It's not that bad or everybody needs a gay messiah

It's 1998 all over again in restaurants, three weekends hidden in my bat cave and I emerge to a plate of 30 dollar gnocchi, just like the grand old days, before the crash, when money coursed through my pocket book my like silt in the yellow river. The last decadent blast in San Francisco when even working waitress stiffs such as myself lived like swells. Sorry, but I am a little mefiant this time around... Also much more, dare I say it, fiscally conservative.

Although, tonigh, tonight was pink, and therefore I unpadlocked my wallet and actually put on a shoe. Yes, I said a shoe. That is, my right leg was (is) booted in the stuff of moon boots and velcroed into place, and my other leg put on a shoe that was not a sneaker, that even had a heel, that was even red patent leather. Yes. And then I did my hair, and carefully applied eyeliner, and sparkly powder to my paling cheeks (august, the most brutal of months to we here in fog city) and lipstick and earrings. Good God, even a matching set for my dainties, I was a right lady, albeit, off kilter and gimping.

P labelled it pink night, so we met at Jardiniere for cocktails and dinner. The perfectly charming pink bartender sold me on a mandarin cosmo which I was so ready to snub, but turned out to be more than entirely quaffable, somewhere between a pink Pez and a kumquat. Late summer tomatoes, avocado and baby arugula with a drizzle of dank virgin olive oil, and the 30 dollar gnocchi with braised duck and cherry tomatoes, a bass note of sage and lemon zest and those bread crumbly things that have a precise italian term, but is beyond all recall at this moment. Worth every fucking cent, just to be out in the world, in a skirt, in a shoe, with my favorite dining companions.

After dinner across the streeet the well heeled, the somewhat down at heel and those who are fabulously heeled were funneling into Davies for an evening with Ben Folds and Rufus Wainright. We caught a song of Ben Lee who was youthful in his enthusiasm but would be better cast as a hobbit. (and I totally heart hobbits!)

Intermission was a fight to the bar, and the fight was lost, so we sat out ben folds in favor of champagne and the odd flasher. Smoking on the terrace a homeless gentleman wandered up and proceeded to drop trou, perhaps he was trying on his hustling game. Needless to say the sight of a this side shy of elderly mad disrobe, display his flaccid member and spread his hindquarters was distressing and funny and horrifying. Thankfully the bells sounded and it was time.

It's silly, falling in love with a rock star, just as it's silly for a straight girl to fall in love with a gay man, and I, in a single coup have done both. I just can't help myself, I am completely enamored and I think he is the librettist of our time. And with pleasure and complete acceptance would I play Ashely Judd to his Kevin Kline clothes, music, men, all the men a man or a girl could swallow, double emphasis given in both the literal and the ephemeral. Yet, I like him just where he is, that dapper fellow on the stage with his huge voice breaking, and the disembodied voice in the earphones crooning the want we all know. I liked him best at the Fillmore with his voice up in the chandeliers. I like him for the first time that I heard him when D and J and I were driving south for christmas and I was sick in the car and being contrary, I love him for it being several years later and a particular song that I forever associate with D doesn't prick anymore, rather I felt a kind of melancholy peace and a kind of pride for a memory of a marriage that still lives in songs.

Separately but strangly alligned I would like to thank Salon for turning me onto Mahler, and his ninth symphony which I somehow can't dissasociate from the Great Escape.

Separately, yet still strangley alligned I dreamt last night that I was on a space station with my high school boyfriend who was looking for his mother, and it was whirly-gigging through space and I couldn't see the universes fast enough, but it was vast and blank and dotted with lights.

Separately and alligned to naught, I evidently owe the government scads of cash, a gigantic source of malaise, and I am rather not inclined to pay. But I must. So I went out and had a plate of 30 dollar gnocchi, because, you know, fuck the government and all that, perhaps tomorrow I'll go out and buy another shoe.