Love With" series. So, after a remarkable performance from my favorite redheaded pop singer the other night, it is time to correct this travesty! Said performance took place on Tuesday, Oct. 27th at Upright LA Cabaret, in the bar of Vermont restaurant. I'm ashamed to say that I almost considered not going to this show, as I have been to so many Tiffany shows during my time in LA that I thought I'd sit this one out. I am so glad I didn't. The show was Tiffany's most intimate to date, just her and a piano player on a small stage in a cozy venue with just the right amount of tables set up for her friends and fans to witness her belting out a selection of her hits, songs that inspired her, and a few surprises. It was simply awesome to finally hear her sing "Here In My Heart" and "Landslide" but I was really happy to hear her sing ...

I remembered what I had set out to blog about earlier tonight. Recurring Dreams - always a fascinating and bewildering topic to me. What do dreams mean, and moreover, why does certain imagery or a storyline constantly weave itself into our nocturnal movie theatres? This one has been going on for awhile. I always have dreams where we either still live on the farm in Paradise, either as a whole family, just Dylan and I, or just myself. Sometimes we are just visiting, or squatting, or some weird situation has brought us back there. Whether or not any of this is explained within the confines of the dream, one thing is almost always bound to happen. At some point in the dream, at least one car will come down the driveway and we don't know who the person driving the car is. Then, they either turn around and speed back up the driveway, or they keep going deeper into the farm, heading east towards the creek and hills. There's always a slightly sinister feeling to these dreams, l...

so believe it or not, 2009 is pretty much over. Sure, we've still got half of October, then two whole more months, but for all intents and purposes, it's over. We're all going to be so busy from here on out that it's just going to fly by, and whatever is going to happen is gonna happen and we're just along for the ride. Tonight was supposed to be the 10th Annual Celebration of the Hollywood Media District, which has been my employer for the past 7 years. Here's the story of how this came to happen. Back in 2001, things were getting ugly at my first job in LA, and I'll be nice and not mention the name of the place I worked. But, things were getting bad between my employers and I, and I'll go ahead and admit that a lot of it was my fault. I maintain that gays, unlike straights, really don't start going through the regular process of adolescence until they "come out". I mean think about it, in junior high and high school, straights star...

I may be a gay male and sometimes boggled by the female mind (and perhaps occasionally insensitive to certain aspects of womanhood that I don't understand), but part of me also considers myself a feminist. I have been surrounded by strong, independent, intelligent women my entire life. My grandma, Eva Strecker, was a hearty, earthy woman who would wake up early, tend to a huge garden, do the washing, kill a chicken and fry it for dinner, all while smiling and telling stories. My mom followed in her mother in laws footsteps, teaching at a small school in Waldo, KS, taking over when Eva retired. When I was in junior high, my mom and dad both went back to college to get their masters degrees. My mom has always been an inspiration to me and continues to be to this day. My little sister, Adrienne, takes after her and has become the first person in our family to earn a degree in law, and is now a practicing attorney who just bought her own home, and she just turned 28. Hopefully th...

I have so much blogging to catch on that it's been intimidating me into procrastination. So, rather than never finish it, I'm just going to very quickly type out some random streams of consciousness. Music is of course such a big part of my life so I want to describe some of the amazing music I have witnessed in the past weeks. On Sep. 19th, I picked up Brandon and Angela and we drove all the way out to Pioneertown, CA, which is a bizarre little place about 2 1/2 hours east of LA. From Wikipedia: "The town started as a live-in Old West motion picture set, built in the 1940s. The movie set was designed to provide a place for the actors to live, and at the same time to have their homes used as part of the movie set. A number of Westerns and early television shows were filmed in Pioneertown, including The Cisco Kid and Edgar Buchanan 's Judge Roy Bean . Roy Rogers , Dick Curtis , and Russell Hayden were among the original developers and investors, and Gene Autry f...