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The Day Amanda Came

Parting Glances

I was once chided by a friend (who was then, I'll freely now admit – he lives in Hawaii – a little more anal retentive than I) for reading several books at a time.
He felt my reading a paragraph here, a page or two there, a chapter elsewhere, was too desultory for his well-zippered mind. In contrast, I found (and I still do) that when I tire of one book, picking up another refreshes my interest and – zip, zip – keeps me going for an hour or two more.
I'm Judge Judy deprived – but maybe I'm blessed – not to be located in an area of good TV reception. (I'm in a little gingerbread house surrounded by newly rising structures, erected by ripely muscled workman who, rather careless of them, pay me absolutely no heed.) Fuzzy-wuzzy reception – on both counts – is a deterrent I'm not as yet ready financially to rectify.
Before I moved from my comfy, conveniently cluttered apartment of 24 years disarray, ensconced in a 1926 landmark that's zealously – but over hastily, I think – gone condo (it's still enticing tenants) I spent my bedtime wind down watching rerun after rerun of }Are You Being Served? (alas, John Inman – the brisk Mr. Humphries – is no longer in sales) and {italKeeping Up Appearances. ("It's Bouquet! It's Bouquet!")
That once-indulged luxury has ended. I got worn out by yet another PBS marathon fund-raiser, and, more than likely, I think the station wised up that I was probably the only person in the broadcasting zone watching those British reruns. (Talk about anal retentive!)
Among the few non-retentive secrets I have to tell at my advanced age is that I'm strictly a nonfiction reader. I've always been so. I can't give you an intelligent explanation for this social effrontery. Perhaps it has to do with kindergarten blocks or {ital}Dick, Jane, and Spot primers. (The reading of which two-syllable books is probably the real reason – but thankfully it's literary – why I'm gay.)
In the past few weeks I've read }The Letters of Oscar Wilde, annotated by his grandson Merlin Holland; a biography of possibly pedophiliac Dr. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud's #1 disciple and PR pro; {italThe Casebook of Forensic Detection (How Science Solved 100 of the World's Most Baffling Crimes), and {ital}Strength of a Woman: The Phyllis Hyman Story, by – five stars – my friend and BTL writer Jason A. Michael.
I'm now reading {ital}Have A Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans Are Looking Forward to the End of the World. It's an Englishman's astonished look at fundygelicals who are doing their dead level best to get us into a Last Day's Middle East shoot out so Jesus can return and body snatch his clones to their celestial aviary. Scary stuff.
I don't dare go into Barnes & Noble, Border's, or Marwil's Bookstore on Wayne State U's campus (where I get a generous 20% discount) because the temptation to buy another intriguing title's too much to resist. Yesterday, I impulse Visa'd {ital}Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities.
I close judiciously with a titles sampling of said oddities (strictly with LGBT interest): }The Nature & Tendency of Balls, {italSeriously and Candidly Considered in Two Sermons [1818]; }Queer Doings in the Navy [1896], {italKinky Finds the Clue [1948]; }Fellow Fags [1925]; {italGirls of the Pansy Patrol [1931], and, my own shortcoming, {ital}Invisible Dick [1926].
Authors listed include – I kid you not – Canon Balls [Episcopalian?] Nonce Casanova, Douglas Cock, Anita Hardon, Helmut Puff, Guysbert B. Vroom, and two for the road: Dr. Stretch Dowse, and Desire Tits. (No comment.)

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