BRUISES THE GIN
INTERVIEW: GEORGE SNYDER, AUTHOR,
On Wings of Affection. By Ben Tyler
On Wings of Affection by George Snyder
It’s not often that I read an absorbing novel that takes place in my own neighborhood, with characters who are on the periphery of my social circle: The rich. Famous/infamous. Wannabees. Poseurs. Ne’er-do-wells. Etc. A beloved colleague in the office brought me a gift of a copy of On Wings of Affection. A gift indeed! The Lambda Literary magazine calls On Wings of Affection, “… a recommended read for anyone wanting to spruce up the darkening days of autumn with the spirit of some summer-like exuberance.”
I bribed author George Snyder to have dinner with me with at Il Covo (try their risotto!!!) in West Hollywood. We shared an immediate sympatico and here’s some of what we talked about:
BT: LET’S START WITH THE BASICS. WHERE WERE YOU BORN AND RAISED?
GS: Like Vera Charles I was born in Pittsburgh, so right away I knew I had to do something. [Ed. Note. We like this man already!] My parents decamped soon after I was born, however, and moved north to a farm on Lake Erie. Soon thereafter my father got the urge to move west and we did. To Ohio. Mother never cared much for Ohio, but my formative years were spent in that state.
Happily I had no trouble being accepted to the schools I applied to for college. Unhappily they expected me to pay. So my mother marched down to the Methodist church where she had some pull and called in a few favors, and I got to go to school on scholarship to a little Methodist liberal arts college in Ohio called Baldwin-Wallace. Which was just as well; anything more exciting would have done me in. Later I went on to graduate school at the University of Chicago but by that time I was vastly more experienced at making friends and getting into gay bars. Chicago was fun.
BT: TELL US ABOUT YOUR CAREER AS A WRITER. WHAT WAS YOUR PATH TO FULFILLING YOUR DREAMS?
GS: I always wanted to be a writer. I romanticized the idea a great deal, I’m afraid. My models were English lady novelists from that great period of novel-writing between the Wars. So I aspired to be like Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keene, and then later on I was profoundly influenced by the novels of Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. I didn’t read many men until later. As a marketing plan, it was probably doomed, patterning myself after these great ladies, but there you are. I was a strange child.
George Snyder, Author, On Wings of Affection I’ve always wanted to write novels, and people kept advising me to write short stories. But I don’t like reading short stories very much, and the ones I tried to write reflected my disinterest. A man whose work I did read, Truman Capote, said he always started out trying to write a short story and it would turn into a novel. But really I like what Iris Murdoch said about novels, that the good ones are about love. I do think that’s true and it’s why I love them. Or the ones that are about love, at any rate.
BT: YOU ALSO WORKED IN TELEVISION FOR MANY YEARS. TELL US ABOUT THAT EXPERIENCE.
GS: I did work in television, it was completely by accident. I met a lovely man who was looking for an assistant. Oh well, I said, I’m sure you want a pretty Cindy Lou Hoo to be your assistant, and he admitted he did, but then he said he thought his wife would prefer me. Prefer that he have me, that is, instead of a cute blonde girl. And so he did. Not, you know, “have” me, but he hired me and I was with him for 100 episodes of a show about a girl who slays vampires. I learned so much from him. He said he always thought it was a compliment in television to be suspected of being gay. Gay or Jewish. He was always flattered when people thought he was either, or both. All the best people in television are gay or Jewish, was his opinion.
BT: YOU HAVE FULFILLED YOUR DREAM OF BECOMING A NOVELIST. LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR DEBUT NOVEL, ON WINGS OF AFFECTION.
GS: On Wings of Affection grew out of my blog. I’d gotten discouraged with my writing – I have a very hard time with rejection, and the endless sending out your manuscript to have it sent back unread or turned down – and a friend suggested I do a blog. It was fun, and it was good writing exercise, and out of it a voice began to emerge. With the voice came characters and the next thing I knew I had enough material to write the first book in this series I’m working on, the Sam, Pam and Didier Adventure Series, an episodic saga about life in the city of fallen angels.
Now I write every day. I get up at five, turn on the lap top, open my current document, go put the water on for coffee, come back and start typing. I always have the dimmest hope of producing anything worth the effort, and every day a couple of hours later I decide it wasn’t so bad and I give myself permission to go on living. Then I close up, shower and dress and go to my day job.
BT WE ALL HAVE A “DAY JOB,” DON’T WE?
GS: Yes, I have a day job. Luckily. There are days when I think it would be lovely to stay here and write all day, but the truth is, I need my time away from writing, and so it is very nice to have somewhere to go to. But juggling a job and a writing career is never simple, is it. I’ve tried different jobs and different combinations – I was a teacher, I worked in the auction business cataloguing books and manuscripts, I worked for a writer in television… I think whatever gives you structure and leaves some time left over for you to write is a good combination. But it’s tricky.
BT: THE COVER ART FOR YOUR NOVEL IS VERY SEDUCTIVE. WAS THE DESIGN YOUR IDEA?
GS: I love the cover of On Wings of Affection.
“Artsy” first cover idea for On Wings of Affection. I loved my first effort which was an artsy effort with marbled paper and a handwritten label – something Virginia Woolf might have done at the Hogarth Press, you know? But it was great fun when friends suggested we get a nice young man to take his clothes off and photograph him leaning languidly, pensively in a window. A lesbian friend of mine was horrified by the bulge in the underwear, but I told her we’d photo-shopped it down because in the original his penis was so enormous it was just too much of a distraction. She screamed.
The title comes from a made-up translation of a Persian poem about birds – the excerpt I “translated” is on the title page. People hate the title. They think it sounds like a romance by one of those English lady novelists from between the wars. Hello, that was the idea! It’s a book that’s literally for the birds! HA! The problem is, people have to read the book in order to find out that perhaps I’m being funny. At least a little bit. Perhaps I was too subtle, do you think?
BT: YOU’VE JUST PUBLISHED THE SECOND BOOK IN THE SERIES. TELL US ABOUT THE LATEST IN THE TRILOGY.
GS: Book Two in the series is called Down the Garden Path. Now, I think that title should make it clear I’m not deadly earnest and serious – I’m leading the reader down the garden path, as in leading you astray, and having fun, and being silly. A little. I hope people ‘get it.’ It’s always hard to know, however, what people will get. Book one was all about birds. Book two is all about flowers and gardens and plants. In Book one the evil decorator was Mr. Tanager. In Book two I focus on the evil landscape architect, Beau Thorne. He’s gorgeous and very ambitious.
BT: WE KNOW FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE THE CHALLENGE OF WORKING A DEMANDING FULL-TIME JOB, AND WRITING NOVELS. WHAT HAS THE EXPERIENCE BEEN FOR YOU?
GS: This is, by the way, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, showing up to write every morning even when I think it’s futile and pointless. I don’t come from a world where people grow up to be novelists. They grow up to be husbands and fathers and businessmen like my brothers. But not novelists. And yet, my family has been very nice about it, all things considered. I’ve always been rather the black sheep, however. At least I wasn’t locked away in a sheltered workshop and not allowed to mingle with the general population – there was a time when it was a bit touch and go on that front!
Now there’s not enough time in the day, of course, to do everything. When I’m not writing or working, I like to read. I’ve done lots of things in my life, but these days if I have free time I find myself coming back to my writing, or reading. There’s so much to read, and I do love it. Friends like to do things, and I go along, I do enjoy travel and museums and concerts and dinner parties and films, but as I said, there’s not enough time for everything, friends get annoyed. You never want to do anything, they say. You never have time. No, I don’t!
BT: WE ENJOY YOUR BLOG, 1904, BUT WE’RE INTRIGUED ABOUT THE TITLE. TELL US ABOUT THIS FASCINATING BLOG.
GS: 1904 is my blog. I started with 1904 because it’s a special year for me, so many of the people and things I love date from 1904, it’s the year The Cherry Orchard, Peter Pan, Madama Butterfly all premiered, the year Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (okay, one of the male novelists I like) was published, the year Nancy Mitford, Christopher Isherwood, Cecil Beaton, and Cary Grant were all born. I rest my case! But now 1904 is just about anything I decide I want to write about. 1904 is a way of organizing and framing my interests. And once you start organizing and framing anything, you start giving it meaning and importance. Look for meaning anywhere and you find it. Or something close. I love that.
BT: WHAT IS THE ONE WORD THAT YOU THINK BEST DESCRIBES YOU?
GS: One word to describe me? Earnest. I do think I am. And it’s important to be earnest. And yes, there’s also the other meaning. In Oscar Wilde’s time, “Are you earnest?” was the equivalent of “Are you a friend of Dorothy’s?” or “Do you ride the short bus?” Earnest is more than just code for gay, though. I think it’s more a word to describe a sensibility. Gay can mean going to the gym and going to clubs and going on websites like Man4Man and Adam4Adam. Gay sensibility means all of that and Peter Pan and Madama Butterfly and Cecil Beaton and Nancy Mitford too. The same but slightly different, if you know what I mean.
BT: Read a fascinating article written by George Snyder in the current issue of The Advocate. It’s all about self-publishing and makes me want to haul out that dusty/musty manuscript that everyone turned down years ago and breathe new life into it. You may want to do the same after reading this piece.
Plays Well With Others. Or Not.
An essay in one (long) sentence that reminds us that Prince Charming is as fucked up as (back to him again) Hank Williams, Jr. LUST IN THE TIME OF CHAT ROOMS
By Anonymous
Have you ever met someone and within a few seconds Roberta Flack is singing “The first time ever I saw your face” in your ear, and he shows you a picture of himself from the 1990s and you think, “Have I seen this before in Esquire or GQ?” and you know this person could make you happy today, tomorrow, and for the rest of your life, and you can see the world in his luminous, wise eyes, and imagine that if you were to look at him over a candle-lit supper you might forget to breathe, and you think, At last!—this is the one I’ve been waiting for, all the others were pretenders, and suddenly you are outside yourself watching everything you do or say, measuring, calculating, strategizing, hoping he likes puppies and is kind to them, and then suddenly it’s the next morning and the last frames of Days and Wine and Roses are fading on the screen and the film unspools and clicks and clicks and clicks against the projector and there’s nothing but dust in the sickly yellow beam of light and you wonder if it was all a dream and you get up and make yourself a cup of coffee and you start another day and you give thanks for the wet nose that nudges your ankle and wants some love?
MIKE IS CLIMBING OUT OF HELL.
In the weeks/months that we’ve been trying to provide a personal understanding of, and compassion for, the millions of homeless people, we’ve introduced you to Mike, a friend of BRUISES THE GIN. (Read more about him in our archived editions.) We’re really psyched to have some exceptionally good news to report. As of last week, Mike has a job! He’s working at the Mazda car plant outside Detroit. The pay is just above minimum wage, and Mike is still homeless. But at least he can afford a motel room. We want to share this recent e-mail. It’s an affirmation of our intuitive feeling that Mike is a survivor.
MIKE: Started working Monday the 19th from 6:30 am –– 3:00 pm at the Ford/Mazda plant in Flat Rock, MI where they build the Ford Mustang and the Mazda 6. It’s pretty cool, I drive the cars from the plant to the Warehousing lot across the street. It’s pretty easy. There is a shuttle van that picks me and the other drivers up (usually 4 or 5 other people) at the start of our shift, takes us over to the plant, drops us off near the line of finished Mustangs/Mazda 6s that have just rolled off the assembly line. You get in a car, start it, blast the radio, and drive it across Vreeland Rd., a 4-lane road that separates the manufacturing plant from the huge lot across the street where you park the car in its assigned spot. The parking spot is predetermined by the cars final destination, and whether it is being delivered by semi-truck or by rail. The trick is finding the correct parking spot in the correct parking lot. There are several different lots: RE (Rail East), RW (Rail West), Tr (Truck), and then it gets into other lot names like SP (?), RX (?), RA (?), C Lot, and Glass (for Mustangs that are having their brand new roofs ripped off and replaced with a full glass roof). If your paperwork says Tr-P-98, you take it to the Truck lot, Row P, spot 98. Each lot is different – some lot spaces are alphabetized, some lot spaces are numbered, some are both, some are neither. But the best part is that I get to listen to the radio all day, and drive some pretty sweet Mustang BOSS 302s and Shelby Mustang GT500s! Not bad for a car geek, huh? A job driving cars!
[Ed. Note: Mike didn't give up. Change was forced upon him. He was scared shitless. He was humiliated. He starved. He asked himself if he shouldn't simply end his life. Thanks for not giving up on yourself, Mike. You're an inspiration to us, and I'm certain that every reader who has followed your path through BTG, is as thrilled as we are.]
Mike’s most recent e-mail correspondence: Well, I’m off to my humble abode, aka Clearview Motel Room #4. I’m gonna make tacos and watch Two and a Half Men later. I never watched it when Charlie Sheen was on, but I was so intrigued by the addition of Ashton that now I’m kinda hooked.
AND THE WINNER IS …:
We’re delighted that so many readers participated in our combination quiz and cry for help in the September 15 edition of BTG. We asked for confirmation of the correct attribution for the quote, “Scratch an actor and you’ll find an actress.” Many of our readers proved that the attribution was indeed Dorothy Parker (as we always suspected). Our randomly selected correct devoted reader, Chris O’Brien, from Ann Arbor, Michigan wins a subscription to Musical Stages magazine. Check it out our September 15 edition of BTG for an enlightening interview with Lynda Trapnell, the owner and publisher of Musical Stages. You’ll want to subscribe, too.
PORTFOLIO We’re concluding this edition of BRUISES THE GIN, with an intriguing gallery of images created by the California-based Photoshop artist/author Andrew W.M. Beierle (whose work has appeared in recent editions of this E-zine/blog). Be prepared to start talking about this emerging artist!
Beierle loves to poke fun at the GOP. But then, they are such an easy target. Is Sarah worried about what she has unleashed among Michelle, Mitt, and Rick?
Brangelina, up close and personal! Perhaps too close!
If we can have “Diana at 50” why not JFK at 94 and Jayne Mansfield at 78? A boy can dream, can't he?
Yes, we make potty jokes, but they are PATRIOTIC potty jokes!
On Wings of Affection. By Ben Tyler
On Wings of Affection by George Snyder
It’s not often that I read an absorbing novel that takes place in my own neighborhood, with characters who are on the periphery of my social circle: The rich. Famous/infamous. Wannabees. Poseurs. Ne’er-do-wells. Etc. A beloved colleague in the office brought me a gift of a copy of On Wings of Affection. A gift indeed! The Lambda Literary magazine calls On Wings of Affection, “… a recommended read for anyone wanting to spruce up the darkening days of autumn with the spirit of some summer-like exuberance.”
I bribed author George Snyder to have dinner with me with at Il Covo (try their risotto!!!) in West Hollywood. We shared an immediate sympatico and here’s some of what we talked about:
BT: LET’S START WITH THE BASICS. WHERE WERE YOU BORN AND RAISED?
GS: Like Vera Charles I was born in Pittsburgh, so right away I knew I had to do something. [Ed. Note. We like this man already!] My parents decamped soon after I was born, however, and moved north to a farm on Lake Erie. Soon thereafter my father got the urge to move west and we did. To Ohio. Mother never cared much for Ohio, but my formative years were spent in that state.
Happily I had no trouble being accepted to the schools I applied to for college. Unhappily they expected me to pay. So my mother marched down to the Methodist church where she had some pull and called in a few favors, and I got to go to school on scholarship to a little Methodist liberal arts college in Ohio called Baldwin-Wallace. Which was just as well; anything more exciting would have done me in. Later I went on to graduate school at the University of Chicago but by that time I was vastly more experienced at making friends and getting into gay bars. Chicago was fun.
BT: TELL US ABOUT YOUR CAREER AS A WRITER. WHAT WAS YOUR PATH TO FULFILLING YOUR DREAMS?
GS: I always wanted to be a writer. I romanticized the idea a great deal, I’m afraid. My models were English lady novelists from that great period of novel-writing between the Wars. So I aspired to be like Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keene, and then later on I was profoundly influenced by the novels of Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. I didn’t read many men until later. As a marketing plan, it was probably doomed, patterning myself after these great ladies, but there you are. I was a strange child.
George Snyder, Author, On Wings of Affection I’ve always wanted to write novels, and people kept advising me to write short stories. But I don’t like reading short stories very much, and the ones I tried to write reflected my disinterest. A man whose work I did read, Truman Capote, said he always started out trying to write a short story and it would turn into a novel. But really I like what Iris Murdoch said about novels, that the good ones are about love. I do think that’s true and it’s why I love them. Or the ones that are about love, at any rate.
BT: YOU ALSO WORKED IN TELEVISION FOR MANY YEARS. TELL US ABOUT THAT EXPERIENCE.
GS: I did work in television, it was completely by accident. I met a lovely man who was looking for an assistant. Oh well, I said, I’m sure you want a pretty Cindy Lou Hoo to be your assistant, and he admitted he did, but then he said he thought his wife would prefer me. Prefer that he have me, that is, instead of a cute blonde girl. And so he did. Not, you know, “have” me, but he hired me and I was with him for 100 episodes of a show about a girl who slays vampires. I learned so much from him. He said he always thought it was a compliment in television to be suspected of being gay. Gay or Jewish. He was always flattered when people thought he was either, or both. All the best people in television are gay or Jewish, was his opinion.
BT: YOU HAVE FULFILLED YOUR DREAM OF BECOMING A NOVELIST. LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR DEBUT NOVEL, ON WINGS OF AFFECTION.
GS: On Wings of Affection grew out of my blog. I’d gotten discouraged with my writing – I have a very hard time with rejection, and the endless sending out your manuscript to have it sent back unread or turned down – and a friend suggested I do a blog. It was fun, and it was good writing exercise, and out of it a voice began to emerge. With the voice came characters and the next thing I knew I had enough material to write the first book in this series I’m working on, the Sam, Pam and Didier Adventure Series, an episodic saga about life in the city of fallen angels.
Now I write every day. I get up at five, turn on the lap top, open my current document, go put the water on for coffee, come back and start typing. I always have the dimmest hope of producing anything worth the effort, and every day a couple of hours later I decide it wasn’t so bad and I give myself permission to go on living. Then I close up, shower and dress and go to my day job.
BT WE ALL HAVE A “DAY JOB,” DON’T WE?
GS: Yes, I have a day job. Luckily. There are days when I think it would be lovely to stay here and write all day, but the truth is, I need my time away from writing, and so it is very nice to have somewhere to go to. But juggling a job and a writing career is never simple, is it. I’ve tried different jobs and different combinations – I was a teacher, I worked in the auction business cataloguing books and manuscripts, I worked for a writer in television… I think whatever gives you structure and leaves some time left over for you to write is a good combination. But it’s tricky.
BT: THE COVER ART FOR YOUR NOVEL IS VERY SEDUCTIVE. WAS THE DESIGN YOUR IDEA?
GS: I love the cover of On Wings of Affection.
“Artsy” first cover idea for On Wings of Affection. I loved my first effort which was an artsy effort with marbled paper and a handwritten label – something Virginia Woolf might have done at the Hogarth Press, you know? But it was great fun when friends suggested we get a nice young man to take his clothes off and photograph him leaning languidly, pensively in a window. A lesbian friend of mine was horrified by the bulge in the underwear, but I told her we’d photo-shopped it down because in the original his penis was so enormous it was just too much of a distraction. She screamed.
The title comes from a made-up translation of a Persian poem about birds – the excerpt I “translated” is on the title page. People hate the title. They think it sounds like a romance by one of those English lady novelists from between the wars. Hello, that was the idea! It’s a book that’s literally for the birds! HA! The problem is, people have to read the book in order to find out that perhaps I’m being funny. At least a little bit. Perhaps I was too subtle, do you think?
BT: YOU’VE JUST PUBLISHED THE SECOND BOOK IN THE SERIES. TELL US ABOUT THE LATEST IN THE TRILOGY.
GS: Book Two in the series is called Down the Garden Path. Now, I think that title should make it clear I’m not deadly earnest and serious – I’m leading the reader down the garden path, as in leading you astray, and having fun, and being silly. A little. I hope people ‘get it.’ It’s always hard to know, however, what people will get. Book one was all about birds. Book two is all about flowers and gardens and plants. In Book one the evil decorator was Mr. Tanager. In Book two I focus on the evil landscape architect, Beau Thorne. He’s gorgeous and very ambitious.
BT: WE KNOW FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE THE CHALLENGE OF WORKING A DEMANDING FULL-TIME JOB, AND WRITING NOVELS. WHAT HAS THE EXPERIENCE BEEN FOR YOU?
GS: This is, by the way, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, showing up to write every morning even when I think it’s futile and pointless. I don’t come from a world where people grow up to be novelists. They grow up to be husbands and fathers and businessmen like my brothers. But not novelists. And yet, my family has been very nice about it, all things considered. I’ve always been rather the black sheep, however. At least I wasn’t locked away in a sheltered workshop and not allowed to mingle with the general population – there was a time when it was a bit touch and go on that front!
Now there’s not enough time in the day, of course, to do everything. When I’m not writing or working, I like to read. I’ve done lots of things in my life, but these days if I have free time I find myself coming back to my writing, or reading. There’s so much to read, and I do love it. Friends like to do things, and I go along, I do enjoy travel and museums and concerts and dinner parties and films, but as I said, there’s not enough time for everything, friends get annoyed. You never want to do anything, they say. You never have time. No, I don’t!
BT: WE ENJOY YOUR BLOG, 1904, BUT WE’RE INTRIGUED ABOUT THE TITLE. TELL US ABOUT THIS FASCINATING BLOG.
GS: 1904 is my blog. I started with 1904 because it’s a special year for me, so many of the people and things I love date from 1904, it’s the year The Cherry Orchard, Peter Pan, Madama Butterfly all premiered, the year Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (okay, one of the male novelists I like) was published, the year Nancy Mitford, Christopher Isherwood, Cecil Beaton, and Cary Grant were all born. I rest my case! But now 1904 is just about anything I decide I want to write about. 1904 is a way of organizing and framing my interests. And once you start organizing and framing anything, you start giving it meaning and importance. Look for meaning anywhere and you find it. Or something close. I love that.
BT: WHAT IS THE ONE WORD THAT YOU THINK BEST DESCRIBES YOU?
GS: One word to describe me? Earnest. I do think I am. And it’s important to be earnest. And yes, there’s also the other meaning. In Oscar Wilde’s time, “Are you earnest?” was the equivalent of “Are you a friend of Dorothy’s?” or “Do you ride the short bus?” Earnest is more than just code for gay, though. I think it’s more a word to describe a sensibility. Gay can mean going to the gym and going to clubs and going on websites like Man4Man and Adam4Adam. Gay sensibility means all of that and Peter Pan and Madama Butterfly and Cecil Beaton and Nancy Mitford too. The same but slightly different, if you know what I mean.
BT: Read a fascinating article written by George Snyder in the current issue of The Advocate. It’s all about self-publishing and makes me want to haul out that dusty/musty manuscript that everyone turned down years ago and breathe new life into it. You may want to do the same after reading this piece.
Plays Well With Others. Or Not.
An essay in one (long) sentence that reminds us that Prince Charming is as fucked up as (back to him again) Hank Williams, Jr. LUST IN THE TIME OF CHAT ROOMS
By Anonymous
Have you ever met someone and within a few seconds Roberta Flack is singing “The first time ever I saw your face” in your ear, and he shows you a picture of himself from the 1990s and you think, “Have I seen this before in Esquire or GQ?” and you know this person could make you happy today, tomorrow, and for the rest of your life, and you can see the world in his luminous, wise eyes, and imagine that if you were to look at him over a candle-lit supper you might forget to breathe, and you think, At last!—this is the one I’ve been waiting for, all the others were pretenders, and suddenly you are outside yourself watching everything you do or say, measuring, calculating, strategizing, hoping he likes puppies and is kind to them, and then suddenly it’s the next morning and the last frames of Days and Wine and Roses are fading on the screen and the film unspools and clicks and clicks and clicks against the projector and there’s nothing but dust in the sickly yellow beam of light and you wonder if it was all a dream and you get up and make yourself a cup of coffee and you start another day and you give thanks for the wet nose that nudges your ankle and wants some love?
MIKE IS CLIMBING OUT OF HELL.
In the weeks/months that we’ve been trying to provide a personal understanding of, and compassion for, the millions of homeless people, we’ve introduced you to Mike, a friend of BRUISES THE GIN. (Read more about him in our archived editions.) We’re really psyched to have some exceptionally good news to report. As of last week, Mike has a job! He’s working at the Mazda car plant outside Detroit. The pay is just above minimum wage, and Mike is still homeless. But at least he can afford a motel room. We want to share this recent e-mail. It’s an affirmation of our intuitive feeling that Mike is a survivor.
MIKE: Started working Monday the 19th from 6:30 am –– 3:00 pm at the Ford/Mazda plant in Flat Rock, MI where they build the Ford Mustang and the Mazda 6. It’s pretty cool, I drive the cars from the plant to the Warehousing lot across the street. It’s pretty easy. There is a shuttle van that picks me and the other drivers up (usually 4 or 5 other people) at the start of our shift, takes us over to the plant, drops us off near the line of finished Mustangs/Mazda 6s that have just rolled off the assembly line. You get in a car, start it, blast the radio, and drive it across Vreeland Rd., a 4-lane road that separates the manufacturing plant from the huge lot across the street where you park the car in its assigned spot. The parking spot is predetermined by the cars final destination, and whether it is being delivered by semi-truck or by rail. The trick is finding the correct parking spot in the correct parking lot. There are several different lots: RE (Rail East), RW (Rail West), Tr (Truck), and then it gets into other lot names like SP (?), RX (?), RA (?), C Lot, and Glass (for Mustangs that are having their brand new roofs ripped off and replaced with a full glass roof). If your paperwork says Tr-P-98, you take it to the Truck lot, Row P, spot 98. Each lot is different – some lot spaces are alphabetized, some lot spaces are numbered, some are both, some are neither. But the best part is that I get to listen to the radio all day, and drive some pretty sweet Mustang BOSS 302s and Shelby Mustang GT500s! Not bad for a car geek, huh? A job driving cars!
[Ed. Note: Mike didn't give up. Change was forced upon him. He was scared shitless. He was humiliated. He starved. He asked himself if he shouldn't simply end his life. Thanks for not giving up on yourself, Mike. You're an inspiration to us, and I'm certain that every reader who has followed your path through BTG, is as thrilled as we are.]
Mike’s most recent e-mail correspondence: Well, I’m off to my humble abode, aka Clearview Motel Room #4. I’m gonna make tacos and watch Two and a Half Men later. I never watched it when Charlie Sheen was on, but I was so intrigued by the addition of Ashton that now I’m kinda hooked.
AND THE WINNER IS …:
We’re delighted that so many readers participated in our combination quiz and cry for help in the September 15 edition of BTG. We asked for confirmation of the correct attribution for the quote, “Scratch an actor and you’ll find an actress.” Many of our readers proved that the attribution was indeed Dorothy Parker (as we always suspected). Our randomly selected correct devoted reader, Chris O’Brien, from Ann Arbor, Michigan wins a subscription to Musical Stages magazine. Check it out our September 15 edition of BTG for an enlightening interview with Lynda Trapnell, the owner and publisher of Musical Stages. You’ll want to subscribe, too.
PORTFOLIO We’re concluding this edition of BRUISES THE GIN, with an intriguing gallery of images created by the California-based Photoshop artist/author Andrew W.M. Beierle (whose work has appeared in recent editions of this E-zine/blog). Be prepared to start talking about this emerging artist!
Beierle loves to poke fun at the GOP. But then, they are such an easy target. Is Sarah worried about what she has unleashed among Michelle, Mitt, and Rick?
Brangelina, up close and personal! Perhaps too close!
If we can have “Diana at 50” why not JFK at 94 and Jayne Mansfield at 78? A boy can dream, can't he?
Yes, we make potty jokes, but they are PATRIOTIC potty jokes!