A humid, sticky Monday...I commuted to New Jersey to work, but now I'm back home. I woke up so early today--5:30 a.m., and I have a dinner appointment with a colleague named Marlena at 7 p.m. which is going to involve margaritas...so I better take a little nap before I go out...

I'm sitting in air-conditioning and my shirt is still sweaty!

I watched Betty Grable's breakout movie from 1940, Down Argentine Way, last night. Just released on DVD on Fox's Marquee Musical line. The story was just a trifle about a rich girl (Betty) who goes down to Argentina to buy racehorses from a suave horse breeder (Don Ameche), but it was worth watching for Betty and Don. What's charming is how the movie makes no bones about basically being a string of musical numbers with a really silly plot. The Technicolor was surreal. Some of the dancing was great, especially the Nicholas Brothers. It's fun to watch Betty dance and sing and walk around all dolled up, it just lifts my spirits. I like her in those 1940s midriff-baring outfits in particular. It was good also to watch the A&E Biography also included on the disc. She sounds like a helluva gal in just about every way. Damn, when is the USPS going to put out a postage stamp of her?? If she picks up my spirits, imagine what she must have done for armed forces in World War 2!

I'm sorry I don't have much more to write today. I have to take a nap...between the heat and my early rising, I feel as if I'm going to fall asleep at the keyboard! Ker-PLOPPPPPP!

It is so hot today. My mind feels scattered. When I woke up, the handymen in my building were hosing down the sidewalk, so I guess it won't expand with the heat, and crack...the generator was not far from my window...I thought they would be done by the time I got back from breakfast at a coffee shop, but they weren't...the ceaseless hum convinced me to get out of my apartment again...to go for a walk before the mercury hit the top of the scale...so I walked over to Tower Video, where they are having a sale ending at midnight today. 20% off on DVDs. I had wanted to get The St. Valentine's Day Massacre with Jason Robards and George Segal, which was just released, but it was sold out! Except for one copy--and the DVD case had been sliced open and the disc stolen...arghh! I've wanted to get a DVD of this for awhile. It's a cool gangster movie from 1967 with a phenomenal array of character actors, and I read in Dave Kehr's NY Times column last Tuesday that it was just coming out.

There were other things to get...like a box set of 4 Betty Grable musicals I've never seen, on sale for twenty dollars off. There was also a book about Grable full of good photos...I was a sucker for them both. At least I paid cash rather than putting down the credit card...

Anyway, it's Father's Day. Of course, I've never had any children, and I've occasionally wondered what it would be like if I had. I like children and seem to be good as an uncle, but I never thought about having any of my own kids. Although my own father certainly took good care of his family, I don't think I ever got the feeling he enjoyed "fatherly" stuff very much. I'm still embarrassed to say that my father never took me to a ballgame (I have never been to Wrigley Field in Chicago, which wasn't far from where I grew up)...we never went to the famous amusement park Riverview (which would be like living in New York and never having gone to Coney Island)...we just didn't really do things as a father and son much. Except for walks after dinner occasionally...otherwise, it was always a family thing, a group thing, and we usually spent Sundays looking at suburban houses my parents never bought until they finally found one in our usual city neighborhood when I was a sophomore in high school...I just never got a sense of my old man really enjoying being around me all that much, and maybe I took that as a subliminal message that fathering wasn't pleasant for him, or something to emulate. Yet, both my sisters had children and are very much into being parents in spite of the fact that our mother is not somebody who comes across as enjoying being a mother, or maternal...I think, actually, they emulate our father in their parenting. I think he was nicer to them than he was to me. They generally have warmer memories of him...

Every child's experience of a family is different. I could see that starkly when I was in Chicago in May, talking with my two sisters and getting the Rashomon effect as we recalled our different angles on the same situations. Anyway, maybe my father resented me for coming along ten months after my parents were wed, and distracting my mother's attention? Who knows.

My father would say stuff to me like, "What I forgot, you'll never know." He said that to me many times...I don't know what it is I did to earn these kinds of digs, but they hurt pretty badly...

The only chance I had to become any kind of man was to move a thousand miles away from all that, but of course, you carry this stuff inside you and fight with it your whole life.

Anyway, I mentioned yesterday how I bought an old movie buff magazine that had an article about 40s star Linda Darnell. The article was informative but surprisingly nasty...the writer was ambivalent about Darnell. It was clear he liked her, but he also kept saying stuff that implied she never really learned to act. People used to write stupid shit like that years ago...what does that mean, she never learned to act? She was in so many memorable movies, and she had tremendous presence...Tyrone Power's Zorro would not have been as memorable without Darnell to play against. I think forty years ago people still thought that "acting" was only signified by the Bette Davis variety of heavy emoting. Now we recognize the best film acting as a different sort of animal...Darnell was a great presence in so many movies, from Fallen Angel to A Letter to Three Wives to Summer Storm to Hangover Square...maybe this condescending critical attitude (which could be found everywhere in those days) was partly responsible for her insecurity as a person, especially later in life as her career stalled. She had a heavy-duty stage mother too, whom she tried to escape by marrying a much older man.

Linda Darnell died a terrible death. It stands out in my mind because she died in a suburb of Chicago where my parents had often looked for potential homes. Darnell was staying with an old friend in Glenview, Illinois, and after watching one of her old movies on tv with her hosts, she fell asleep with a cigarette. This was in April 1965, when I was finishing eighth grade. I remember going to the drugstore near our apartment and seeing the Chicago Sun-Times with the story. Badly burned, Darnell died the next day at a hospital in Skokie, a nearby suburb where in high school I used to go to Jewish youth "mixers" looking for girlfriends...I don't think I really knew much about Darnell at that time, but what struck me was that a big Hollywood star had not only been in an ordinary place like Glenview (where my family and I had spent many boring hours looking at model homes) but had actually died there...and I think her death, coming a few years after the death of George (Superman) Reeves, stayed in my mind as yet another powerful intimation of the mortality and vulnerability of movie stars, who seemed like gods and goddesses to me, or at least some of those most enviable people on earth.

Speaking of enviable, that guy who plays Eva Longoria's hubby on Desperate Housewives--Ricardo Antonio Chavira--really has a good job. He gets to do scenes with Gwendoline Yeo, that unbelievably foxy Singapore-American girl who plays the maid and surrogate mom to the baby of Eva's and Ricardo's characters. The gossip column Page Six had a nice item about Miss Yeo today. I don't usually watch that show but I saw two episodes when visiting my sister Jenny in Chicago last month. She loves the program, and I have to admit, I didn't quite know what I was missing until I saw Gwendoline...

What do they say in the old song? "Who do you go to the show for? The DAMES!"

Anyway, it IS Father's Day for a number of my friends, all of whom are rock solid dads...and I wish them the best!

A friend of mine told me that, in general, the blogs which are most read have short entries. I know I write at length sometimes, not to make things long but to adequately express the subject at hand. It calls to mind something Abraham Lincoln said when asked how long a man's legs should be. "Long enough to reach the ground," Abe answered. That's how long I think entries should be--some short, some long, enough to make make their points with clarity...reach the ground, so to speak.

I just mention this because I realized I wrote a long one yesterday!

Anyway, I went to a movie memorabilia show today, which is always fun. Here's a peek into my eclectic tastes: I bought DVDs of a time-travel fantasy from the 30s and a supernatural horror movie from the 40s; an out-of-print book of jokes by the late nightclub comedian Myron Cohen, whom I saw many times on the old Ed Sullivan show on Sunday nights; a book of saucy pinup art from the 1890s through the 1920s; and three issues of the vintage 60s movie buff magazine, Films in Review (or FIR).

I like reading these old FIRs because they frequently ran lengthy articles about Hollywood history. The issues I bought today have career articles on Linda Darnell, film composer Bernard Herrmann, and a filmography of movies made from the books of the thriller writer Edgar Wallace (he devised the original story for King Kong but didn't live to see the completed movie).

What's also interesting about these mags is to read what some people thought of certain actors then--stars who are now regarded as icons. Here's what a reviewer named Adelaide Comerford had to say about Sean Connery back in 1967, appraising his performance in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice:

"He is not much of an actor, and, of himself, possesses little or no personality. He can read a line as though he understood it, but his voice is not really pleasing, nor are his face and form. Away from the 007 nonsense he's 000." Pretty severe.

From my adolescence, I remember film criticism in the 60s as being far more harsh than it is today, with actors in particular coming in for withering attack. Ironic how today Connery is not only regarded as a fine actor but as the gold standard of James Bonds!

Anyway, I have enough entertainment and reading now to keep me going through a hot and humid weekend!

I went to a party on Wednesday night.

I don't much like parties but a friend got me invited and so I forced myself to go because I know I don't socialize with new people enough. I showered, shaved, dressed, and went. I did have a beer beforehand, however, to relax myself.

The party wasn't bad.

It actually took place in a building where I did freelance work for many years, but this time I saw the edifice from a new perspective. Instead of being in an office on the eighth floor, I was on a rooftop terrace on the eighteenth. Rain had been predicted, but it hardly came down at all, so I got to enjoy a vista of elegant Art Deco buildings under a sky of dark and shifting clouds.

There were some attractive gals at the party, and I chatted with a few.

It's always nice to have conversations with women without having to keep in mind that they're waiting to lapdance for me and earn twenty dollars a song.

Still, I judge ordinary women way too harshly, considering that given my own appearance they are the only ones I can reasonably expect to get. But I've written here how my erotic expectations were raised too high early in life by exposure not just to Playboy, but to the beauties of European cinema like Claudia Cardinale, Gina Lollobrigida, Virna Lisi, Elke Sommer, and Chelo Alonso.

For some complex egotistical reason, I believed I was destined for the favors of such women.

The images of these almost mythic females were branded into my psyche and seemed to promise a world of romance and physical excitement far beyond the mundane life I knew growing up on the North Side of Chicago in West Rogers Park.

Anyway, I guess I'm at a point in my life when almost no activity is free from a certain self-consciousness. When I talk to a new woman, for example, I can sense myself subconsciously aware of the procession of all the women I've known in the past: the women I've been with, the women I haven't; the women I've wanted, the women who haven't wanted me. I have a very hard time staying in the present moment.

This is what happens when you feel at midlife that you haven't achieved your sensual dreams and goals, and feel constantly unsatisfied.

I find myself often bored by what I say to new women in social situations, except in stripclubs, where I am revealed in my naked need as the friendly, semi-goofy acolyte of feminine beauty I really am. I don't mind when they tell me I remind them of a puppy when I look up at them. I know it's true...yes, in that environment, I am relieved by not having to hide my real nature.

The friend with whom I went to the party is a very handsome guy, quite a bit younger than I am. He’s buff in the way that is so admired these days, and he's also a well-spoken and inveterate flirt, very smooth with the chicks.

I couldn't help but reflect how in contrast I really can't flirt with women anymore except when I feel very attracted to them, and feel that they possibly find me attractive as well. If I feel it's only me wanting them, I can't relax. I have never been good at pursuit and seduction of the uninterested or ambivalent.

In a stripclub, I know the women are attracted to me, even if it's only for my money, so I am able to be quite charming sometimes. It's almost bizarre how at ease I can feel there in contrast to the "real world."

In the “real world,” I am constantly aware that I am judged by the same exacting standards I apply to average women, and I definitely fall in the lower percentiles of masculine allure. Not only am I average-looking, but I am middle-aged. Still, I am just ordinary, mind you, not Quasimodo; but ordinary is seen as blah these days, and perhaps even pathetic.

Just as that wealth guru says, "There's no middle-class anymore, you have to choose between rich or poor," in the arena of sexual attractiveness, to be ordinary is to be invisible, at least in places like New York. You gotta be Top Choice--or you might as well be H for Horrifying so you’ll foster no illusions about yourself.

Anyway, there was one gal at the party I particularly enjoyed talking to, and who seemed to enjoy talking with me in turn. It was then that I could feel my ability to flirt return--but I held it in abeyance because she was there with her husband. Otherwise, I might have tried to get to know her better. So there I was, earlier castigating myself for feeling so asexual in conversation, until I felt the opposite when talking with someone who caught my fancy and didn't seem to consider me a ghoul.

Maybe “ghoul” sounds excessive, but that is what New York women can make you feel like if you express interest and they decide you are not worth bothering with.

Yes, it was good to be reminded that if and when I feel a glimmer of what passes for mutual attraction, I can come out of my shell. Maybe next time I'll run into somebody who's available, as well as attractive to me.

Then again, my fear of involvement and commitment might rise up as usual, and perhaps I'd still restrain my desire to flirt, to finalize, to connect.

Yes, the stripclub is safer.

Thinking about this doesn't make me feel very good about myself.

Maybe I like spending the money on dancers not only because I'm getting easy thrills, but because when the money runs out, they leave.

They leave...

And I am free again.

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POSTSCRIPT...

The friend who took me to the party called a little while ago to chat, and asked if I’d hooked up with a woman I’d been talking to around the time he left.

I told him no--that although it was okay to talk to her, I wasn’t attracted enough to take it any further.

I said, “I’ve learned through experience that if I don’t feel initially drawn to a woman’s looks, it’s a waste of my time to pursue her. If we go to bed, I might not even be able to get it up.”

When I was younger, I went to bed with gals I had no particular desire for, but the fact that they were available convinced me to go through with it. I performed okay, but I didn’t enjoy it much. But after doing this several times, my body rebelled and would not cooperate.

Sir Cranky, disillusioned by meaningless sex by his mid-thirties!

I know the old saying about sex and pizza--that even when they’re bad, they’re good...but is that really true?

Talking to my friend reminded me of the time I went on a vacation to Florida about twenty years ago. I picked up a girl on the bus coming in from the airport, and we made a date to have dinner. She was personable, if somewhat plain and bulky, and I didn’t feel any real desire for her. But I thought, “Cranky, this will help you start off your vacation on the right foot. Maybe you’ll get laid on your very first night here!” Big mistake. Not only wasn’t I attracted to her physically, but her personality really had no appeal to me, and the whole thing was a total disaster. Back in her room, I couldn’t get it up and that lead to the awful question, “What’s wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong??” (Think of the old “echo” effect.)

I hemmed and hawwed my way out of there, but I deservedly felt like a shithead. It cast a pall on the rest of my vacation, although towards the end I did hang out with a girl I liked--but who didn’t want to sleep with me.

They call it just desserts, I believe.

So I’d rather be alone than go through that again. Some guys can have sex with a tree stump, but if I don’t feel attraction, I’m not getting--or am able to give-- satisfaction.

Yes, I’d rather go to a stripclub.

I took my writer/artist buddy ZP, who looks like a tall Kafka, to the Starshine Burlesque last night in New York's East Village. We had a fine time! This was my third visit to the Starshine, and ZP's first. The show had a great lineup with the comic prestidigitation of Magic Brian bringing zany new life to that old children's show chestnut, the cut-and-restored rope trick; the emceeing of Rose Wood in his drag guise of the watchful Sister Fredericka of Hollywood; and dancing by top peelers Dottie Lux, Delirium Tremens, Lukki, Veronika Sweet, Creamy Stevens, and Little Brooklyn. They had a drinking contest with two girls from the audience named Lola and Marla trying to finish Heineken bottles held between the lush thighs of Creamy and Little Brooklyn--and these girls were seriously guzzling the brews! It came to a draw amid the applause of a happy crowd. Fetching go-go dancer Amelia Danger performed before the show, writhing in front of a white sheet in the bar's window. A bachelorette was brought up onstage to be congratulated for maintaining her virginity all these many years until her impending marriage.

Dottie Lux stripped out of her boa and bra while wearing strangely sexy clown makeup; Delirium Tremens peeled out of a pink satiny 1950s dress and gloves--ZP in particular loved her pinup-girl expressions underneath her Bettie Page 'do; Lukki slid out of a Carmen Miranda-style South-of-the-Border costume to an Yma Sumac mambo number, and ate an apple from her hat with voluptuous satisfaction; Veronika Sweet came out as a "Mafia Princess" in letter-perfect 1960s style complete with sleeveless black dress and poufy hair, and danced a bold and saucy strip to a big orchestral arrangement ala vintage Vegas; and Creamy Stevens posed as a bespectacled medical technician who pines over a photo of her dreamboat--Ricardo Montalban!--and then strips out of her dress and gets quite raunchy with his lab samples!! As if continuing the theme of ladies and fluids, Little Brooklyn (who co-produces the show with Creamy) performed as a 1950s housewife in shirtwaist print dress, full apron, and rubber gloves, scouring her glassware and plates, until she starts to go berserk with the suds and sprinkles detergent all over her body and lingerie! Last but not least, emcee Rose Wood briefly slipped out of his nun's attire to do a bold turn in drag as a female stripper right down to pasties, g-strings, and stockings. Now THAT takes balls!!

Glancing through the audience, I also saw Runaround Sue in attendance. She was one of the best performers in Starshine's Summer Starlet Search I saw a few weeks ago, and I do hope she performs again soon.

ZP hadn't read my entry from yesterday yet, but he echoed my sentiments there when he said jokingly during the show, "This is now my religion! Let's meet up again soon, Cranky, for Thursday night services at the Starshine!"

It looks like for the first time in our lives, we two scoundrels have a shot at being devout!