And another thing

Oh, and also, I keep forgetting to write about this, but the Today Show has begun their search for the next Today Show Wedding. This time it's a "hometown wedding" theme. Here are the eligibility rules - - other than the parts about "good moral character" and "nothing in [your] background that would be an embarrassment to NBC News or TODAY," I don't see any potentially homo-exclusionary criteria. There's also something about "full makeup and hairstyling for the bride," but I'm willing to play that role.

If only

a) Wellfleet were our hometown,
b) I owned a video camera,
c) the Today show didn't completely usurp all decision-making capabilities, and
d) M. wouldn't sooner drop dead than have our wedding televised,

I'd say we had as good a chance as any of entering and winning.

O Canada

In the course of my daily Metro free newspaper news briefing from 49th St. to 59th and Lexington this morning, I learned that Canada has officially legalized gay marriage, making it one of only three countries worldwide to offer equal marriage rights to The Gays.

And sometime last week, I learned that actually, no, M. and I cannot legally get married in Massachusetts, as Governor Mitt Romney - - whom I would add to my Official List of Mean People I Hate if I knew how to create that on here - - has unearthed some old law that says that any marriage that wouldn't be recognized in one's home state will not be recognized in Massachusetts. The legality isn't what made us decide on Massachusetts, but a little officiality sounded kind of nice.

The good news is that we are now free to get married on a spaceship in our underwear by the innkeepers' dog, or by this enormous baby, or whatever we want.

Because Being Gay is, if nothing else, about freedom.

Good News Bad News

The good news is, we're officially getting married on Saturday, June 24th, 2006 at the place we wanted.

The bad news is, I've spent the past two days sitting with a patient on "contact isolation," which I've since come to understand means "don't come in here without a mask" because she might have TB, and I have tested positive for TB exposure since high school, but I was "too cool" getting a late start on my adolescent alcohol experimentation to "finish" my six month anti-tuberculosis regimen - which, in a nutshell, means I will be "getting married" in an "iron lung."

The other good news is that the new season of Average Joe started tonight, but the bad news is that it stinks.

A Successful Weekend

(exhale).

Well, that's over with.

M. and I are back from our big Introduce-Our-Mothers-and-Find-a-Place-for-the-Reception weekend, with nary a scratch or bruise to show for our troubles. All in all, a swimming success.

We drove up to Massachusetts on Friday night and, somewhere between the Henry Hudson and the Merritt, managed to get into a somewhat major argument centering mainly around Who Takes On Which Role in the Wedding Planning Process (consistent readers and/or friends can, I am sure, take a wild stab at the particulars) - - which, because M. and I have become para-professionals at this pasttime, resolved nicely into a mutually satisfying agreement centering around Increased Visible Excitement about Wedding Planning and Decreased Audible Anxiety about Wedding Planning (again, take a wild stab).

Saturday morning, M. got up at 5:30AM to meet his mother in Boston, where they grabbed the ferry to Provincetown. After a leisurely breakfast of coffee and fruit salad, my mother and I drove out to meet them. I was anxious that my mother would forget M.'s mother's name, or that they would hate each other, or have nothing to say to each other, or that I would throw up on my new shirt. My anxiety only increased when, at the pivotal moment of impact in the parking lot, my mother had to run to the ladies' room, thus throwing a temporary cog in the proverbial wheel, as we were all in Meet the Other Mother mode and therefore had to stand around somewhat aimlessly until she came back (a wait compounded by the bathroom-less ferry load of women who had arrived shortly before us).

In the end, of course, it went off without a hitch. Some slightly awkward silences as we wended our way through the (disappointingly crowded and compact) streets of Provincetown, but as we sat down for panini's at The Patio our mothers were already well into discussing their mutual distaste for needlepoint and humidity, and by the time we were in the car en route to Wellfleet (mothers in front, kids in back) M. and I couldn't get a word in edgewise.


"Hi, Cathy." "Hi, Judy."

The first place we saw was a funky Colonial-type inn -- emphasis on the funky, by which I mean un peu musty -- which we kinda sorta liked, and which had a tavern next door that we loved and would be perfect for our pre-wedding talent show, and which will, regardless, host half of our wedding guests anyways, as it is one of the two large inns in town.



Pretty on the outside,


Less pretty on the inside,


But a bitchin' bar.

The second place was the one we already loved from seeing it on the website and which turned out to be every bit as miraculously delightful as we had hoped - other than their blind, deaf and malodorous golden retriever which the owners' son almost ran over and which didn't seem to stand much of a chance of making it to witness our impending nuptials - and that is where we have decided to hold our wedding, which will be on June 24th, 2006 at 5pm, as long as they write us back to confirm.



The front.


The back (part of it).


The part where you get married (*lawn nymph not included).



The rest of my Saturday night was spent not discussing the wedding with my dad when he and my mother and I went to dinner (M. stayed in P'town eating clams and drinking chardonnay with his mother while they waited for their 7pm ferry, which we would have stayed for had it not been for the Portugese parade, but that's another story for another time), trying not to take offense at his careless ease in discussing Mr. Zine's son's wedding and my brother's second wife's daughter from her first marriage's wedding, and mainly glaring meaningfully at my mother while I stuffed a loaf of bread and a horrific seafood fra diavolo into my mouth.

Speaking of fathers the audience doesn't like, I also watched Swimming Upstream with my mother, an Australian film about two famous and cute Australian swimmers, their clinically depressed mother and their alcoholic, wife-beating, son-controlling father, which had an inspirational message buried somewhere deep below the constant sea of shiny, lithe, young male torsos in Speedos. I would try to be thankful for having a father who will probably end up "coming around" (and ponying up the cash for my Big Day) as everyone seems to be saying, instead of an abusive Geoffrey Rush type father, but any and all gratitude is cancelled out by my deep resentment for not looking like the cute Australian swimmer boys when I wear my Speedo.




That's my mom on the end.

Sad songs say so much

So I've found two really good potential First Dance songs.

One of them is about a guy (we'll call him "Sting") who loses someone to another guy and then spends the whole song trying to convince that someone to come back to him. As I sat on the subway yesterday, listening to it for the fiftieth time and trying to figure out how awkward it might look if I put my (6'3") head on M.'s (5'7") shoulder, I decided that despite the fact that it's not so much about two people in love as it is about one person in love, at least it's a pretty song and people probably wouldn't listen to the lyrics anyway. Then I started listening to the lyrics and heard Sting ask his here-to-for-gender-neutral someone to come and be his wife, and then I pictured everyone as they stopped laughing at me hunched over M.'s shoulder to wonder which one of us was the wife.

The other one is about a girl (let's use "Des'ree") who just keeps singing over and over and over about kissing her Significant Friend, but in a really beautiful and haunting and romantic way. The problem with this one is that it's from Romeo + Juliet, and I can't get it out of my head that maybe she's singing to her dead lover or someone. Especially when she stops repeating Kissing you kissing you kissing you and switches to Where are you where are you where are you. Also, I can't stop clenching my jaw in dreadful anticipation of her forgetting which song she's singing and instead telling her dead lover that he's gotta be bad, he's gotta be bold, he's gotta be wiser, he's gotta be cool, he's gotta be calm, he's gotta stay together.

So basically, the only First Dance love songs I seem to like are the sad ones whose lyrics I would have to try and get everyone to not listen to, or the ones about wives or dead people. This may be explained by the fact that people tend to write love songs - the good ones, anyway - more when they're yearning for love, as opposed to when they've found the love.

There's also the acoustic version of Keep on Lovin' You that I still have yet to find.

All of this is, of course, predicated on the off-chance that M. will even want to have a First Dance, the chances of which may be slightly on par with my head reaching M.'s shoulder.

Barbra, Bryant Park and a Very Important Lesson

Last night M. and I went to Bryant Park to watch The Way We Were - which I'd bever seen, and which I liked quite a bit, but which was also about half an hour too long for an outdoor viewing on wine-soaked grass in cramped quarters.

A friend of a friend of a friend was there, an overbearing type we'd previously met at a party along with his new husband, the two of whom spent at least an hour sharing aaaaaaaaaaaaall the details of their whirlwind ceremony in Montreal (as well as their mutual predilection for waxing off 100% of their pubic hair). It was a little much to take in all at once, but one could not deny how overwhelmingly blissed-out they were about the whole thing, and their excitement was contagious.

That was about two months ago.

And now, according to the foafoaf, it's all over. Done. Divorced. As in, he'd literally just come back from signing the divorce papers in Canada.

My first thought was one of sadness and sympathy. They'd seemed like such a good match, not only able to put up with one another, but able to share mutual niche interests such as the Full Brazilian.

My second thought was, Maybe if his husband were here tonight, he wouldn't have his hand halfway up the leg of my shorts.

In the end, though, it just felt validating and liberating and normalizing. I mean, if us gays want equal treatment and marriage rights, then By Golly, why shouldn't we take the whole cart and horse like everyone else? Why shouldn't we be able to make mistakes like everyone else, eloping to Canada and then ripping up the papers three weeks later? Part of getting married is taking a risk, and sometimes that risk proves to be misguided, and before we know it we're back to being alone and we've downed two bottles of champagne and we've misplaced our left hand up an innocent, relative stranger's Old Navy undershorts.

I feel badly for this guy, despite his very glib Devil-may-care attitude about the whole thing, but in the end, he's proving an important point: The gays, like the straights, are only human.

Laura Clark is Mean

I have a new lifelong mortal enemy, and her name is Laura Clark, and she is the Devil.



Which is ironic, because she thinks that I am the Devil, too!

Some of her more choice words: ''The purpose of the hate-crime legislation seems to be just to silence those of us who oppose homosexuality,'' she said. As to the medical-decision-making bill, she added, ''We know it's a back-door way for the homosexual activists to get gay marriage.'' She said that she was taking part in petition drives that would force referendums on both issues. ''I'm collecting signatures from everyone I know,'' she said.

First of all, kudos to Laura for slipping some subversive gay humor into an otherwise tedious conversation with her "back-door" analogy.

And kudos upon more kudos for beating us homosexuals at our own game and figuring out that when we say, "Please, if nothing else, let us have some small say about what happens to our partners if and when they are run over by a truck or mauled by a bear or develop gangrene", what we are really saying is, "Pleeeeeease let us sit at your popular girl marriage table, Laura."

Finally, I'm thinking of collecting signatures from everyone I know to collect enough cash to deliver a fresh, flaming bag of dog shit to Laura Clark's front door in Catonsville, Maryland every morning for the rest of her life.

Until those signatures are collected, please add her to your prayer chart.

Listen to the Olsens

When did I forget how to entertain myself?

M. went home for the weekend yesterday, and since then I have been wandering around like a lobotomy patient. When I got home from work last night, I was at a loss. I'd left my friend MB a message suggesting we have a widow's night out, as his bf is also away, but he's a lawyer and works late, so it was all I could do to sit here and stare at the walls. Or, rather, spend the next two hours of my life in inappropriate and wasteful ways that provided only the most fleeting glimpses of comfort or satisfaction.

Sure, I could have called another friend - although it seems that most of my friends have either moved away or are moving away or are just away - or engaged in any number of other meaningful activities. I've got bills to pay. The house needs cleaning. I have books that need finishing, a wedding that needs planning. There's the vacuum cleaner we still haven't bought. It was a nice night for a peaceful and solitary walk. I need new work pants.

Yes, at least twenty potential activities, but I was helpless to do any of them. To be fair, it was a Friday night. Today was better - I managed to get up early, go to yoga, eat a pear, do the laundry, drink a smoothie, drop off some drycleaning, buy some toothpaste and sunscreen, all before 1:30pm. But once those things were all done, I was back to Just Me again.

What did I used to do before I met M.? Did I simply alternate between laundry, errands and porn, filling in the gaps as needed with sleeping and eating and going to work? Did I feel fulfilled by that? When M. and I broke up for a summer, I poured all my energy every night into building a mosaic tile-top dining room table. Before we met, I used to go out six nights a week to gay bars and gay clubs and gay parties.

I suppose, then, that are two issues at hand. One is the fact that I find meaning through activity; if I am not busy, I am not living. If I am not busy, I also start to feel isolated and scared and depressed, but this is something we're discussing In Therapy, so perhaps it's best not to enter that snake pit right now.

The second issue is equally perplexing, if not quite so psychologically convoluted. Allow me to don my Carrie Bradshaw hand puppet for a moment:

[close up on letters being typed on screen]

How do we keep the "I" in marriage?

[cut away to Groomzilla lying on bed with laptop propped against gut]

That is, how do I maintain my integrity as an individual, my ability to negotiate this world on my own, while at the same time existing as part of a two-man team? How do I make sure that I'm still me, that I still do the things that bring me happiness and meaning, still see the people I want to see, while at the same time bask in the glory of being part of a we?

Point-counterpoint, isn't this the whole reason we're driven to find love? So that we'll be less alone? So that we'll have a constant traveling companion, someone to hold the map while we try to make our way down the ill-paved streets of existence? Someone to appreciate and foster our uncanny penchant for metaphor?

Does it really take times like this, when we're separated from our significant other, to realize that, Holy Shit, I forgot how to do this?

Speaking of therapy and traveling companions, I finally sat down to watch New York Minute this afternoon, after weeks and months of searching for it on our HBO On Demand and Cinemax On Demand and Showtime On Demand (it was on Cinemax). I must say that, while I was hoping to be able to come up with something biting and clever to say about it, I actually found myself at several points laughing out loud with actual, genuine laughs. Of course, this is coming from someone who spent his day all alone and has lost his right-brain functioning. I don't know that I've actually heard Mary Kate or Ashley speak since they were seven, and hearing grown-up voices coming out of their their Muppet face mouths is disconcerting at best, but it was not the worst acting I have ever seen (exception: Jack Osbourne, with an ill-advised cameo as a teen record producer/enfant terrible, and Dr. Drew, who plays the twins' father much like a robot or vacuum cleaner might). MK is by far the more attractive of the two, except when she turns her head and her profile disappears. And I was excited to see that one of their biggest scenes, in which Mary Kate slaps Ashley across the face to get her to face the very real and dire predicament in which they have found themselves, took place right across the street from my therapist's office!

In the end - spoiler alert! - the two sisters realize that they can, indeed must, maintain their unique personalities while at the same time treasuring their synergistic force, and therein lies the crux of yet another very effective segue about love and marriage.

An unfortunate obsession

I've become a little obsessed with death lately.

More than usual, I mean. Because of course, right, how could someone who works with dying people and reads books about dead people not have some level of deep-seeded predilection towards the topic?

Lately, though, I've been getting these sudden, brief bursts of anxiety about it. Worrying about M. dying, worrying about my mother dying, worrying about me dying. My grandmother's unexpected (aside from the fact that she was 88) death when I was in the sixth grade led to my first foray into therapy to help combat the panic attacks and morbid obsessions that developed soon thereafter, but since then I've been largely cured of my afflictions. Feel free to relate this to Paragraph B and discuss.

So why the recent relapse? Part of it is probably my work catching up with me, or maybe even my grandmother catching up with me. Part of it is probably growing older and having valve replacements and multiple PVCs become part of my everyday family lexicon. But I've given it a lot of thought, and what strikes me as the most likely culprit is Good Old Love.

I'm scared of death because I'm in love. (I'm also scared to death because I'm in love, but that is for another entry). Now that I have found M., found the person I want to spend my life with, have kids with, grow old with, I'm scared of losing him. I think I read somewhere that this an unfortunate but well-known fact about falling in love - - allowing yourself to love someone means, ultimately, allowing yourself to lose someone.

Last night I invited M. downstairs for a couple of post-work beers, and ended up launching into an urgent and angst-filled diatribe about how he needs to stop smoking so that he won't get cancer or heart disease or lung disease and die on me. Needless to say, it was a buzz-kill, and what started out as a relaxing opportunity for post-work Family Time imbibement turned into an intense and awkwardly silent ten minutes as we slowly finished the dregs of our lukewarm Bud Lites. An hour of Dancing with the Stars helped to restore the good humor in our household - Rachel Hunter, hollah - but the dark cloud lingered, sprinkling us both with quiet reminders of pushy smoking-cessation boyfriends and stubborn pro-tobacco boyfriends and the certain knowledge that death is just around the corner for each and every one of us.

So what's the answer? Will I spend the rest of my life worrying about M. dying? Is it just an unfortunate, unavoidable side effect of monogamy? Or do these feelings subside over time, replaced by the tentative self-reassurance that 'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? More importantly, is anyone up for a Bud Lite? And a cigarette?

Cocktails, Katie and My Naked Ass

M. and I were in Garden City on Saturday, meeting up with my parents for drinks in between their friend's son's wedding ceremony and reception. I was unexpectedly nervous as we sat there sipping our beers and nibbling on our fried calamari, waiting for my parents to meet us at the hotel bar (note: the Garden City Hotel is lovely, if a bit overzealous in its attempts at creating what one might call a hip decor, if one lived under a rock or managed a hotel in suburban Long Island). Mainly nervous about my dad, as we hadn't spoken more than once - and even then, fleetingly and fluffily - since M. and I made the Big Announcement, other than his mean email about not wanting to hear or read or talk about It anymore. Once my parents arrived with fourteen of their friends, the nerves pretty much disappeared and I spent most of my time catching up with the Ladies and talking to my mom and complimenting her on yet another c-u-t-e wedding outfit (this is one of the many areas in which she excels). Other than the one friend who came over and gushed to my mother about how nice it must be to have "us both" in Manhattan (i.e. mistaken presumption that M. was my brother, not my bf - - quickly rectified when I slid under the table to fellate him in front of the lot), it was just your average New England late afternoon cocktail hour, and M. and I were just another couple among many at a very long table in a very ill-conceived hotel bar. My mom also chose to drop a bomb two minutes before we left that she'd been diagnosed with "multiple PVC's", which is basically a weird and potentially deadly heart murmur, but of course don't worry about it, it's nothing (which ended up being true, as she called me yesterday to update me after speaking with her doctor) - - so other than the misguided friend, the misguided decor and the poorly timed sharing of health-related concerns, all in all it was a very normal three hours.

Katie Holmes has officially embraced Scientology.

As I was pulling up my shorts under my beach towel yesterday at Jones Beach - or was it pulling down my sunga - I couldn't help but notice, aided by the eagle-eyed vision of my friend MB, a man thirty feet away from us, stuffing his zoom-lens camera into his knapsack as he stared nonchalantly in our direction and raised his eyebrows as if to say What the fuck are you gonna do about it?

The presence of all of the above - M. and I seamlessly blending in with the everyday average 60+ cocktail set, Joey Potter's swift and headlong rush into the fiery pits of hell, nude photos of me eventually winding up on the internet (ok, technically not a first, but the first to be posted with face visible) - leads me to believe that The End is Nigh.

Groomzilla of the Week Award: June 11, 2005

I tried. I really, really tried to find someone new, some new celebrity representation of groomzilladom. But he's making it too easy. Now he's gone and brainwashed that poor girl. And then he took away all her food. And then he dragged her around another red carpet like a little malnourished Raggedy Ann doll. And then brainwashed her some more. And it was all right there, plain as day, on the MTV Movie Awards.

You win, Tom, okay? Are you happy? You win. Now take your plaque and beam out of here.


Going...


Going...


Gone.

Big Day

For the low cost of 38 US dollars plus 43 minutes of our lives which we will never see again, it's official - we're Domestically Partnered.

I still have to check the books to see what else this grants us other than M.'s access to my aforementioned shitty 1199 health insurance and the laser-printed form certificate presently hanging on our refrigerator.

We would have taken pictures inside were it not for the fact that the security guards raped and plundered our bags and removed all of our photographic devices - - including our camera, which M. had thoughtfully thought to bring, and our cell phones, but curiously enough, not my Palm Pilot, which also takes photos - evidently the Bronx county court house is techno-savvy but only to a point.

Even with the illicit Palm, however, it soon became clear that this was not an environment for joyful domestic partnership picture-taking. First of all, the lighting was terrible, mainly cheap fluorescents glaring off of concrete prison-yellow walls and cracked wood paneling. Second of all, I believe we may have been the first DP's to make an appearance at the BCC in a good year or two. The swarthy, twenty-two year old Boar's Head delivery boy and his betubetopped fiancee were the only ones who really gave us any hint of disdain, but for the most part this particular marriage license department (yes, in a cruel, ironic, rubbing-it-in gesture, we DP's are forced to go to the Marriage License room to stand in line with the Real Deals) seems to cater mainly to the newly-immigrated-yet-desparately-in-love-read-that-as-you-will crowd. Plus the Boar's Heads, and one haggard sixty-year old couple who looked to be finally making honest folk out of one another after a few too many years of 2pm bar crawls topped with a smattering of hillbilly heroin and pork rinds.

Finally, it's just not a joyful or celebratory procedure. Sure, the large Puerto Rican family sitting outside in the waiting area seemed to be making the most of it, cakelessly and cameralessly feasting their newlyweds. And their was one bride in full regalia getting her picture taken in the little park across the street from the courtouse. Otherwise, it was very much a lifeless, conveyor-belt kind of event, where you wait in the security line, stand stoically while the guards manhandle your electronics, walk down to the basement, wait in one line, get your pre-registration form signed, wait in another line, hand over your money-order, get your certificate, walk back upstairs, collect your underwear and cell phone, and head back out into the equally-stark yet slightly-more-friendly bustle of the Grand Concourse with crisp certificate and tattered dignity in hand.

Here's a photo from the outside, post-registration.

It's Official

Please see parenthetical.


Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 12:48:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Groom Zilla"
Subject: Re: ceremony
To: "the xxxxx inn"


Hi Frank and Penny,

This sounds great. M. and I (and our mothers.....!) will stop by at some point on Saturday the 25th. We'd love to have been able to see the rooms while we're there, but if we can't do that on Saturday, we've seen them on the website and they look great. Is there a time of day you think would be best to stop by? We're flexible and will only be coming from Marion, so just tell us when is easiest. I'll keep your number on file and call you closer to the 25th.

Thanks again, and looking forward to meeting you as well,

Groom Zilla




the xxxxx inn wrote:
Hi,
This will be fine. You can see the rooms on Friday before guests start to check in. On Saturday you can also come and see the reception and festivities, etc...We will give you our home phone # since we are the ones that handle the weddings, not the front desk personal. 508-xxx-xxxx. So you can give us a time that you might be here when you get to the cape. We look forward to seeing you both towards the end of the month.
Frank and Penny
P.S. If Friday isn't good to see the rooms we will have the place back in shape Sunday afternoon.




Groom Zilla wrote:
Hi Frank and Penny,
M. and I would like to come up the weekend of June 24th to see your place and a few others. As you suggested, we'd love to come by when there is a wedding set up - - when would be the best time/day to do that? I don't think I've thanked you yet for sending the packet, which we received and which was very helpful - so, thanks!

Speak to you soon.

Groom Zilla



the xxxxx inn wrote:
Hi Groom Zilla and M.,
We are 12 miles from P'town. So yes it is fine to have guests also stay there. It is also close enough to have the rehearsal dinner there too. We will send out the packet tomorrow and we will wait to hear from you as to what week end you'll be up to the Cape!
Sincerely,
Frank and Penny Young
The xxxxx Inn



Groom Zilla wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for the fast reply. Right now we are thinking around 90 people, plus/minus 10. We'd love for you to mail a packet, our address is: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, New York, NY 10019. We'd also love to swing by to see a wedding set-up one weekend in June, so we'll figure that out. Also, how far are you from Provincetown? I grew up in Mass. but my geographical knowledge of the Cape is limited. Is P'town close enough to have some people stay there and/or do a rehearsal dinner type thing in P'town and the wedding in Wellfleet? Thanks, and we look forward to receiving your info and hopefully working with you as well.

Best,

Groom Zilla (and M.)


the xxxxx inn wrote:
Hi,
Thank you for your interest in our inn.We can accommodate weddings/commitment ceremonies (we are comfortable with both, no problem!) in June and September. You can have the ceremony and reception here on the grounds at the inn. You can choose your own caterer. We can also suggest a few really good ones that others have used in the past. We sleep 50 persons give or take with roll aways if necessary. There is plenty of lodging for other guests close by. We can acomodate 200 guests for the reception (give or take once again.) How many were you thinking of? We do have a packet that we can mail off to you. So we would need your address. We have 3 week end weddings next month on the 11th,18th and 24th. We would be happy to show you around and then you would be able to see the actual set up of these affairs. Just let us know when you might be coming to Wellfleet. Thanks and we look forward to possibly working with you!
Sincerely,
The Youngs
The xxxxx Inn



Groom Zilla wrote:
Hi,
I'm interested in holding part or all of my commitment ceremony events at the xxxxx Inn. We are looking to have the ceremony/reception in late May or early June of 2006. I'd appreciate any info you can give me as far as availabilities, rates, and any other pertinent information. If we were to hold both the ceremony and the reception on your grounds, how might that work as far as catering, location within the Inn's grounds, etc.? Would we be able to bring in whichever caterer we wanted? It looks like there is enough nearby lodging to hold a fair number of people, is this the case? I should also ask whether you and your staff would feel comfortable hosting a same-sex commitment ceremony. We've only seen your Inn on the internet, but what we've seen looks beautiful. Depending on what we hear back from you, we'd like to come up one weekend in June to see the Inn and speak to you in person.

Very much looking forward to hearing back from you,

Groom Zilla

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Shattered Dreams

M. and I are getting registered as domestic partners tomorrow, so that he can partake of my shitty 1199 health insurance.

When we first discussed taking this momentous step, I had an image in my head of me in my pillpox hat, eyes all atwinkle, gazing proudly at M. as he hunched over the mayor's sun-dappled desk to sign our Life Partner Celebratory Commitment papers, followed by a celebratory dash down the steps of City Hall.

This image was somewhat compromised when I found myself standing in line at the dirty drugstore down the street with a motley crew of miscreants and nonogenarians, waiting for the creepy pharmacist/notary/pedophile to stamp our pre-registration papers with his creepy, yellow-fingernailed fist.

Then the pretty image came back a little bit last night as I listened to M. describe the sprawling, limestone City Hall building where we'd be legally validating our relationship on the municipal level after work on Thursday.

Then I went on the website and saw that the Manhattan office closes at 3:30, which is too early for me to leave work, which means that now we probably have to go to the one in the Bronx, because it's on my way home and is open until 4pm, and now the pretty image is laying trampled and lifeless in the middle of the Grand Concourse.

The F Word

I think I just got gay-bashed.

Strike that, I definitely just got gay-bashed.

I was coming out of the hospital, happy to be outside after 5 hours of seeing patients, enjoying my $1 mango Icee, when I saw a couple of co-workers coming up the street, promptly threw them a sassy look as I bounded across the cross-walk, and that's when it happened:

"Faggot."

From the towtruck I'd just passed in the cross-walk. Before I knew it, the truck had slithered down the street, leaving my bold assailant faceless.

The good news is that this is the first gay-bashing I've received - in this city or elsewhere - in a good two years. The other good news is that it was a verbal insult and not a brick, or a baseball bat, or a snowball studded with broken glass, or a flaming bag of dog feces.

The bad news is that I've gotten so used to living in this giant insulated bubble of a metropolis that it took a good two seconds for my pillowed brain to even register what had just happened - just long enough for my homophobe to make his anonymous getaway and escape the fiery verbal wrath I surely would have dealt him after first blinding him with my artificially sweetened frozen treat and carefully kicking his towtruck door with the rubber part of my already-scuffed leather dress-up shoes. Or any other number of imagined retaliations with the same likelihood of leaving my imagination as that Janet Jackson "All Night (Don't Stop)" sidewalk dance routine I've been choreographing on my walks home from the subway.

Although my Gwen Stefani "What You Waiting For?" routine did make a small but successful showing during yesterday's brief downpour as I clutched my shoulder bag and leapt over puddles, racing through the rain to make it home in time for my Energize yoga class.

God, maybe I really am a faggot.

Another Can of Worms, Please

So, I was talking to my mother again on the phone over the weekend.

She has not only gotten to be close friends with the word gay - example, she is now able to say, without missing a beat, "You remember, Paula O'Malley has a gay uncle and he got married," whereas the Old Her would have said something like, "Well...you know, Paula O'Malley's uncle is a....uh....had a .....uh....special...celebration...and, uh....." - but she is now slowly starting to show unsettling signs of Extreme Participation. As in, "You remember, Paula O'Malley has a gay uncle and he got married....and she says you can count her in for the wedding!!"

So now Pat Kelley and Paula O'Malley and Aunt Mary are all in, and by default this will require all the other ladies from the Wollaston Golf Club lunch bunch (with whom I spent my formative years eating Saltines in a high chair while they ate their turkey clubs and drank their chablis and broke out the latest gossip from the Back Nine)...plus their husbands....plus my mom's friends from Westwood, where I grew up, plus their husbands, plus my mom's other friends and their husbands, plus plus plus....

And I think she's still keen on going with M. and I to look at places on the Cape in a couple of weeks....

Which leads me to the only reasonable conclusion I can possibly reach, which is that I am well on my way to having a real, live Mother of the Bride.

I really, really need to be careful what I ask for.

But honestly? It feeds into all sorts of parts of me that eat this stuff right up, and the Day Dream Believer in me is absolutely certain that this will finally close the chasm that has developed between me and Mom since I told her I didn't like girls anymore, and we'll go back to being best friends and close confidantes and unhealthily enmeshed. And maybe just my mom's friends will come, without their husbands, and M.'s mom's friends will come, and it will just be M. and I and all our friends and thirty 65-year old women.

Another potential scariness: This morning, I posed to M. the hypothetical of using the reception hunt weekend as a means of having our mothers meet by inviting them both along. M. thinks it's not a bad idea at all.

Groomzilla thinks Groomzilla might not be sane at all.

Groomzilla of the Week Award: June 4, 2005

Despite the ever-present temptation to pull a repeat and hand it over to Tommy Lovebug Cruise for the second time in one month, I've decided to change up the rules once again, and present this week's award to not one, but two, groomzillas.

And the winners are..............Elton John and David Furnish.



I don't know which one's going to come out on top - wink nudge - but I'm confident that at least one of them will manage to turn their wedding into a three-ring nightmare.

As he's younger, has more time on his hands, and hasn't already been down the aisle once like Sir Elton, my money's on Furnish.

Get to work, boys.

And Your Little Dog, Too

It's already happening.

Look: Used to be this.



And this.




But now it's this.




And this.




Used to be this.



But now, it's this.




Was this.



Now this.




This.



Then this.




Where have all the lapdogs gone?

There was a good six month period where Paris and Nicole and Britney and Christina and even little Kelly Osbourne wouldn't be caught dead without their toy chihuahuas or teacup terriers nestled in the crook of their non-dominant arm. The fad spread quickly, to the point where even the local SJP wannabes, faces made up like a Tara Reid blow-up doll, feet nestled warmly inside their Ugg's, could be found staggering up 9th Avenue under the oppressive weight of a 2-year old St. Bernard-Dachsund mix slung over their shoulders.

And then, *poof*, doggy go bye-bye, replaced by a hot new fiancee or an impending Federlinian or maybe just a new Berkin bag.

What is to become of this entire generation of abandoned miniatures, their organ systems left dessicated by generations of ill-advised crossbreeding, their hunting instincts blunted by tuna tartare, their pride compromised by feathers and rhinestones and Juicy Couture hoodies?

Even if one were to lowball their life expectancy, most of these trembling bundles of tentative joy still have a good six to eight years left in them - years that once held the promise of red carpets and limousines, but which now portend only dark walk-in closets, shoeboxes or, at best, the shame and humiliation of the maid's neighbor's daughter's cramped split-level in Chino.

Why, Paris? Why, Christina? Britney - why, y'all?

More importantly, will I - newly engaged, soon to be wed, future expectant father - lose sight of my own metaphorical lapdogs? These chihuahuas passed unscathed through fashion trends and media scandals, emotional upheavals and drug relapses. It was only when their owners found True Committed Love that they found themselves eating Alpo out of the can.

As I continue along the path of betrothedness and move ever closer to my final destination of eternal wedded bliss and bountiful parenthood, what unsuspecting and undeserving creatures will I sacrifice at my own Altar of Love? My friends? My family? My feisty independence? My good credit rating? My personal hygiene?

How does one accomodate love and all its trappings, while still saving room in one's Berkin bag for the Little Things?