Number 12 Looks Just Like You.

The Twilight Zone is my favorite series of all time. Rod Serling's promise was to take good writing and bring it to the home viewers, and that promise was kept every week! This episode is one of my favorites: Number 12 Looks Just Like You, written by Charles Beaumont. Beaumont is also one of my favorite short story writers.

Submitted for your approval:

Things I missed in college.

The wicked art of the immortal Wally Wood.

Please check out my new blip account. I'm picking at least a couple of new songs daily and would love to have new listeners. If you dig Pandora, this isn't too different. The difference is that Pandora keeps rotating the same songs through and this system tends to bring up a lot of cool new stuff. So sign up for Blip and start listening. I'll listen to you too.

I love this article that I stole from Susie Bright's Facebook feed: What I learned at my first orgy. Personally I've never attended nor participated in an orgy. I just love the final conclusion at which Greta Christina arrives.

added later:
I've been thinking about the concept of polyamory lately. For those of you who have never heard of it, it's the idea of having established more than one relationship or planned non-monogamous relationships. This idea sounds really complicated to me. I would say that if I could handle a relationship, it would probably be with one woman.

However, I know more and more people who are living in polyamorous relationships. When I hear about this, my first reaction is to filter it through my own beliefs in my own ability to deal with jealousy, to imagine multiple viewpoints, to remember the times I've been burned. Is it possible to maintain such a relationship? All the evidence I've read suggests that it's more difficult than a one-on-one relationship. It might be possible, but it would take a stronger person, a group of people who are each individually stronger than me.

I think that's why the article is so refreshing for me.

10 Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm

Thanks to Josie Jacobs, from whom I stole this clip.

Mary Roach is the author Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. This video features her speaking about orgasm. I didn't notice any specific human nudity, but there are some moments that might be questionable at work. Buyer beware.

The L stands for love!

I'm totally listening to the original cast recording of A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant. It's kicking my ass in the most bestest of ways! From what I've been told, you probably won't get to see this performed, ever. Xenu has deep pockets.

I honestly don't have any love or loathing for Scientology. I'm just a fan of a good satire.




This evening I watched the Tony Awards and I was stoked to learn that Hair won the award for best revival. That makes me happy since it's the only Broadway show that I've seen in the last decade. Also, I just love the show in general and have done for years. This new production just burst off the freakin' stage.

At some point, I'm gonna have to get the cast recording.

Lefties don't need special rights

I'm about as gay as I am left-handed. Which is to say that I can write with my left hand if I make myself do it. It isn't pretty and it never feels right.

I was thinking up this whole analogy about how left-handed folks were once shamed and chided into behaving in a right-handed way and how that was similar to the way that gay folks are often shamed and chided into behaving straight. If you believe that sexual orientation is as biologically ingrained as handed-ness then it shouldn't be too hard to understand.

In my research, I found one person who said basically what I was thinking but from the gay/left-handed perspective. Go there to find my basic conclusion, but from an insider. I'm not suggesting that left-handed people are gay or vice versa. If you believe that gayness is genetically programmed ("Oh, my girl takes after her aunt Susie") then it makes sense. Though they were once expected to change their ways, being a left-handed is now more-or-less considered natural and not sinister, pun intended.

Some have argued that being gay requires a behavior, that men who are attracted to other men and women who are attracted to other women don't need to act on those impulses. The sin of gayness, as described above, is a sin of acting the way that one's heart tells them to do rather than squelching those feelings. It makes sense to me that teachers and parents tried to purge the left-handedness out of children. Would it have to do with making kids more "normal?"

This is to me what the whole mess is about: encouraging normalness. As a strange person, I have to take offense. Don't get me started on "tradition."

I imagine that being a leftie and learning to write with one's right hand would be similar to being gay and marry a person of the "appropriate" gender. This appears to be, after all, what opponents of gay marriage would encourage. However, marrying the wrong person would seem to be much more horrific to me.

Why is it said that the existence of same-sex marrieds threatens the existence of marriage as an institution? It seems irrational to me. Put in this same point of view, it seems as if folks were complaining that left-handed kids threaten to infect a whole school with the Southpaw flu.

I once tried signing my name with my left hand. I'm still all right.

One of Dem Bums

This I Believe was a radio program conceived by Edward R. Murrow in which prominent people and normal folks could share 600 words about their system of thought. It was launched in 1949. Decades later, the show was relaunched as a series on National Public Radio. In the time since then many of the articles have been collected in a series of books, also called This I Believe.

In the 1952 edition of This I Believe Jackie Robinson, the famous first African-American baseball player wrote a passage that puts me in mind of the current events of today:

... I can tell [my children] too, that they will never face some of these prejudices because other people have gone before them. And to myself I can say that, because progress is unalterable, many of today's dogmas will have vanished by the time they grow into adults. I can say to my children: There is a chance for you. No guarantee, but a chance. And this chance has come to be, because there is nothing static with free people. There is no middle ages logic so strong that it can stop the human tide from flowing forward. I do not believe that every person, in every walk of life, can succeed in spite of any handicap. That would be perfection. But I do believe - and with every fiber in me - that what I was able to attain came to be because we put behind us (no matter how slowly) the dogmas of the past to discover the truth of today; and perhaps find the truth of tomorrow.
I believe in the human race.
I believe in the warm heart.
I believe in man's integrity.
I believe in the goodness of a free society.

"If I had to do it all over again, I would do it."

This entire morning has been filled with the news that Frankie Manning, the Ambassador of Lindy Hop, has died. Credited with creating the first air steps of the dance, his legacy is far more than can be described in a short missive.


This clip dates back to the 1980s, I think.

This was surely one of the first things I watched in my own Lindy Hop education. Since then, a generation of dancers have been gifted with his inspiration.

I remember the moment I first saw the flyer for the Harvest Moon Swingout in 1997. I had learned East Coast Swing a month before and had planned to delay learning Lindy Hop for another few months. Then I saw the flyer at one of the Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association Saturday dances. Frankie Manning would be teaching Lindy Hop the following weekend! I hadn't learned the step yet, but the common thought at the time was that it was nearly impossible to learn. So I bought the Frankie Manning/Erin Stephens instructional video and got to learning on Sunday. Then I took Erik and Sylvia's Lindy Hop class at The Derby on Monday and worked on the basic step for the rest of the week.

By the time I got to the class on the following Saturday, I hesitantly joined Frankie's beginning level class. I really didn't have an idea of what to expect from the man. This was in the days before YouTube. I thought he would be an old white guy, and I might have been intimidated by the mere idea of him. In class I warned my partners that I had only started learning the dance the week before. Most were pleasant, if not a little put off by my warning. They were patient with me and perhaps surprised by my progress.

Wow! The man at the head of class had this joyful timbre in his voice, like he was on the verge of spilling his laughter over the crowd! He was absolutely not the scary white man that I had imagined. Frankie Manning had an excitement during that class that surely carried over into the way I feel about the dance today. Hundreds of dancers in the room were with him that day and I'm convinced that was merely a drop in the bucket.



That night at the dance, they played the first Lindy Hop clips I ever saw, including Hot Chocolates, still reversed in soundie form. In the film, Frankie was the man wearing the overcoat. It was that night that I first began my quest to find more dance footage, years of wandering through obscure video stores and wading through films and catalogues to find the merest glimpse of Lindy Hop.

If anything could be said about that week, I learned that Lindy Hop wasn't impossible after all. Lindy Hop could be as easy as walking, only filled with exuberance, replete with joy!

So Frankie Manning, I thank you many times over for the love you shared, not just in the dance but in life. You have meant so much to so many people. For me, your laughter lives on in my own teaching. Your joy will live on in the generations to come!