I Remember You Well From The Chelsea Hotel…

I love this building, and I can imagine staying here forever. There was a photography book that we had at the counter at the bookstore my parents owned. It was something like “Residents of The Chelsea Hotel” and it was a bunch of people sitting on their beds. There were quotes next to their photos like – RHONDA: “My grandmother pays my rent, so I can paint.” I wished that I was her, and that I had naturally curly hair and that I was an artist, living off the fat of the land, as it were, because it seemed totally alien to me that your family would ever support your own artistic inclinations.

Had I asked my grandmother to pay for my rent so that I could paint, she would have had me in an arranged marriage so fast it would have made my head spin all the way around Exorcist style. I might have even got my feet bound to boot, even though it had gone out of fashion by then, but they were old school, so who knows.

How illustrious, that your apartment would be enough to make you a cause celebre, so that your image would be captured for all time in a 70s coffee table book, that would then be stored in the archives of the mind of a faux full time idiot savant like myself.

I feel it though, and if these walls could talk, it would not really be about lesbian couples getting pregnant. It would be stories of rock and roll suicide, murder, mayhem, romance, neglect, genius, getting head on the unmade bed while limousines wait in the street. After all, this is where Sid stabbed Nancy, which ultimately ended in his equally untimely death; the greatest romance story of all time, at least for me. I find those two terribly glamorous, and even if the reality of it is a tragic tale of drug addiction and domestic violence, I cannot help but think their wildness and sad love something to aspire to.

My life leads me into inspiring situations far more optimistic than the stories that fill me with longing. I crave rather disgusting and destructive things, but they are sated consistently by the beauty and majesty of living as an aggravated case of arrested development.

I just returned from the soundcheck for the Wedrock Benefit tonight, a night of stars, raising money to stick it to the Federal Marriage Act, and let love rule, put together by the dear and brilliant John Cameron Mitchell. We rehearsed the finale, “The Origin of Love.”

I love the show “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and have seen the production in two countries and coast to coast countless times, as well as having the movie on heavy rotation in my computer. It is a dream to sing this song. John is generous to allow me, a non-singer, to do this tearful, intelligent, gentle and rocking Gnostic tribute to and interpretation of love.

I bust into my best Edie Brickell moves, straddling the mike stand like a witch on a broomstick. Bob Mould stands just off stage, and I have just met him, which makes me fluttery inside. Idolizing him since the 80s, I am at a loss for words, and can only clown, because from Husker Du (I still cannot figure out umlauts) to Sugar, to his own solo albums, the transcendent and vast scope of his songwriting has given me a soundtrack that has played underneath all the dramatic and tumultuous, inspiring and harrowing, serpentine undulating sexual and jaggedly lusty, tearfully needy and simply sweet milkshake moments of my life.

We ran through the song twice, and when I was about to leave, Bob Mould said I was good. HE SAID I WAS GOOD. I LOVE HIS MUSIC SO MUCH AND FOR SO LONG AND HE SAID I WAS GOOD. AND I DON’T EVEN REALLY SING. I just rock a little sometimes. I LOVE HIM I LOVE HIM I LOVE HIM. It was enough to make my entire day, week, month – and between this and David Bowie, my life is happy and should remain so always.

Ryan is coming in from Boston, many friends and family will be in the house, and I will live my dream, as I step onstage to do the song tonight, I shall be dressed in drag, as Hedwig. If you could jump into my skin for a second, like it were a pair of pants you were trying on at the GAP, you would first feel overwhelming fatigue, a strange, undesirable pain going from the bottom of my shoulder blade to the middle of my butt and immense, intense, the kind that never relents – straight up joy.

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