I went to the stripclub Friday night but my mind seemed to be elsewhere the entire time, so I didn't stay long...which of course is always good for my wallet. I ended up going to the diner and having French toast and fresh fruit for dinner. I seem to be eating this sweet stuff a lot lately. Also I couldn't stop eating chocolate last night. I know I'm tense, anticipating the tax time financial massacre that puts me in debt all over again as a freelancer...

I spent a couple of hours after breakfast doing some more preparation to go see my accountant. Lots of figuring and planning on how to put some money in the IRA and still have enough left to pay my regular bills. Oh man, why couldn't I have made a big score and become rich?? Anyway, I then had an otherwise lazy Sunday reading the papers, talking to a couple of my friends on the phone, and then browsing in Borders. I just have a need to browse in bookstores and video stores, even though I probably have enough stuff to keep me going for five years if I never bought another book or DVD. The browsing doesn't even relax me that much; it just distracts me, gets me out amongst people. At least I didn't buy anything this time, although I was tempted to get a book about the 50s Hollywood scene that had a great picture of the late stripper Candy Barr. But it was only ONE picture, and I told myself it wasn't worth $24.95.

Back at my apartment, I read an article in Parade magazine about soldiers in the Iraqi army; the implication I got from this piece, written by a Marine veteran of the Iraqi campaign, is that the Iraqis' commitment to their own military is probably not cohesive enough to keep the country together if and when the Americans leave. Grim prognosis indeed.

After I read the article I started daydreaming about a pretty woman I'd seen on the street Saturday when we had a little burst of spring-like weather. She was demurely dressed, about twenty, with long blonde hair, and she wore a pretty dress and a light coat. There was something so peaceful and comforting about her look. Thinking about her diminished the stress I felt after working on my taxes and thinking about all the carnage over in Iraq.

I spend a good deal of time daydreaming about this or that, often just to relieve tension, and I used to think there was something unusual about me for doing this so much until I realized that this seems to be a national frame of mind lately, shared by many people. With all the problems in our world, folks seem to be on a constant search for distracting entertainment. Pages of the newspapers are devoted to Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, and Hollywood gossip, often pushing more significant items off the front pages. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the melodramatic problems of celebrities seem manageable by comparison. I comfort myself with the image of a sweet blonde, while others lose their anxiety between the two ear buds of an iPod which they wear constantly. It's all about escape.

I watched the old Sean Connery/James Bond flick From Russia With Love this afternoon. The heroine is introduced to Bond in a bedroom scene where she is under the sheets, wearing just black stockings and a black velvet ribbon, or choker, around her neck. I saw this movie when I was twelve years old in 1963, and the image of that ribbon always stayed with me as a symbol of erotic adventure and delight.

About eighteen years later I was involved with a girl for whom I bought such a choker as a gift. In my travels in the world of strippers back then, I knew a costume designer, and I went to this designer to have the ribbon made specially for my girlfriend in black lace. It was just a fun little gift. There was no kinkier meaning to it for me other than I wanted to see my gal wearing a sexy black choker sometime when we made love.

I wasn't hanging around with strippers or any other women during the time I was with her, either.

Anyway, despite her beauty and intelligence and sense of humor, my girlfriend had a large share of problems, and she interpreted the gift in completely the wrong way. Instead of seeing it as an aphrodisiac little notion, she viewed it through some combination of feminism and alcoholism that turned it into a “slave collar,” as if I wanted to subjugate her with it, when in fact its only meaning to me was that it would be a sexy extra touch when we slept together one night. Now, this is a girl who told me at the end of our relationship that I always looked happy going to bed with her, so it certainly wasn’t a question of my not liking her just as she was. We argued a lot because she was so damn ornery (and a recently recovering alcoholic) but I never once had a bad night’s sleep with her (maybe because I was exhausted from quarreling? I dunno.) Anyway, I don’t remember now if she ever wore it, because the fight we had about its “subtext” and its subsequent disposal in the garbage is the main thing I remember--other than sitting in the costume designer’s loft and feeling like James Bond while she showed me different kinds of lace before she cut and made this choker for a gorgeous girl I was crazy about.

There was an article in the New York Post yesterday by Mackenzie Dawson about how Manhattan gals look down on pantyhose, and would rather just wear heavy tights, or more preferably go bare-legged, in the cold weather.

The article says "pantyhose are for losers and tourists." Isn't that a mite harsh on the throngs of visitors whom our beloved Mayor Bloomberg assiduously courts? You mean all those ladies who line up for The Phantom of the Opera, The Lion King, and The Color Purple are just big zeros?

Trivial digression: in Britain, pantyhose are called tights, whereas here in the U.S., tights are a different animal entirely.

Anyway, I've frequently marveled at skirted chicks walking around with the wind buffeting their bare gams. And I gape goggle-eyed at gals who wear open sandals when the temperature is under 30 degrees. Are they nuts, or are they advertising for someone to warm up their frosty tootsies?

The Post article says women don't like pantyhose partly because it makes them feel their legs look like sausage casings. Well, let Sir Cranky put his two shekels in...

Pantyhose are extremely sexy on women! The texture is arousing, particularly thighs in pantyhose! And butts in pantyhose are XXX-cellent!

In any case, girls, a major point of pantyhose is PRECISELY to put that "sausage casing" on you, like a kind of security barrier to heighten our male lust! Pantyhose serves as the rope ladder we have to ascend to capture your favors--the castle wall we have to scale to reach the precincts of your yearning yoni! In fact, this is probably the most profound function of pantyhose, as I seriously doubt pantyhose can keep legs very warm in really cold weather.

I'd rather wear tights too.

I think women who walk around with bare legs all the time are actually practicing an extremely esoteric form of crossdressing. Rather than wearing an item of the clothing of the opposite sex in order to crossdress, instead they emulate the opposite sex by NOT wearing something that women are supposed to wear, but men don't wear! The clinical term is "crossdressing by omission" (or so states a recent paper published by the Sir Cranky Clinic for Inconvenient Disorders.) In essence, men don't wear pantyhose, so if a woman doesn't wear pantyhose, she may indeed be trying to pass herself off as a kind of "drag" man. Hence, a woman in freezing weather with bare legs under trousers is a transvestite, since men don't wear pantyhose under their trousers; and if she is advertising her bare legs by wearing a skirt, she is an exhibitionistic transvestite! (Yes, I believe women should wear pantyhose under their pants as well as with skirts and dresses.)

And in writing the last paragraph, I am practicing a form of literary crossdressing, because I am a man imitating the frequently female ability to transform any idea to suit her whims. In freely molding the concept of crossdressing to suit the purposes of my own frenzied logic and overheated emotions, I am acting just like many contemporary gals who, for example, are able to find "empowerment" in almost anything in order to justify whatever action they've just taken, or whatever philosophy they have.

Hey, is this too heavy for a late Friday afternoon blog?

I think it's time to head to the tittie bar...

I see I had lots of company yesterday writing about Frank Bruni’s New York Times review of a steakhouse in a tittie bar. After I read that Bruni’s piece was yesterday’s most emailed article in the Times, I did a Google blog search and saw an endless amount of commentaries on it, too.

It’s like the blogosphere is a cyberspace water cooler around which we all gather to assert our individuality through analysis and pseudo-gossip. Of course, the difference between the blogosphere and the water cooler is that everybody’s comments are written in digital stone, and later, at our leisure, we can then compare our quips in how deftly we dissected Mr. Bruni’s babblings. I looked at a couple of other people’s entries, but I immediately went into “compare and despair” mode, thinking to myself, “I should have come up with that snappy headline,” or “This blogger is much wittier than me.”

How friggin' pathetic.

It’s enough to send a man into the arms of a good stripper to forget his ego in the warmth of her breasts! Well, now I have weekend plans.

My writer friend Moe kindly brought an article to my attention in today's New York Times that I probably would have missed. Being on a freelancer's limited budget these days, I tend to avoid reading the restaurant reviews, which tease yet deny the fulfillment of my senses with a cruelty second only to lapdances. Yet here was a piece I had to read, by the Times eatery scribe Frank Bruni, about a steakhouse located in a stripclub! Specifically, Robert's Steakhouse in the Penthouse Executive Club on the Far West Side of Midtown Manhattan.

Oh yummy: I love it when the Times deigns to rub elbows with my favorite kind of woman, La Femme Ecdysiasticus. And I do like reading about good steaks, because on occasion I manage to afford to consume them. (Thanks to the largesse of my writer/bodybuilder/streetfighter pal Rexx, I dined recently at Sparks.)

My hopes for Frank Bruni and his review grew a little shaky at first when in his fourth paragraph he wrote, speaking of himself and his dinner companions: "We were strangers to such pulchritudinous territory, less susceptible to the scenery than other men might be, more aroused by the side dishes than the sideshow." Hmm, those first two clauses are mysteriously loaded: firstly, I always scoff at grown men who profess to be lambs in the land of lasciviousness, who claim to be unacquainted with flesh palaces--really?? In Gluttonous Gotham in the 21st century?? And then, that second statement, "less susceptible to the scenery than other men might be..." My first interpretation of that line was that Frank means he's gay. Is he? And/or his friends, too? But being gay doesn't prevent a man from being "susceptible" to a skin display--because gay men go to their own strip shows, and look at their own erotica. So what did Frankie mean??

Calling all copy editors! Hey, I know a good one who works freelance at Vanity Fair.

Frank meets a stripper who accepts his offer of a glass of cabernet, and she says he can pour it on her toes. And then he tells us--"Didn't happen." My dear Signor Bruni, you should have called moi. (Wait, you don't know moi. Darn.) Because I would have accepted that experience. And then Frank admits that on his visits to both the stripclub and the steakhouse, through which the peelers apparently traverse freely, he was "derelict in my duty, failing to sample much of what the restaurant had to offer."

A pity, that. Wasn't he curious about how a lapdance or two could affect the perceptions of his palate? He's basically saying that he didn't finish his job, and saying it in print! Will he get spanked back at Times headquarters? I would hope so. (Maybe one of the Penthouse chicks could be brought in with a paddle.)

In the "body" of the review (nyuk-nyuk!) Frank gets into what he does pretty well, and describes the chow. After a really positive analysis that implies that the meat at Robert's combines the best qualities of two of New York's finest steak joints (which would seem to indicate that even the presence of strippers does not detract from the chef's triumphant achievement) Frank only gives the place one star. Huh? Doesn't compute. The Times should let Frank put a calculator on his expense account, and not just the wine.

Frank's discussion of the chef's work situation reminded me of what I call the "Positive Fringe Effect in Popular Culture." Because the executive chef of Robert's Steakhouse weaves his wonders within what is generally regarded as a declassé environment (the Penthouse Executive Club, aka a tittie bar), by his own admission to Bruni the chef is given more control over the food than he would have in another type of establishment. This reminds me of how directors of Grade B to Grade Z films made on the fringes of Hollywood, everybody from Edgar "Detour" Ulmer to Ed "Plan 9 from Outer Space" Wood, were able to freely exercise more creativity in their world of schlock cinema and make classics because they were left alone to spin their magic as long as they turned in the goods on time and on the dime. Similarly, it sounds as if Lang has found a similarly laissez-faire environment to do his steakmaking the way he sees fit, and it sounds as if he produces damn good meals, which Sir Cranky will have to sample some time when he and his friends are feeling flush.

Returning to Frank's review: his description of a dessert called "a buttery nipple" makes me wonder if you can just go the steakhouse for the dessert alone, because for $20 cash a dancer will straddle your lap, and "pour a combination of Bailey's Irish Cream and butterscotch schnapps down your throat," with a squirting of Reddi-Whip to top it off. That I could afford; a $53 strip steak would give me pause. As it is, I currently prefer my after-stripclub meals at Greek-American diners, where for $10.95-$12.95 I can scarf soup, salad, entree, and side dishes, sometimes with a free glass of house wine thrown in for good measure. Coffee, regrettably, comes extra.

Frank winds up his review with a bit of condescension toward the strippers and their intellectual attainments, their choices of cellphones, and their lack of certainty in the spelling of their stage names. But really, Frank, you shouldn't take a girl to task for not being sure if Brianna is spelled with one "n" or two. After all, at least strippers make things easy for us by still using stage names. That's better than actors who use unpronounceable monikers nowadays, like that Euro fella who played the villain in Casino Royale. I couldn't tell you who he was even if you threatened to beat my testicles with a rope.