What a dreary, rainy, chilly day. And naturally I have to be getting a cold to make it even more richly enjoyable. Maybe I can nip the sniffles in the bud with orange juice and Vitamin C? I knew there was a chance of a cold when I was standing behind a guy at the Subway shop yesterday who reeked of eucalyptus cough drops. I should've gone to Blimpie.

I’ve gotten some work done today but not as much as I’d wanted. And then I had to spend an hour paying bills. One of the things I envy about rich people is that I imagine they don’t have to spend time paying their own bills, but can have assistants or accountants or henchmen pay them. Maybe I’m wrong about that, maybe some big shots love the thrill of writing out fat checks and seeing a humongous balance remaining. All I know is, my entire body seems to constrict when I sit down at the tray table (I also eat on it) to write out the checks.

Yesterday I went to the post office to buy some new 39 cent stamps so I could mail these checks. Ahead of me in the line, a young guy, probably in his thirties, was pointing at a display behind the counter and saying, "Is that Bush on the stamp? Is that George W. Bush?"

"No," I said, "the president can’t put himself on a stamp. Actually, I don’t think they put contemporary figures on stamps, period."

"So who is it? Who is it?" He was squinting to see.

"That's Moss Hart, the playwright," said the postal clerk.

"Whew!" said the young guy. "It's tough enough that McHale's closed. But to see Bush on a stamp! You’re sure that’s not Bush?"

"It's Moss Hart!" the clerk repeated.

The young guy was so unnerved by what he thought he'd seen, that when he left the counter he almost forgot the package he'd come to mail.

"Yeah, it's a drag that McHale's is gone," I said. There was a twentysomething brunette next to me. "You knew McHale's too?" I asked her. "They had the best bacon cheeseburgers. Bacon enough for three breakfasts on a single sandwich. A cool place, unchanged in decor since the 50s."

"I think I knew it," she said, probably just humoring me. "I like burgers."

If I'd had any gumption yesterday, I would have asked her to go have a burger with me then and there. It was dinnertime. She wasn't a beauty but she looked nice enough. Her looks would have improved if she'd said yes, to paraphrase a friend's theory of feminine attractiveness. Maybe she was too young for me, but ever since I watched Thomas Haden Church pick up Sandra Oh in the movie Sideways over the weekend, I've been feeling more horny than usual. The image of them being interrupted mid-screw in one scene has lingered in my mind. Sandra looked so inviting on her back, her leg up in the air, while Church was powering into her from a standing position at the edge of a bed. Looked good, better than getting a lapdance--even a lapdance from Lily, my favorite stripper.

I should've tried to pick up that girl in the post office, doubts be damned.

McHale's is indeed gone. That atmospheric old bar and grill, a Times Square staple for decades at 46th and 8th Avenue--and a location for many movies like Shakedown with Sam Elliott, and She's the One with Cameron Diaz--is coming down so they can put up a high rise.

Maybe they could put McHale’s on a stamp! They have stamps of American sports cars of the 50s. Why not Great Vanished Bar-Grills of the American Metropolis?

And isn't it time Richard Conte got a stamp?

I called the club again tonight and asked about Lily, if and when she was coming back to work. They seemed in the dark about it themselves, saying that she was still on vacation and probably would be back in a few weeks. Now it’s a few weeks! It’s been five weeks already. Ah, what a drag. I really miss hanging out with her. Still, I guess in her absence I’ll be able to put away money for my taxes.

I wasn’t even going to call about her tonight, but as I was sitting idly on my couch, having finished watching the rest of Something Weird’s new vintage striptease DVD entitled Hollywood Burlesque, I began thinking about some of the sexy things Lily said to me as she danced--so, wanting to know if I would soon be hearing some more hot nothings, I picked up the phone and dialed the club. Alas, no dice.

And my 1950s fave dancer, Patti Waggin, seems to be out of the picture too. Meaning, the print of Peek-A-Boo, the 1953 stripper flick that Something Weird has double-featured with Hollywood Burlesque, appears to be missing a scene. As I wrote in my previous post, Patti Waggin is in it, billed only as Patti in this early stage of her career. But the trailer for the film, which is included on the disc, shows a clip of a solo dance scene with Patti which is missing from the complete feature. So although we get to hear Patti’s voice as she performs in a couple of comedy skits, we don’t get to see this solo.

Something Weird does a great job digging up these obscure movies, but part of the problem they can face is damaged or incomplete prints. These movies played in the sleazy Main Street grindhouses and burlesque theaters in the 1950s, and sometimes the prints were chopped up in their travels for reasons of local censorship or who knows what else. It’s conceivable that somebody clipped out Patti’s scene to save as a souvenir. Although forgotten today, she was regarded as one of the top strippers of her era. She married a Major League baseball player too.

Film restoration is not unlike archeology or paleontology in that the objects of the searches, the old buildings and tombs, or the fossils of extinct animals, are sometimes in less than perfect shape. Oh well. Maybe someday Patti’s solo from Peek-A-Boo will surface on some other disc, unless the trailer itself misrepresented the movie and Patti did not have a solo in it. But the credits seem to indicate that she did.

In any case, the stripper who toplined Peek-A-Boo was somebody named Venus, and although her costume left something to be desired (it included a weird headpiece), she was a good dancer, vivacious and energetic, with a pretty smile. Jennie Lee, famous for her big bosom and skill at whirling her nipple tassles, also performs a solo, and she’s fun to watch too—even though her scene seems to have been truncated slightly in the print by some local censor along the road.

Now all I have to do is close my eyes and imagine a movie with Lily in it to tide me over until she comes back...or if she comes back. And if she’s off on the road somewhere herself, I hope she still has that cute little bracelet I got her and remembers me with good feeling.

Oh, slow moving this Monday morning, dragging myself out of bed, dragging my feet as I dropped off a load of laundry at the wash-n-fold place, dragging my eyes across the newspaper and wanting to take another day of leisure, just to drink coffee and veg out...

Nutty dreams last night I couldn't remember, waking up later than usual, feeling guilty for venting about my family in a post yesterday, thinking of my favorite dancer Lily this morning and missing her (she's still on vacation or maybe she quit the job) but not missing spending all that money on her at the club, oh well it is Monday morning and I have work to do.

I don't know why I feel slow to start this morning because actually I got a nice surprise last night--it should have perked me up. Something Weird Video came out with another double-feature DVD of vintage burlesque movies. The main feature is called Hollywood Burlesque, made in 1948, but I started watching the second feature first--it's called Peek-A-Boo, from 1953, and my ultra-50s-fave Patti Waggin is in it. She's only called Patti at this early stage of her career, she's just in the chorus of the Follies Theater in Los Angeles, but her raven black coif (as distinctive as Bettie Page's, in its own way) stands out even in the long-shots that the movie favors. Best of all--Patti speaks! I've only watched two thirds of the flick, but she's been in two comedy skits so far (as well as a big dancing chorus number), and it's so great to hear her voice after seeing her only dancing for the last two years in old burlesque clips! I love the skits with the baggy pants comics making google-eyes at the gals, and the girls' punchlines which are often accompanied by a roll and grind of the hips and big pelvic bumps!

Come to think of it (and how I could I forget this?), it was a Patti Waggin weekend for me because a memorabilia dealer I know found me a copy of a vintage girlie magazine with one hundred photos of 50s strippers, and there was a great shot of Patti. I laid down twenty bucks for the magazine just for her photo. It's hard to find good pix of her, unlike some other more remembered strippers like Tempest Storm, but I've found about five or six of Patti Waggin in old mags so far, and treasure each one.

Well, I'm going to get to work now, but I'll write more about Peek-a-boo and Hollywood Burlesque after I finish the DVD. Have a good day!

I’ve had a knot in my stomach for the last twenty-four hours, a combination of feeling bloated and hungry at the same time--the symptoms of a psychosomatic stomach ailment I had in 1990 when I simultaneously lost my job and tried living outside of Manhattan (aka Sir Cranky’s Terra Firma) for a year. I’ve had this bloated feeling today, I think, largely because of two words my uncle in New Jersey said to me over the phone late yesterday afternoon. I can’t seem to let go of the emotion these words set off in me, a feeling of dismissal, of being trivialized.

This uncle is my late father’s brother; as I’ve written here in posts like “Cousin Cranky,” I saw him and his family more often over the last holidays than I had in recent years, because I attended various family events out where they live, about an hour and a half away by subway and train. They’re nice enough people but I don’t have much in common with them except for a shared name. I can only take their bubble-like mind-set in measured doses. I know that sounds cold, but you would never know anything else is going on in the world when you’re around them. The conversation is often dull and materialistic, and although they’re not bad people I just don’t like to hang around with them much because they can be very boring. There, I said it. Maybe I sound like a snob, but I don’t think that’s the problem. I get along with all kinds of people, but I always feel as if I’m acting around this part of my family, acting as if I feel a deeper connection than I do. Maybe I’m a bad actor and they sense my roleplaying, and they’re roleplaying that they like me too? I just don't understand why I can't accept who they are and feel closer to them...

In any case, another family event has come up and I was invited. A relative is coming into town, and everybody’s going to a restaurant. But when I was told the time, I protested that I myself would have to get up at six thirty in the morning on a Sunday to get there on time for the meal. “Poor baby,” my uncle said in that sarcastic tone he can dole out like somebody spreading salt on a frosty sidewalk. Am I made of ice, in need of a thaw?

“Yeah, poor baby,” I retorted. “Why couldn’t you have scheduled the meal for twelve o’clock instead of eleven?” He knows--or maybe he forgets--that I have to take a subway and then a train to get out to his area, which means I’ll have to catch a nine o’clock train to arrive on time, whereas everybody else can roll out of bed at nine or nine-thirty since the restaurant is not too far from them.

My uncle explained why he scheduled the brunch for eleven. The reason made sense; it had to do with two seatings at this particular venue. Of course, it wasn’t obligatory to eat at eleven, it could have been the lunch seating at one-thirty, but fine. I wasn’t going to argue with that. On the other hand, perhaps another restaurant could have been found that had a wider range of times to eat. But let’s assume there isn’t such a place in all of New Jersey.

Yes, I can get sarcastic too--but I usually confine it to writing, and even then you would be surprised at how much I revise and hold my tongue. For example, I came up with some doozies when I was writing about a celebrity I dislike a couple of months ago here, but no, I thought, don’t tease the poor girl about her resemblance to...

Hush, now, Sir Cranky.

No, my issue was with my uncle’s comment “Poor baby.” These two words immediately made hash of my feelings about the matter, as if I were an infant throwing a tantrum, as if everybody loves to get up at sixty-thirty in the morning on a weekend when it’s absolutely unnecessary! (I hope I’m not starting to sound like the Paul Giamatti character in Sideways!) If my uncle had left the sarcasm out, and merely explained the situation about the two seatings, I still would have been unhappy with the early hour, but I would have just been able to deal with it without feeling this knot in my gut.

Irritable Cranky Syndrome.

My uncle’s sarcasm reminds me of my father’s, which was something my dad seemed to use to keep me constantly feeling as if I’d never measure up to him. It’s strange, but my sisters can remember better than I can how sarcastically my father spoke to me. I seem to have blocked a lot of it out. I don’t know if I’m over-sensitive here, but I usually can take sarcasm from people when it’s not meant to diminish, but merely tease.

I don’t think it would be have been untoward for my uncle to call me before he made the arrangements for the meal to take my travel situation into account, since I’m supposed to be a member of the family too.
“I want to set up a meal for Cousin So-and-So, and I hope it won’t be too much of an inconvenience for you to get here if it’s at eleven. I can’t schedule it any other time for such-and-such reasons.” That’s all it would have taken. Just don’t tell me I’m a baby because I have a reaction you don’t like!

Maybe I am being childish--my great fear is that I’m acting petulantly, and am totally in the wrong about all this--but I’m going to post this on my blog anyway because of those stomach problems in the past, those knots that destroy the pleasure of eating on a normal schedule and mess with your mind. In fact, the last time I really had these problems bad was when I had more contact with my uncle and his family. So I naturally wonder if there is a connection, and if there is, maybe I can short-circuit the problems by venting a little. Please don’t hate me for writing all this; to paraphrase Lesley Gore, it’s my blog, and I’ll cry if I have to...

Ah! I wonder if it’s all in my mind, but does my gut feel a little more relaxed now after all this spewing? Perhaps...and just in time for dinner downtown at a burger joint with my pal ZP...he’ll cheer me up, in any case.

Meanwhile, in spite of this real or imagined “tsuris,” or trouble as it’s said in Yiddish, I worked even more this rainy afternoon at organizing my receipts and tax materials; so even though I didn’t feel much like eating, I took a real load off my mind by accomplishing this task. Soon, I’ll also get myself up to speed on organizing my 2006 receipts so that I don’t have to go through playing catch-up with my paperwork next year.

This afternoon I also watched a second-season episode of George Reeves’ Superman series called The Dog Who Knew Superman, and was pleasantly surprised that Dona Drake was in it. I wrote about her here about a month or two ago; if you do a Blogstream search on her name, you should be able to find that post and a link to her picture. I just can’t remember the title of the post offhand or I would give it to you. Anyway, she was a charismatic 40s and 50s actress and musician who was great at playing sexy “dames,” and she was terrific in this episode as a feisty gangster’s moll. Her bookie boyfriend loses her puppy and she threatens to brain him! It was played for light comedy, but for a moment it really looked like Dona was gonna throw a mean punch!

Speaking of which, my buddy Rexx gave me a recording of a Spanish game show, where winners get a kiss from the pretty hostesses, and the winners get--slapped in the face!! I’ll check it out after dinner...

In any case, watching the original tv series of Superman on DVD is a constant pleasure. I just have to ration myself so I can make the twenty-six episodes of this second season’s boxed set last a few more weeks!

I finally knuckled down and started on my tax preparation this morning, putting the Sunday papers aside after one last long ogle at a particularly beautiful leg shot of actress Heather Graham in the LIFE magazine supplement that comes with the New York Daily News. I feel relieved after two hours of work; I accomplished a lot towards getting organized. As a freelance worker I have to pay my own taxes, and that involves adding up receipts for deductions and so forth. Because of bothersome health and professional distractions, I was less tidy in my record-keeping this year than in previous ones, so I have some catching up to do. It’s a boring task, but once I get into it, the sense of accomplishment balances out the tedium. I didn’t finish it, but I think I have the impetus to complete a lot of it in the next few days.

Perhaps I was at last able to get into it because last evening was pleasant. First I watched the movie Sideways, which I’d never seen before. I thought the neurotic Paul Giamatti character was a little too nebbishy at times, and I much preferred the brio of his horny buddy played by Thomas Haden Church, but the movie had some good belly laughs and that Sandra Oh was quite fetching to observe. I loved the scene where Church is watching her pour a big glass of wine and says that she’s a “very bad girl.” “Yes I am, and I have to be spanked,” Sandra says with a sly look, before walking away and giving her own butt a little tap. A magic cinema moment, and one for which the movie will probably end up in my permanent collection. I see that Blockbuster sells used copies at a reasonable price.

Anyway, after the movie, I had dinner with my writer/bodybuilder/streetfighter friend Rexx at a favorite Italian restaurant, and afterward we stopped in a funky self-described “dive bar” to have a beer. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I am starting to feel a little more sociable, as witness my excursion on Friday to the Geisha Lounge, and last night at the dive I briefly chatted with two young women while waiting for use of the unisex bathroom (the bar was indeed funky and unpretentious). What was nice was that one of the women initiated the conversation with me as she held the bathroom door shut so her girlfriend could do her business. It seemed that the lock on the door didn’t work, so potty time was by necessity a two -person affair; one to go in the bathroom, another to hold the otherwise-swinging door closed. When it was my turn, the gal offered to hold the door shut for me. When I got out, she and her friend went back to a birthday-celebrating group they were part of.

Rexx and I left a few minutes later, but he thought I should have pursued the conversation with the women a little more. I didn’t really want to, though; the girl who started chatting with me (and held the door shut) was nice enough but I wasn’t attracted to her, so I didn’t see the point in going any further with it beyond a few pleasantries. It was nice enough just to be reminded that I can get women to talk to me without having to purchase a twenty-dollar lapdance. Sometimes it feels as if my social skills in the regular world are a little rusty, or my perception of them rather is that they are so. Anyhow, I viewed it as progress. Friday night in the Geisha Lounge I was content just to girl-watch, but last night in the dive bar I started a little chat, so I did go a step further.

I don’t mean to make myself sound like I’m socially inept, because I’m not; it’s just that in this particular arena of meeting new female friends, I’ve gotten badly out of practice. I’m not a natural at talking to strangers or small talk in any case, and it’s a skill I had to acquire by practicing; and by not practicing it, I have to work at it again somewhat. It’s hard to believe that in the early eighties (long before I knew Rexx) I was able to chat up the ladies and get phone numbers and dates in places as diverse as museums, bank lines, subway cars, bookstores, on the street, and in bars and restaurants. Of course I was also much younger. But also in those years, I had relationships that didn’t work out well and I propelled myself into a self-protective shell that’s lasted for a long time. In some ways it feels as if I have been reclusive when it comes to the opposite sex; compartmentalizing my friendships with gals into the constricted arena of the stripclubs. The irony is that I greatly enjoy the company of women; I’m just afraid of getting swallowed up by them in intimate relationships because I too easily repress my feelings in the spirit of being the ever-amiable Sir Cranky. I am generally amiable, but sometimes it is a role that does not fit my mood or inclinations.

No doubt, I am screwed up. My need for independence is satisfied by keeping a certain distance from females, whose company I often crave. And it doesn’t have to be sexual company, as I have always had platonic friends too. At this point in my life my relations with women are split between my platonic companions and the strippers, like Lily, whom I lust over but also like just to hang out with. Well, maybe--maybe--I’ll work out some more reasonable compromise between my desire to be independent and my need to be close to women again.