The ban on gay marriage in California has been lifted!! I can’t believe it. For everyone who has been working for this for what seems like such a long time it feels like a miracle. I am not sure what this means now. Can gays and lesbians get married in California? Today?!
Update: Ian and some readers updated me and said that in 30 days, gay and lesbian couples in California will legally be able to marry. I am absolutely thrilled!! Well?! What are you waiting for? If you have a longtime partner – now is the time!! If you have always wanted to be married here is your chance!!!! Yay California!!! Yay! Gay!! Marriage!!!
Sometimes I can’t start my day without looking at DailyPuppy.com – a website devoted to pictures of dogs, puppies and grownup puppies. They update it every single day, and I will even log on at midnight just to see the dog changeover.
I love dogs of all kinds, and I when I look at them, I think about where I might kiss them: right on the dog lips, on the top of their soft dog heads, and on their dog chest, where they should be petted a lot because it makes them thrust out their chest and makes them proud – it is a dog psychological thing. I imagine petting them right at the base of their tail, which will make a lot of dogs legs start to kick out of sheer pleasure. I also imagine what kind of corn chip feet smell they will have – is it like Fritos or Doritos? MMM Cool Ranch!
My friend Ryan Landry says his dogs feet don’t have a corn chip smell because they are so clean, and so he keeps an open bag of Fritos by the bed so he can huff them. He has one two three Jack Russell terriers (the middle girl named after me!) and every time he kisses one, he kisses the others too – all equally so there is no jealousy. He grew up in a household with many siblings and he felt the sting of the rivalry, so he makes sure to love them all exactly the same.
Daily Puppy also has bios of the dogs in the pictures, turn ons and turn offs – kind of like Playboy, but it is dogs not people. One day I hope my lovely dogs will be featured on Daily Puppy!
I am very excited about the new Flight of the Conchords record and have been listening to it nonstop. It is really great. They are so funny and also Jemaine Clement is very hot AND Asian adjacent – he is part Maori!!! I will be attending their concert at the Orpheum later this month and eagerly awaiting Season 2. Arj Barker is also on the HBO show and he is another Asian hottie. It is exciting! I really want to be on the show and challenge Mel to a duel to see who is truly their biggest fan. I love them!!!
My friend Midori is doing the AIDS LifeCycle ride and needs your support! She is an amazing woman and a good friend of mine. I haven’t done the ride myself, but several years ago, I got flown in on the middle of the route to perform for the riders. It was raining and everyone was so tired but the show was amazing and I had the time of my life. This is such an important cause so please check her out!
I haven’t seen the new film “21″ but I don’t plan to, which hurts a little, because I am a big Kevin Spacey fan. I liked him since he came to my 23rd birthday party with Jason Gould. The story of “21″ is based on a true one, about a group of Asian American kids who take card counting to another level and beat the house at their own game. It is a cool story about Asian Americans, and even though there are a couple of great young Asian actors in the cast of the film, they are only in minor supporting roles. Hollywood for some reason didn’t think that the film would be “marketable” enough with people who looked like the people who the story is actually fucking about! So because of this - the leads in the film are white!!!
That is right - the story, which was one about Asian American kids sticking it to the man has been stolen right from under us and given to white people. This makes me so fucking furious I can’t believe it. It makes me “railroad” mad. No fuck that – it makes me fucking “internment camp” mad. It is like they made a film about building the railroad or being in an internment camp and cast white people in it. It is up there with the casting of David Carradine instead of Bruce Lee in “Kung Fu” but it is actually worse because there was at least a slight attempt to make David Carradine seem chinky – well actually - I don’t know – what is worse? Yellowface or outright non-inclusion? Is it better to be made into a caricature or just plain invisible?
Hollywood is still racist, and even though there are a few more Asians out there making great television and movies and music and art - it just isn’t enough. I am a huge “Grey’s Anatomy” fan, and even though I think Katherine Heigl is totally hot and beautiful and a killer actress and Patrick Dempsey is truly McDreamy - to me, the real star of that show is Sandra Oh. She absolutely lights up the screen. I want to cry with pride and elation and excitement every time I see her. Here is someone who is so talented that she was able to transcend racial barriers - these weird ideas that Hollywood still hangs onto that Asian Americans can’t tell stories that aren’t directly related to their asian-ness – but Sandra, she is so good no one and nothing could stop her. I just keep thinking about that one scene when Burke leaves her at the altar and she is crying and pulling off her wedding dress. Don’t even act like you didn’t cry. I am crying just thinking about it. Omg - she rules. She is gorgeous and sexy and such a gifted amazing actress and I want to see her in some big blockbuster movie about a wedding sometime too!
Until that movie comes out I am going to make myself happy with Harold and Kumar 2…
Today is the National Day of Silence, which is about making sure LGBT kids are not bullied in school, and this year it will be dedicated to the memory of Lawrence King, a California pre-teen who was shot and killed by another classmate out of homophobic hate. It is an important day, because we need to protect our children. Kids aren’t always aware of what their hatred can do. It is just as deadly as grown up hate. Hate kills. And it hurts everyone.
I remember when I was in high school, and someone had written all this homophobic graffiti, identifying all these ‘lesbians’ in school, writing all the girl’s names in big letters all over the walls. It was really scary, like a witch hunt. Rumors started swirling about who else was a lesbian, and then my day came. One horrible girl named Kathi said that I had tried to kiss her on the lips, and I was really offended – because yes, I wanted to kiss girls on the lips, but not her! Eew! Kathi was gross! Of course she was not ugly, she was a beautiful girl who later became a real live anorexic model, but she was mean, with a long black dark streaky sandy gritty vein of meanness that ran through her like a shrimp, and that made her unbearably ugly to me. I was really mad about it and I was scared anyway because I knew inside that I was different, and that people were picking up on it was really frightening. This was in the 80’s, so we had no real understanding of gay pride. It only existed for adults then, not for kids. When I tried to defend myself against the rumors, people would say, “Why are you getting mad? If you are mad about it that totally means you are a lesbian and you love Kathi!” I don’t know if I cared about being called gay as much as I cared about people thinking I had bad taste.
In retrospect, I had it really easy. Kids didn’t have guns then, at least not in my school. Bullying and name calling was hurtful, but it didn’t kill you, it just made you want to die, which was bad too. When you are a kid, being thought of as different is so scary, and we just want to blend in, but if you are gay, you can’t always hide it. People pick up on it, and if they want, they can turn it against you. And the consequences can be deadly. I don’t want any more children to suffer because of this kind of ignorance and stupidity. Growing up is hard enough without having to fear being killed because of who you are.
I make a big deal about showing off my physique whenever I can because I think it is important for people to know what a 39 year old woman looks like. I don’t see that many images of women like myself out there, so I want to be a good example. Whenever I can, I put on a bikini or even just pasties and a g-string because I don’t want to hide out. I think that too many people have body issues, and if we just confront those issues head on, we can get rid of them.
For years I kept myself covered up because when I was doing TV a very long time ago, one of the executives I was working with said after my first screen test, “Never, ever show your stomach in public again,” and it just made me feel so freaked out by my own body. I just wanted to disappear. It sent me into a dieting frenzy that was almost deadly.
Now that I am older and wiser, I just want to enjoy my life, and not worry so much about what people think of me, how I look, if I am too fat or something – I just don’t give a shit.
In 2007, the ‘artist’ Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, took a dog from the street, tied him to a rope in an art gallery, and starved him to death.
For several days, the ‘artist’ and the visitors of the exhibition have watched emotionless the shameful ‘masterpiece’ based on the dog’s agony, until eventually he died.
Does it look like art to you?
But this is not all… the prestigious Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American decided that the ‘installation’ was actually art, so that Guillermo Vargas Habacuc has been invited to repeat his cruel action for the biennial of 2008.
First of all, I don’t really like pie. I know that is weird. Pie is good, but for some reason, I don’t like to eat it because usually it is too hot and I burn my tongue, and it is too sweet, so it gives me a crazy sugar high really fast and then I am exhausted. Polygamists seem to eat a lot of pie. I am not sure if this is a known fact, but a pie seems to complete the polygamist outfit.
Which leads me to the outfit - even though pastels like baby blue, lilac and soft pink flatter me, I don’t want to wear the big shouldered prairie dress. Don’t get me wrong – I love “Little House on the Prairie” but only when it is kept in the realm of ‘drag’ and not worn every day for religious purposes. The shoulders are too wide and lambchoppy to make anyone look good.
I don’t want to marry anyone that much older than me. Not just because of the sex (which would be not so fun to begin with but at least old people finish either super fast or super slow) but because there would be nothing fun to talk about. How do you relate to each other? It would be boring!
I also don’t want to be a polygamist because then I would probably have to cook or clean and I don’t know how to do either of those things. Also I have terrible allergies, so if I had to live in any kind of compound situation I am sure I would die of a runny nose.
I’m having an amazing time on my Beautiful tour, with killer back to back shows this week in Portland and Phoenix, and I was thinking back on how all this got started.
When I was a kid, my family was one of the first on my block to have a VCR. It had wood on it and stuff! Remember when electronics would be encased in wood?! That was really weird. Like they were trying to disguise it as furniture. It was a huge machine, and would open up its big metal mouth so you could insert a tape. We rented movies at this cheap video store two blocks from my house, and my favorite movie to watch was Richard Pryor’s “Live on the Sunset Strip.” He was so amazingly funny to me, even though I didn’t fully understand all the jokes because they were mostly about sex and drugs and I had yet to experience those things. The other film that completely changed my world was Eddie Murphy’s “Delirous.” As a standup, Eddie Murphy was my ultimate hero. I laughed at that show so much I almost got sick. The “Ice Cream” bit was my favorite. I wanted to be like him. I knew that I was going to be a standup comic. That was going to be my life, and I didn’t care about anything else.
I think that we all have the potential to be anything we want to be, and I am living proof of that. I was just a kid, and yet I was able to make my dreams come true and I continue to do so every day. If you love something, I think you have to just do it. Don’t worry about what people will say. Follow your dreams, because there is a reason why you have them. They are the path to your destiny.
I just watched the amazing new documentary by Steve Balderson, “Underbelly,” all about my dear friend and frequent collaborator Princess Farhana. It is a wonderful film following our lovely princess through a busy year of her life teaching and performing all over the world. I am interviewed, as are many dance superstars from the world of bellydance and burlesque and there are lots of wonderful dance performances from all the different shows HRH has been featured in, including our fantastic run with “The Sensuous Woman” at the Zipper in NYC last fall. Princess Farhana is truly an inspiration to dancers and fans all over the world and it was so beautiful to see her incredible life documented in such a fascinating and elegant way. The dance sequences are beautiful as are all the costumes! It is a must see for any lover of the arts, dance and women loving themselves and living life to the fullest! All hail the princess!
