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September 30, 2008
I Can See Manchuria
My head feels like the terrorists have won.
Last Friday, we went to a friend’s house for dinner and the debate. My galpal was quickly driven out of the TV room by McCain’s smarmy opening gambit about Ted Kennedy’s hospitalization. Unable to sit still, she nervously cleaned our friend’s kitchen to a gleam it had not seen in years. Her Mrs. Clean efforts did not preclude periodic screams from the kitchen: “Do not agree with John McCain!” “Nail him now with the Savings and Loan scandal.” “Interrupt grandpa now!”
I tivoed the debate plan to play it when it’s time for a thorough cleaning of our own kitchen.
I had thought of sending Obama a case of Red Bull for the next presidential debate. His preternatural calm is highlighted by the desperate tics of John McCain, or as we call him in our house, “God Forbid.” Obama’s calm in the eye of the storm is his nature and as much as I would like him to squash McCain like a bug, it really is not the change he has called for. Despite my own post-debate despair, in many analyses Obama was judged the winner.
Next up is the vice-presidential debate. While Rove and Limbaugh, the diaxis of evil, have their old crank-yanker with the dicey health records hooked up to adrenalized life-support, they have their v-p candidate hooked up to the info-injection machine. She’ll be ready when they pull McCain’s plug, but for now you can just pull her neck string: “Putin rears his head, flies over, in the airspace, where does he go, Alaska.” Their Manchurian Candidate is deemed being-there brilliant. Just as eight years ago when the bar was set low for Bush, if Sarah Palin does not burst into flames, she will be proclaimed the winner.
We are staying home for the v-p debate. I am hoping to get a couple closets cleaned out. Speaking of closets, I predict gay marriage will stand in CA. The zeitgeist will be: Oh for god’s sake, it’s the end of the world, let the gay people get married.
September 28, 2008
What food are you planning to serve for your V-P debate watching party?
Kate wants to hear from you! The next question of the week, straight from Kate, is: What food are you planning to serve for your V-P debate watching party?
To get your voice heard, simply hit the Comment link below and tell her what you think! No registration is necessary, and you can post anonymously if you want.
September 24, 2008
When Banks Compete
September 23, 2008
Girl Power Productions
Saturday, October 11
WOMEN’S TEA DANCE & DECK PARTY • 2-5PM
Girl Power is where it’s at all week long! Beach yourself at The Pied for the only women’s Tea Dance. Tell your friends you’re going for gal company and cocktails on the coast, and pick up your free Welcome to Women’s Week gift from us.
Saturday, October 11
THE L WORD PARTY • 9PM
Always the HOTTEST Columbus Day weekend party in town. Free L WORD T-shirt to the first L’s through the door; lots of chances to win L WORD Season 5 DVD sets, cast-autographed L Word stuff and more. Midnight Sexy Contest - $100 cash prize! Sponsored by OurChart.com
Sunday, October 12 • 9PM
ITTY BITTY TITTY COMMITTEE DVD RELEASE PARTY
Celebrate the DVD release of this break-out lesbian movie hit – an entertaining, crowd-pleasing, rockin’ love song to the heady rush of sex, freedom and rebellion. Plenty of chances to win the DVD, t-shirts – and more. Midnight “T” Contest turns up the heat. Free IBTC mementos to the first 50.
Wednesday, October 15 • 8PM
THE OLIVIA CRUISES PARTY
If you can’t get enough of the Women’s Week stars – and who can? – come party with them! The hugely popular, annual Olivia party returns with EVERYONE including Kate Clinton, Vickie Shaw, Suede, Karen Williams, Jennie McNulty and many more to celebrate Olivia’s 35th Anniversary. Free Olivia gifts to the first 50 fans and the best chance you will ever have to win a free vacation.
Thursday, October 16 • 9PM
FOREPLAY: THE EROTICA PARTY
Get ready for hot, sexy fun. Bring your girlfriend or find someone tonight. Go-Go gals, sexy visuals, steamy coupons, dating games, mating games and more we can’t reveal. Come watch, come play, but just come. To sex up the deal, free party favors to the first 50, midnight Butch & Femme Hot Contest and more Itty Bitty Titty Committee mischief.
Saturday, October 18 • 1-3PM (Doors open for the party at 1PM)
DANI CAMPBELL DOES GIRL POWER’S L WORD DVD RELEASE PARTY
Party with smokin’ hot reality TV star Dani Campbell. Come meet the real-life lesbian superhero and get her autograph or your picture taken with her. Plus, free L WORD T-shirts to the first L’s through the door, lots of chances to win L WORD Season 5 DVD sets and more. And, you never know what other star might show up.
------ Plus, don’t miss the Private, VIP Cocktail reception with Dani Campbell, Saturday, October 18, 1-3PM to benefit The Human Rights Campaign. Tickets available at the HRC store, 209 Commercial Street in Provincetown or on-line at www.hrc.org/ptown
September 21, 2008
What TV financial personality would you most like to tar and feather?
Kate wants to hear from you! The next question of the week, straight from Kate, is: What TV financial personality would you most like to tar and feather?
To get your voice heard, simply hit the Comment link below and tell her what you think! No registration is necessary, and you can post anonymously if you want.
September 19, 2008
Decided Voters
On Labor Day, after finishing my summer run of shows, and before one quarter of my tomatoes had turned red, I had to pack up, leave Provincetown and head back to New York. Next summer I either have to plant earlier or find an early ripening tomato. Or not leave.
I loved watching the progress of my tomatoes during our very short New England growing season. I tell my girlfriend I am going off the grid, going to live off the land. She says it will take more than two tomato plants. I’ll keep chickens and pigs. The pigs don’t have to wear lipstick. Maybe a little Covergirl Porcine Glow blusher. Ellen Degeneres is the new face of Covergirl! A real lipstick lesbian! Progress!
Within a few days I was back in the swing of New York City, catching up with friends, seeing movies I’d missed [Burn After Reading – great cast, don’t bother], and ordering Indian takeout. The weather in New York that week after Labor Day was glorious and I was not a happy cabined, cribbed, confined camper. I tried to be gracious, but based on my unconvincing performance, my girlfriend agrees that next fall I should extend in Ptown.
That week I felt like a war correspondent keeping up on dispatches about the Palin bombshell and monitoring the progress of Ike as I got ready to go to Austin, Texas for the Out and Equal Workplace Summit. The annual gathering of LGBT corporate, dare I say it, “community organizers” is getting larger and they are doing amazing work to transform workplaces into safe and thus creative environments for LGBT employees.
The sad irony of the weekend gathering of workplace optimists is that in the next week, their newly diversified workplaces at AIG, Lehman, Hewlett-Packard and Fannie Mae, to name a few, were to be bankrupted, shuttered and sold off, big enough to fail and bail. The riotous spirit of the dinner I emceed had a fin du siecle hysteria about it.
New York, the former financial capital of the world, has lost 20,000 jobs. Each time I ride the elevator in my building during the day, I see more and more unfamiliar faces. They are young men, young fathers on the way on an errand or young women, moms with their own small kids in the middle of the day. Every day is casual day.
It was good to leave New York and do a series of shows at the new RAZZ Room at the newly remodeled Nikko Hotel in San Francisco. The city has been through its share of booms and busts from the gold rush days, to the war years, to the closing of three military bases and loss of jobs, to the dot com bubble and bust. They go on. The city is bustling with life-saving tourists. The US is not a melting pot anymore. We are an outlet mall.
The crowds at my show have the exhausted feel of a warriors fighting on two fronts. Not only are they fighting for the election of Barack Obama, but they are also fighting the insulting nuisance of ballot initiative #8 which will take away the right of gay people to marry. They are organizing, phone-banking, going door to door, volunteering, raising unseemly amounts of money to fight the right.
A couple of people from my San Fransister’s audience told me after my show that I had gone too easy on Sarah Palin. After all the justifiable complaining I did about the sexism in Hillary Clinton’s primary bid, it’s true, I’m having a hard time being hard on Sarah Palin. She is so beside the point. The venal cynicism of McCain’s choice of the inexperienced Palin is on a par with the boldfaced vetting of Clarence Uncle Thomas as supremely qualified for the high Court.
We haven’t got time for Sarah “Operation Distraction” Palin. John McCain, or as we call him in our house, God Forbid, answered a question about Spain with all the loopiness of Miss Teen South Carolina when asked why one fifth of Americans could not locate the U.S. on a map. Such as.
We don’t have time for chain emails about white privilege, or goodbye to all that part three or Palin as Obama’s psychic shadow or crying about polar bear vaginas. We can think all those big thoughts later, when we’re sobering up from the Democratic victory parties. Right now, it’s time to volunteer, send money, fight with undecided voters, vote and win.
September 16, 2008
Exorcise
September 12, 2008
Pig Lipstick by L’Oreal
Greetings from Austin, Texas! The site of the Annual Out and Equal Workplace Summit. I’m here to emcee their annual awards dinner gala where they celebrate and honor the work of LGBT activists in the corporate world and the work of corporations that make it possible for LGBT people to be out and creative at work.
We are also in the path of Hurricane Ike. It’s 99 degrees and muggy, so I am not out seeing the sites of Austin. That leaves me in my lovely hotel room with this little laptop and the de rigueur flat panel television. The 24-7 weather coverage is hyperbolic, hysteric and all I want to know is whether I’ll be able to get the hell out of here tomorrow morning. Not a one of the slick, soon to be slickered, drawling weather forecasters has said, “Kate Clinton you will make it back to NYC on Saturday with a one hour delay.”
Her-icane Sarah has not petered out and alone in this hotel room I have her talking with Charles Gibson on, but muted. Her voice could shatter that glass ceiling. I still have that vague nausea.
It’s important in this hurricane season not to conflate the feelings of powerlessness I get fronting the isobars of a hurricane with the powerless feeling I can get watching the “there you go again” Category 10 Republican lying cheating hot air machine. It’s easy to do and that’s just what they want me to do.
Let me be clear. I am a Vagina-American but I could care less about possible president Palin’s insane family, her glasses, her hockey momness or darling husband. Let L’Oreal come out with a new line of pig lipstick. I don’t care.
We’ve established the newfound sexism detectors of the cynical Republicans and their snickered media mouthpieces, their double standards, their lying manipulating ways. The cancerous religious right, rumored to be dead or in remission, was having their version of a three-day waiting period, and with Jesus Palin, they are risen again. They don’t like gay people. They don’t want women to have control over their own bodies. They don’t give a shit about running this country. They care only about winning the election. Then lifting off from Alaska in the rapture.
I am very glad to be among the courageous activists and community organizers at this convention. It downgrades my feelings of powerlessness. I will not wait for Obama to speak directly to me through the TV, “Kate Clinton we are going to win this thing. Just sit tight.” I just had a little back and forth with a non-conference woman up on the free continental breakfast floor. She was eating a yogurt and nodding, as Palin zombied to Charles Gibson. I watched with her and then said, “She’s is so unqualified. She has Wikipedia brain.”
Speak up. Send money to Obama or “No on 8” in CA if you’re still having I-don’t-wanna-Obama feelings. It’s the same idea. Volunteer. Talk to your friends, family. Fight with them. Stick with the facts of war, economy, environment, and gay rights. Then let’s have a going away party for them on November 4. They can lift off from Alaska, hopefully their last frontier. Wave and say, “Bye bye. We’ll watch your stuff.”
September 08, 2008
Hope-aholic
Granted there may not be a lot of us who remember, but is it just me or
does Palin remind you of Phyllis Schlafly?
At least she sure gives you a lot of new material to work with! Am
looking forward to being at the Birchmere when you're there in November,
in the meanwhile stay sane, and thanks for contributing to my sanity.
Viki Robertson
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Viki,
It wasn't just you - it was you and Gloria Steinem who saw the connection.
Gloria in her great op ed in the LA Times - "Wrong Woman, Wrong Message"
calls Sarah Palin a young Phyllis Schlafly. I don't know if Phyllis's
Wikipedia has been scrubbed, but there's no mention of her gay son.
Hmmmmmmm....
Gloria refers to herself as a "hope-aholic" and even manages to find some
good Hurricane Sarah. I'm following Gloria's lead and not going insane.
And hip hip hip hooray for my Serena Williams!!
That helped -
Kate
September 07, 2008
Mourning Sickness*
A while back, I was talking with my sister on the phone and told her the news that our niece was moving back east, and she practically hissed, “Fierce!” Then, to my confused silence, she explained, “That’s Christian Siriano from Project Runway.”
Though my sister is a rabid anti-TV person, she is a passionate seamstress. Her guilty pleasure is Project Runway. She is now a Christian Sirianist. Of all the things I have done in my darling career, she was most impressed when I sent her a picture of the kind-hearted taskmaster of the show, Tim Gunn, and me at a fundraiser. Desmond Tutu could not have gotten a bigger reaction.
Until this summer, I had never seen Project Runway. At a lovely wedding dinner for two couples that had exchanged vows earlier that day, suddenly everyone was up and exiting before the cake was even rolled out to be cut. I asked the preternaturally hip fourteen-year old son of one of the couples what the heck was going on. He gave me a look that made me feel even older than I did getting a texted v-p announcement from Barack Obama and said, as he quickly left, “Tonight is the drag queen challenge on Project Runway.”
Except for a few dazed straight people wandering the streets like some post-nuclear family survivors, the streets of Ptown were deserted as I rode my bike home. The town had a personal stake in this PR episode. Two of our very own drag performers, Hedda Lettuce and Varla Jean Merman were on the show.
Though I wasn’t sure of PR’s format or point system or what accent Heidi Klum was doing, I was immediately hooked.
Thus far, I have seen maybe four episodes, but from what I’ve seen, if the world doesn’t end before the next presidential election, may I suggest we model our next national contest on Project Runway? Just as I am one of the last to know about PR, or to try online banking, I’m sure someone has already pitched this idea. It’s so obvious.
Wouldn’t you prefer a PR spinoff to the format we have now - endless primary campaign season, billions spent, Republican and Democratic circuit party conventions? It would be an eight-week season. Both parties would have four weeks to pick their contender, then four weeks for them to go up against each other. They would compete in individual and team competitions. The challenges would vary week to week.
To be read with a Heidi Klum accent:
This week you must work with a US military and Iraqi civilian team to plan the withdrawal from Iraq by 2010. You will not be allowed to leave an occupying force or to send the troops home by way of Afghanistan.
This week you must design your own solution to our nation’s health care crisis. You will work with insurance companies and four people with chronic illnesses. Each can afford only $3 in co-pay.
This week you will work with the Army Corps of Engineers, the dreaded community organizers and what’s left of the infrastructure of New Orleans to draw up a plan for the restoration of the delta. You cannot rely on casino funding.
This week your assignment is to design a plan to reduce the US dependency on foreign oil by 50% in the next five years. You will be penalized for wearing fake hard hats and shrieking Drill, Baby, Drill.
Your final challenge, for the win, is to outline your plan to bring Dick Cheney and George Bush to trial before an international War Crimes Tribunal. You have two years to accomplish this. It doesn’t count if you go to jail instead of them.
You get the idea. Presidential candidates don’t have to like the challenges; they just have to do them. We’d get to see them in action as problem solvers, deciderators, managers, leaders and not just speechifying campaigners. Then we’d all vote. I believe we have the technology to do it with our TV remotes. Press select.
I’m going to try to get this on the ballot in California as an election reform initiative.
*This is a Palin-free space. After the Republican White Party, I thought we could all use a break. And I am sure this nausea will pass soon.
September 06, 2008
In The Life Pioneer Award
Join us for In The Life's Season Premiere Gala as they present Kate with The Pioneer Award and see a sneak preview of the new season.
October 6th, 2008 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Neue Gallerie: 1048 Fifth Avenue
at East 86th Street, New York City
Wine, imported beer and hors d'oeuvres served by Cafe Sabarsky
Tickets are $175 before September 22, $250 thereafter.
September 05, 2008
Del Martin
Remember Del Martin
The Republicans just finished up their White Party and Friar’s Club Roast. It was like their Houston Convention, point oh hate. All they’ve got is derision and cheap shots. After eight years as Designated Bush Watcher, I am cranky, whiny. Weh weh, I can’t bear to watch. Can’t I just do knock knock jokes? Poor me. Then I remember Del Martin. She was an amazing, dare I say it, “community organizer” for our LGBT rights. For at least 60 years. How did she do it? Who cares? She just did it. In loving memory of her courage and passion, I’m quitting my whining right now and getting back to work.
September 04, 2008
Hurricane Sarah
September 03, 2008
YIKES!
Love you Kate! After looking at the following link could you please answer the following question.......IF McCain wins this election and then had a fatal heart attack in office........Will this be what our Veep will be wearing when that 3 am call comes in?
http://www.trendhunter.com/images/phpthumbnails/23808_1_468.jpeg
Yikes! My Best from KY!
________________________________________________________________________________________
Dear Mark,
Hubba hubba! Like all sensible, former Clinton supporters, I am changing
my party affiliation. John McCain got it so right. There'd be some
heavy breathing on that 3am call.
And you were worried that I wouldn't have any good material without
George. . .
Best,
Kate
September 02, 2008
All The Good Ones Are Taken
Hi, Kate:
Do you believe there is support, empirical or otherwise, for the old
cliche that "all the good ones are taken"? If not, where are they and why are
they not "taken?" Does that mean they're not so good after all, or just can't
find each other?
Thoughts?
Sharon
St. Louis
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Sharon,
I believe in, "there's someone for everyone" and "never sit around in a
wet bathing suit," both nostrums from my Mother. Sarah Palin for John
McCain, etc. And now I better go change my suit.
For one week give up on the whole propes of finding someone - no really do
it - and let me know what happens.
Best,
Kate
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