The Duck's Nest: online home of mizducky

The little LGBT pride celebration that could

After services this morning at the main campus of my right-on LGBT-affirming UU church, I climbed into a car with a couple of friends and drove on down to Chula Vista for South Bay Pride. This is the second year I've gone to this little lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender pride celebration, tucked away in a gorgeous little park just off of Chula Vista's Third Ave. retail district. The new South Bay campus of our congregation was reprazentin' in one of the couple of dozen booths set up, so I hung out there for awhile and attempted to help network the passing crowd. Our new ministry coordinator for that campus, Mar Cardenas, was doing a lot better on that score because she's a native Spanish speaker and my Spanish is embarrassingly rusty. My friends and I hung out for awhile longer, ate a few things and listened to a few bands, and then called it an afternoon. A nice mellow little gathering--glad it's keeping on.

Keith Olbermann's "Special Comment" on Proposition 8

He basically says it all; nothing for me to add except "Right on--preach it, brother."

It ain't over till the fat lady sings: the fight against Prop 8 heads to the courts

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ... while we celebrate the phenomenon of the first person of color to assume the Presidency of the United States, we also stand aghast at the spectacle of the tyranny of the majority deciding to up and vote that a minority should lose a right, just because the majority doesn't like 'em. But never fear--there's a bunch of pissed off queer couples and their friends and allies already lining up to take this thing to the courts. And this article, published way back in May, lays out in advance the argument they'r going to use against the homophobo-mendment:

Is The Proposed ‘Limit On Marriage’ Initiative Too Late?.

And it's two steps forward, one step back, do the hokey pokey and try to get back on track ...

Election night; also just another work night; and another cosplay photo

Wow, the polls in California closed just a little over a half-hour ago and McCain's already conceded. Whew. Good luck, Barack--I hope I'm proven dead wrong, but I can't help having a funny feeling that things are going to get even more challenging for you and for the progressive movement now that you've got the office.

Meanwhile, still waiting to get real numbers on Prop 8. The initial numbers are disheartening, but it's so damn early, it's almost meaningless to conjecture yet.

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Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be getting work-work done, so that I can also get all this pre-dinner advance cooking done. So this will be a pretty short post ...

... except that I have to show off this other Halloween crossplay photo that my photographer-friend emailed to me, because it came out so damn good (if I do say so myself). The fangeek in me loves showing off my replica Airsoft Walther P-38. But even beyond that, I love how I managed to get a really Lupinesque expression on my face. All that's missing is the dangerously raised eyebrow--only, while I can and do raise an eyebrow, it's not enough under my conscious control to do it on demand. But still--this photo makes me so happeeeeee... :-D

First picture from my Halloween crossplay; action-packed week ahead; fear and loathing on Election Day

Okay, I have gotten my virtual hands on the first of a bunch of photos taken of me in my Lupin III rig on Halloween. Note the stylin' background--the Postal Annex branch where I keep my mailbox offered free photos to anyone who came in wearing a costume on Halloween, so I took them up on their offer. Also note the slight blurriness of the photo, even after I pounded on it a bit in Photoshop; ah well, as they say, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Or you get what you pay for. Or one of them thar sayings. Hopefully the photos taken by my camera-savvy friend will come out much better--he really went to town with taking multiple shots with multiple poses, which ups the odds of success considerably.

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Got a fistful of action happening to me this week, starting of course with voting tomorrow--I always get an absentee ballot, and I always wind up hand-delivering it to the nearest polling place. I originally started doing this because I'm a lazy-ass procrastinator, but it turned out to be the best of all possible approaches: I can peruse the ballot at my leisure, without feeling like I'm holding up a horde of people in line behind me; I can then walk in to the polling place and hand it in without having to stand in that infernal line; and best of all, it's on paper and cannot be screwed up by flaky electronic voting machines with no paper trail verification.

Then on Thursday I am serving a catered dinner for eight that I auctioned off during my hippy-dippy Unitarian church's annual services silent auction fundraiser. The menu is a mix of some of my favorite dishes from a variety of Asian cuisines:  Vietnamese salad rolls; Thai tom yum goong (spicy coconut-milk/shrimp soup); Thai som tam (shredded green papaya salad); Vietnamese steamed whole tilapia; Chinese red-cooked pork belly; Hong Kong style sesame noodles; a trio of Korean banchan (little side-dish salads); and Thai black sticky rice pudding for dessert. It sounds a lot more difficult than it is--a lot of the dishes are make-ahead and require very little fuss. But there's no denying that there's a lot of shopping and prep, so guess what I'll be doing on Tuesday and Wednesday in addition to my usual load of work?

Then on Friday I'm driving up to Los Angeles and spending the night, so I'll be right on time for an all-day workshop on beginning voice acting for anime, taught by prolific voice actor (and voice of Lupin III for the American dubs of the 2nd series and Mystery of Mamo) Tony Oliver. Yes, I'm going to be a total fangeek and bring along a DVD for Tony to autograph. And yes, this little trip implies some extra work during the week too, because I'm going to have to make sure there's enough food and supplies in the house to keep my little Tottsan out of trouble--including, I suspect, getting all his meds for the coming week all counted out in case I return from LA wiped out. Well, at least while I'm away in LA it'll feel like a vacation. Sort of. If I get up there early enough on Friday I'll see if I can hit some interesting places--at the very least Melrose, and maybe Japan-Town to hunt for anime swag and good cheap Japanese comfort food.

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 I've been some flavor of liberal-to-left political animal from way back when I was a little squirt watching my mom take care of duties as a county Democratic Party volunteer, and I gotta say it's been a pretty disillusioning experience. Every time I've seen a glimmer of hope on the horizon that the spirit of liberalism and altruism might finally be gaining a toehold somewhere, I've seen that hope collapse--either at the polls, or at the business end of a gun. Every time I've sworn that politics could not possibly get any weirder or nastier, I've been unpleasantly surprised. And there's been several elections--the first time Reagan got in, and the first time Papa Bush got in, and both times Baby Bush got in, that I've actually entertained 10-second fantasies of high-tailing it for the nearest international border for fear that Big Brother was about to descend.

Now we've got a guy speaking amazingly refreshing and thoughtful words about hope and change, and of course I'm voting for him, but I'm also holding my breath for fear of jinxing things. Just the mere fact that, even in this day and age, there are American citizens who are deciding to not vote for this guy solely because of his African ancestry makes my blood run cold. And don't even get me started about the homophobes who are attempting to ram an amendment into the California Constitution "defending" their narrow-ass view of marriage. Where the hell do these people come from? And how did they manage to sleep through all their civics, history, political science and philosophy classes so that they think these are legitimate and defensible political positions?

I know the higher road to take with these people is to say, yes, they're entitled to their opinion too, and that's what makes this a democracy. But the moody-ass curmudgeon in me, who has seen too many elections go by where the tyranny of the majority has voted in all kinds of idiotic demagogues and hateful legislation, has lost all patience with the higher road. Soooo: my inner curmudgeon says to all those idiots: hey! Have you noticed you're a bunch of bloody idiots? Maybe you should stay home and not bother voting. After all, according to that beloved Scripture you like to (mis)quote so much, the Rapture's supposed to come soon and take you all away, right? So what the hell do you care if those of us who get left behind decide to throw a big party and vote for some smart people and laws for a change? So there. Nyahhh.

NaBloPoMo; Halloween (mis)adventures

So I was doing the free-association websurfing thing the other day, thinking about the infamous National Novel Writing Month but unwilling to put my fanfic project on hold in order to start a whole new piece from scratch, when I stumbled upon this whole other group madness known as National Blog Posting Month. Same general concept as NaNoWriMo--only instead of working on a novel throughout the month of November, the goal is to post to one's blog every day in November. Cool, thought I -- just the thing to get my blogging mojo back, which as many of you might have noticed has been kind of hit-or-miss lately. Plus the literary dilettante in me got a giggle out of NaBloPoMo's inadvertently "postmodern" acronym.

So here I am, officially kicking off my participation in a month of daily blogging. Wish me luck!

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So today I am definitely one of the walking wounded--and extremely grouchy about it, too--and all because of Halloween. You see, I've been a huge fan of dressing up for Halloween since I was a little kid, and that enthusiasm (there's that word again!) only increased when I first came out and discovered that Halloween was like unto a major cultural holy day in the queer community calendar. So of course I was bound and determined to dress up yet again for this Halloween, only this year I added a few new twists:

1. Whereas every previous Halloween for as far back as I can remember, I have dressed up femme (even as a kid, when I would get into all my mom's costume jewelry and makeup), this year I decided to make my very first foray into drag king. 
2. Whereas nearly every previous Halloween, I have dressed not as a specific identifiable character but more a generalized theme (usually some kind of hippy/Goddessy-looking rig with long flowy skirts and lots of earthy jewelry), this time I decided to try my hand at crossplay and dress up as some kind of homage to--nu, who else?--my current anime obsession, Lupin III.

These decisions, of course, presented a number of obvious challenges:

1. The general challenge of approximating a male appearance;
2. The more advanced challenge that the vast majority of anime characters, Lupin perhaps moreso than most, tend to be drawn as impossibly skinny and long-legged, whereas I am anything but.

That second point, alas, there was nothing I could do about. So I basically ignored it. Not that I wanted my portrayal to be a burlesque or a parody--far from it; it's just that the fangrrl in me really really really wanted to do it, so I honored my inner child and went for it. Besides, I reasoned--correctly, as it turned out--in the context of the LGBT community events I was going to take this little bit of personal performance art to, the odds of anyone even getting the reference would be nearly non-existent, so I might as well have fun with a joke that probably only I would get.

As to the first point, well, there is a sizeable body of advice both online and in books on how to go about equipping yourself to do drag king, so I read up and started gathering and/or creating gear.

The men's clothing mostly came from thrift shops--I only had to cheat and go the women's clothing route with the iconic red blazer, because there simply were no guy's red blazers to be found in any size, let alone mine. But I lucked out and found an absolutely gorgeous bright-red menswear-styled blazer, wool and fully lined, for a buck--a steal the master thief would have had a good giggle over. I also lucked out on a truly gorgeous vintage square-bottom tie in a relatively subtle shade of yellow--yeah, I was going for accurate attire, but I also wanted this rig to be stylin' rather than buffoonish.

The chest binder I wound up making myself. I bought a couple of yards of white lingerie-quality spandex, used a snug-fitting tank top as a pattern, and stitched up a compression shirt that really did the trick and fit me quite comfortably--or so it seemed at the time; more on that anon. And for the iconic sideburns, I paid a visit to a theatrical makeup supply shop and purchased crepe wool and spirit gum.

Halloween afternoon, I settled in with my makeup kit and a mirror. It took a bunch of fuss and false starts--you try drawing symmetrical sideburns on your own face!--but when the smoke and expletives cleared, I was tickled to look in the mirror and see a pretty damn impressive pair of sideburns gracing my face. Some weeks previously I had started getting my hair cut short into a pretty butch hairstyle; I gave it a dose of spray-on black haircolor, and called the makeup part of the program done. I then climbed into my costume--including the rolled gym sock packy inside the (striped, of course) boxer shorts), and was ready to roll.

There were, however, a few problems with my rig that, while not apparent at first, eventually came back to bite my ass before the night was through:

1. That compression shirt, while amazingly comfortable for the first couple of hours, really started to tax my bod as the night wore on.
2. The shoes I was wearing--these great ankle-length black leather lace-up boots I had owned forever--were another case of "comfortable when first put on, more and more uncomfortable as time wore on." The issue here was lack of cushioning--even a pair of those damnfool gel inserts were not enough to protect me against a night of standing and walking on hard pavement and dancefloors.
3. Southern California weather, even for Halloween night, tends to be a bit too balmy to be wearing a fully-lined wool blazer over a long-sleeved dress shirt and tie over a spandex compression shirt.

Problem #3 had me carrying my jacket rather more than wearing it, and eventually just stowing it altogether in the trunk of my car. Problem #2 caused the boots to also find their way into the trunk before evening's end, replaced by my beloved pair of Vans slip-ons. I decided to just tough it out with Problem #1, which may have been a tactical error.

For when I awoke this morning, boy was I ever a hurting unit. Back pain, complaining muscles, complaining hip joints, complaining knees, and a general feeling that, yep, I'd spent way too many hours squishing my torso with that compression shirt. Oddly enough, it was not my breasts that were complaining--it was my rib cage and sternum. When I had read up on breast-binding for drag king performance I had noted all the warnings about the hazards of binding too tightly. But those hazards seemed to be more associated with the use of elastic bandages and tape and other such makeshifts, and I thought my homemade compression shirt was no tighter than some girdles I had known in the Bad Old Days, so I  thought I was alright. Guess not, huh? And even though I had ditched the boots for more comfortable shoes, apparently it wasn't soon enough to prevent a pounding for my knees and hips. Ow.

So after all that--after a day spent mostly sleeping, self-medicating, and taking hot soaking baths--can I say it was worth it? Hmmmmm ... maybe! I confess that, even though I thought I had emotionally prepared myself for having my costume go unrecognized all evening, it was still a bit of a bummer. I did at least get some nice compliments on the look from people who may not have known Lupin from a hole in the wall but who appreciated the drag king aspect of it--my favorite being the woman who said "nice tie!" in tones of admiration. And my friends, though nearly as unfamiliar with Lupin as the general population, were still incredibly complimentary on the general look--according to them, I definitely had the guy body language down as well as the costume and the sideburns.

Will I ever do any part of this again? Hmmmmm ... maybe! Another confession: though cosplaying at an anime convention might get my Lupin rig a hell of a lot more recognition, I am frankly intimidated about presenting as Fat Lupin to a crowd with so many cosplay perfectionists in it. It might be safer for my ego to make my first attempt at convention cosplay a character that's meant to be heavy-set. The problem, of course, will be finding such a character, let alone one I'd want to play. (Anyone tempted to suggest Super Mario: sorry, fuggeddaboutit!) But maybe I'll feel braver once I've gotten a little more familiar with that scene and had a chance to get over myself. God knows the desire to show off my vintage Airsoft replica Walther P-38 is huge enough to tempt me into all kinds of fun stupidity.

As for doing drag king again, the answer is an emphatic yes. That part, binder fatigue notwithstanding, was just way too much fun not to do it again. And fortunately, there are many exemplars of girthy drag kings out in the lesbian community. I'm especially intrigued with this dude Murray Hill -- not only is his build like mine, but I really dig his style of humor. Plus in the process of shopping for my Lupin costume, I happened upon a terrific charcoal-gray pinstripe suit that fits me almost perfectly (the sleeves could use just a little shortening). After all, a great clothing find like that demands to be used. Plus I have enough left-over crepe wool to make at least another several dozen pairs of sideburns.