Creampuff Revolution

Creampuff Thrilled by Return of Roommates

As most of you know, there is little that thrills me more than having the house to myself. Not only because it means I can prance about pantless and have crackers for dinner, but  . . . no, that's mainly it. Regardless, I was excited when my roommates, Deye, Grmi and their 2 year old son Emmi, took off for a week and left me in charge of their house.

The first thing I noticed, once they'd left, is that things weren't that different. Oh sure, I spent more time upstairs in pyjamas, ordered in more often and went through all their drawers. But the only two major deviations from my normal routine were that:

a) There was no 3 hour nightly Toddler Feeding, Bathing and Bedding ritual; and

b) I was absolutely, heart-poundingly certain that someone would break in and kill me in the night.

I have lived here for nearly a month and the sounds of the house settling in between blasts of the furnace have become as familiar to me as my own tuneless humming on the streetcar when I'm trying to discourage people from sitting next to me. As for the neighbourhood, it's not Beverly Hills, but I have yet to sniff out the local crack house. There's a lock on the front door and it's not like the Hope Diamond is just sitting out on the coffee table. I know that statistically it's unlikely that HOLY CHRIST, FUCK STATISTICS, WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT??

I knew going in that this might happen. For days leading up to Deye and Grmi's departure, I made sure not to watch crime drama (because we all know no good can come from that) and I also made sure not to eat or drink anything that might keep me awake. It didn't help that whenever I mentioned this irrational fear of midnight marauders to anyone, they came back with a story about how their friend/cousin/work colleague was robbed while they were sleeping. Yeah. Thanks, you guys. You know who you are.

I also made the mistake of borrowing the seventh season of Buffy from my friend Cafa. I don't fear the vampyre, so Buffy generally doesn't freak me out like CSI does ('cause Buffy is a fantasy but CSI - SO REAL). And I must say that the first six episodes Season 7 are generally pretty quirky and hilarious. As for the rest, let me give you a tip - don't watch "Conversations With Dead People" when you're home alone in the night. Not even three episodes of Northern Exposure and a stuffed giraffe can help you settle down after that. But hearing scratching noises and regularly having your system flood with adrenaline, then staying awake until the sun comes up and finally falling asleep while cradling Emma Thompson's Sense & Sensibility Diaries and mumbling "I greatly esteem you, Emma" - yeah, that works.

Also, fortuitously, my writer's block dissolved partway through the week and I was catapulted into the most depressing, co-dependent lesbian part of the play. So when I wasn't vibrating like a tuning fork at every night time auditory experience, I was writing wank, missing my girlfriend and sniffling pathetically. Am I turning you on? Not even Swiss Chalet could console me, although I did keep the rock-hard roll that came with my meal by my bed, in case I needed to wing it at some great evil (or at the rocking chair in the corner - it was looking shifty).

It was a long week, people, and this creampuff was TIRED. So you can imagine my joy when I came home last night and saw my roommates had returned and left the porch light on for me. I started yawning immediately and I slept like a baby.

I don't know why I feel safer with Deye, Grmi and Emmi in the house. Maybe because when they're here, I sometimes come home to scenes like this:

That's Giraffe (or "Dirty Giraffe", as Katr and I call her, as she's constantly spread-eagled and likes to proposition the other animals). It seems that one night after his bath, young Emmi dressed Giraffe up in his best hockey pyjamas. I asked Deye why Giraffe got the good pyjamas and she said "Well, I think that Emmi is aware that Giraffe is a guest. And guests get the good pyjamas." The best part was when I took the pyjamas off and found this:

I don't think I'll ever look at Dirty Giraffe in the same way again.

Creampuff's Gay Wedding Is On Like Donkey Kong

When Katr was in town a couple of weeks ago, we scoped out a few possible venues for our Gay Wedding Cabaret & Topiary Festival. Because - and I'm not sure if you know this - just because you've picked a DATE and told everybody doesn't mean that the wedding is totally planned.

One venue we looked at was the Steamwhistle Brewery, where they gave us a free six pack, so obviously that scored a lot of points. We also looked at the Great Hall on Queen, where I performed the coveted role of "witness" at my friend Rela's wedding a few years ago. There are many things to recommend the Great Hall, not the least of which being that they let you bring in your own hooch. Also, there's a disco ball. Also, it looks like this from the outside:

and if we can't LIVE in a big Victorian mansion with a turret, we can damn well get married in one! Also, there's a stage. 'Cause we're not kidding about the cabaret.

We liked the Great Hall and our date was available but we needed to know a little more about the preferred caterers (i.e. is their food good, will they give us attitude for not wanting a sit-down dinner, will they get really confused about who's the "groom" at the lesbian wedding just because one of us might wear pants, etc.). Lucky for us, there was an open house at the Great Hall Wednesday night to show off the space and introduce the various caterers and other service providers to event planners and brides and mothers of brides and the occasional groom. Free booze! Free snax! Free wedding magazine! Jealous? Since Katr's back in Vancouver, I brought my man of honour, Padu. Ah, sweet Padu. Best man of honour ever.

While I was waiting for Padu across the street from the Hall, I accidentally made a movie.

We floated up the tulle-draped staircase into the main room to find the open house in full swing. Four caterers, a flower shop, some valet parking people, a DJ and a videographer were there and the centre of the room was dominated by three vastly different table settings. Ice clinked in glasses - beef tenderloin sizzled - cheque books trembled. Padu and I began our rounds. Here are our notes:

Flower Lady - seemed a little shell-shocked. Too many poppies, perhaps? Those crazy flower people. But she did seem to think that we could get all the flowers Katr wants and their shop is right across the street and it's chick-owned, which we like. Their website, however, is impossible to find via search engine. Think they'd give us a break on the flowers in exchange for a little search engine optimization? Yeah. I don't think so either.

Caterer #1 - best food, best drinks, best service, best package, best rep with the best name (Star) and the biggest price tag. Although I must say, I feel that if I'd made my standard "HOW much? Do I get a hand job with that?" joke, she might have said "I can work that hand job into your budget." Because she was THAT GOOD.

Caterer #2 - very good food, very good service, very nice rep, no package but definitely best presentation ideas around the whole cabaret thing. Also, they win points for sending me a charming, non-pushy e-mail the next day.

Caterer #3 - by the third caterer, we'd already had two drinks and we were pretty relaxed. The poor blond girl at the table looked terrified as we came over and it became clear that she was really just someone's assistant and had no idea what to do. Unlike the previous caterers, there was no glad-handing, meaningful eye contact, exchange of personal information AND, more importantly, she didn't offer us a drink, even though there were some very yummy looking skirt drink martinis on the table behind her. She handed us a package and pointed us towards the mini-Yorkshire puddings. We waited for her to try and sell us on the catering. She waited for us to leave. We did.

Caterer #4 - what can I say about Don? He was the only caterer to drop the F-bomb. Plus, he gave us jelly beans. I loved him.

I must say that I was impressed by how gamely Padu and I were greeted by all of caterer folk but you could tell that their initial thoughts went something like: "Does that poor fat girl know she's marrying a gay man?" They all seemed relieved and enthusiastic when we revealed that no! It was a lesbian wedding! HA ha! Feed us more wasabi risotto, monkeys! It kind of felt like that great moment in Elizabeth when the Duke of Anjou fakes Elizabeth out with the flute playing, laughs at his own joke and then whispers how he's excited to stroke her private areas. That guy was all class.

Speaking of class - we're not doing a sit-down dinner, but if we WERE, the table setting would HAVE to look like this:

I really think that all that was missing from this BDSM chic table setting were the teeny tiny ball-gag napkin rings.

On our way out, Padu made sure to grab a free Wedding Bells magazine and thank god he did. 'Cause nothing raises the tone in the ladies shitter like wedding magazines.

So, after consulting with my lady love, I think it's fair to say that we're going with The Great Hall as our gay wedding venue. We had asked the event planner, whose name rhymes with "Bandy", to put our date on hold until after the open house and I e-mailed her yesterday to let her know that our gay wedding at the Great Hall? Is ON like DONKEY KONG. At least, I think it is. It's been 24 hours and she hasn't e-mailed me back to confirm. Hmmm.

And so it begins.

Creampuff Valentine's Gay Special

Valentine's Day is here again and, as usual, I'm bitter.

Katr's in town for work and she leaves on Valentine's Day and this is the last I will see of my love for a month, but because of the nasty cold I contracted while she was here, I suspect that there will be far more hanky than panky. Nothing says "Come hither" like a sexy negligée and a wet, hacking cough. My one consolation is that at least my illness will make it a little easier for her to leave me, because when I am sick, I am also whiny like a man.

It must said that, single or no, I've always hated the Valentine's Day. In elementary school, the agony and ecstasy of card-sending - in junior high, the drama of the carnation-gram - in high school, the tragic searing of the tongue with too many cinnamon hearts - in university, the dreaded Goldschlager hangover. For years, my roommate Jesk and I had a Bitter Single Girl's Valentine's Day ritual where she would buy a flat of Valentine's cupcakes at the Loblaw's and I would rent a tender, heart-warming film from the Blockbuster, like Terminator 2. Then we would order pizza, eat cupcakes and enjoy the bloodshed. Those were good times.

Anyway - I've been tagged again by the lovely Winter to tell you 5 Things You Don't Know About Me (the same Winter tagged me to share 5 Weird Things awhile back) and I thought that with Valentine's Day shitting cinnamon hearts and shiny red decorations upon us, I'd like to share a Special Embarassing Lurve Edition 5 Things with you all. I've always been freakish and secretive about love, so coming up with these took a really long time. In no particular order, here they are.

1. Before I met Katr, my longest relationship was with a boy named Daniel. I fell in love with him on the first day of kindergarten, when he wouldn't stop crying after his mom left. "Yep," I said to myself as the tears rained down on his Cookie Monster sweatshirt, "that sissy boy is MINE." We used to play Star Wars at recess together - he was Luke and I was Leia. We were together until Grade 4, when I gave him an ultimatum - his video games or ME. It was hard being single again after all that time, but it wasn't long before I stepped into the arms of my next love, Yorgo. Coincidentally, Yorgo often played Han Solo in our Star Wars recess games and he and I took up together around the same time Return of the Jedi came out and we all found out about Luke and Leia being twins. Clearly, Daniel and I weren't meant to be. Plus, Yorgo bought better stuffed toys. Score!

2. I mentioned the queer youth crush I had on Buliana Bivato in the previous post, but I did not mention the root causes of this crush, namely that she was a great singer, she was taller than me (a rarity) and that at some Fringe or Teen Fest party, she kissed me on the mouth. Looking back, it was not in any way a hot n' heavy liplock - it was closer to the hello or goodbye peck you give your close friends, if you have kissy friends. Any lingering I perceived was no doubt due to teen drunkeness. But my knees giving out after she walked away? THAT was teen lust. I was wearing a pink sweater. I turned the same colour as the sweater. I may have slept with the sweater on that night but I confirm nothing.

3. Once - and I am not proud of this, except that I AM kind of proud of it - I shouted out my own name in a . . . climactic moment. I was not alone at the time. Now, in my defense, I was with someone I had no intention of ever seeing again and in my mind, the whole point of getting it on that night was to make myself feel better. Still . . . not my classiest moment. Nor were the subsequent moments when I couldn't stop laughing.

4. Deeply fed up with a years-long bout of unrequited love, I decided for awhile to have an imaginary girlfriend. Not the "I totally have a girlfriend! Ooh, you wouldn't know her, she goes to another school" kind. The "you don't measure up to my imaginary girlfriend" kind. Her name was Mel. She was a creampuff and she had a chin piercing (which is funny to me - why a chin piercing??). She was also very handy around the house. After a few weeks, I shyly and reluctantly told my therapist about Mel and she was THRILLED that I had found love - IN MY MIND. "She shows up on time! She returns your calls! She's fat - and she LOVES it!" Mel and I had a blissful few months together and she helped me through a very rough patch. Thanks, Mel!

5. Starting in high school, I kept a journal that was SUPPOSED to be about theatre projects, but which quickly devolved into what can only be described as a WANK repository. Oh my god, people. The WANKERY of this thing. I am surprised that my laptop has not collapsed under the weight of all the (often lurve-related) angst. I suppose you could argue that, because I generally write comedy, the wank had to end up SOMEwhere. And despite it's EXTREME embarassingness, I cannot bring myself to delete it. All of its longing and yearning and self-hatred and screaming blood metaphors and word by word accounts of dramatic conversations were important to me at some point - also, it's a great file to poke around in when I'm looking for a good title. My latest play, Kiss With Your Teeth, takes its title from the following Wank Journal line: "You know it's time to stop smiling when you start to kiss with your teeth."

The problem with the Wank Journal is that there are no dates and generally no identifiable names or places, in case the WJ ever fell in the wrong (i.e., anyone else's) hands. So while I like the title of the play, I really have no idea where that line came from. Probably best not to.

So there you have it - 5 Embarassing Lurve Things About Me. If you'd like to celebrate Valentine's Day by mocking your past love-capades on your own blog, let me know! For Katr leaves me tomorrow afternoon and I will need to be distracted and amused come nightfall. Perhaps I'd better pick up some of those lesbian books you all recommended. And some Kleenex.

Creampuff Would Like Some Recommendations

So I hosted the Queer Youth Cabaret at Buddies the other night and going in, I wasn't sure what to expect. I had not had a chance to attend QueerCab before hosting it and I heard from a reliable source (Padu) that the event had been known to occasionally go like this:

Host: Cracks a funny while introducing queer youth.

Audience: Crickets.

Queer Youth: Whatever. My poem's about DEATH.

Turns out that when you go in expecting the queer youth to diss you and then slit their wrists on stage, they end up being really sweet and fun. My favourite thing was that apparently some of the queer youth had taken part in a drag workshop at Buddies a week before and got up to strut their gender-bending biznass Wednesday night. That's right - a DRAG WORKSHOP. For QUEER YOUTH. Jealous?

I have to hand it to the queer youth. I was not that cool when I was their age. In fact, I'm still not that cool. Also, despite the fact that I spent most of my teens nursing my life-threatening crush on "Buliana Bivato" (I know, Chezza, I know - she was so out of my league), I'm not sure that it had occurred to me that I WAS queer at their age. I don't know about you guys, but I was 20 and it took a big butch whose name rhymes with "Bhristine" hitting on me repeatedly (and, eventually, successfully) before I fully embraced the inevitable lesbosity. And embrace it I did. Like a long-lost lover. Who'd brought a pie over. Good times.

Anyway - I picked "Slash Fiction" as the theme for QueerCab (a theme assiduously avoided by all the queer youth) because I've been thinking alot lately about queer stories and the lack thereof and how that's frustrating. Sure, Anne of Green Gables probably turned me gay, but can you imagine how much GAYER I could have been if there had been a queer equivalent in my childhood? Say Rebecca of Beaver Mountain? I recently went through a period of having "nothing to read" because I couldn't bring myself to crack the spine on yet another story about (god bless you all) straight people.

Don't get me wrong. I love straight people. My parents are straight. But Sweet Lavendar Lord, I am in need of some LESBIAN BOOKS. And so I appeal to you, gentle readers. Help me. Help me to find some good, clean lesbonic reading before I am FORCED to write my OWN book called The Three Pussketeers about a trio of swashbuckling dykes who save damsels in undress with the help of their fine fencing skills and many clever cats.

Here's a short list of the books I've read already.

• The oeuvre of Sarah Waters 
• Selected works of Emma Donoghue (Just so you know, lesbians, there are no dykes in Slammerkin. I kept waiting for the main character to get it on with her prostitute roommate - then her lady boss - then the maid she shared a bed with. I was foiled.) 
• Beyond the Pale (which I thought was well-written, but can never read again because *spoiler alert* AWFUL THINGS HAPPEN IN IT). 
• Selected works of Jeannette Winterson 
• Occasional Rita Mae Brown 
• Some weird western where these two babes open an inn in the Nevada Desert and one of them ends up living as a man and getting all leathery.

So please - leave suggestions in the comments, or send me an e-mail or post your own "favourite lesbo books" list on your own blog. Because (straight) literary detective Thursday Next will only placate me for so long, people.

Speaking of placating, pictures of hat and sock knitting coming soon. Because I know you're all waiting with bated breath.

UPDATE: Thanks for all your suggestions - seriously, I'm all excited. Here's a bonus comment from SassyFemme that for some reason I can't post in the actual comments. Too many links - or does TypePad have it in for lesbian fiction??? History will decide.

From SassyFemme:

Lesbian fiction is one of my very favorite topics! Seriously, I usually go through a couple of books a week, more if we have a lazy weekend.

Okay, do you know about Radclyffe?  She's my very favorite author. Other favorites are Frankie J. Jones, Peggy Herring, Karin Kallmaker, Gunn Brooke, and JLee Meyer.  You should look at Bold Stroke Books and Bella Books to see authors/books, and to purchase them.  BTW, Radclyffee is the owner of Bold Stroke Books.  She quit her job as a surgeon to be a full time book publisher!

If you want to read online fiction, including some chapters or online versions of published stories check out Royal Academy of Bards (started as Xena fanfic, branched out to everything) and The Sandbox 101.  If you want to see some of the "brainer side" of lesbian writing, then look at Golden Crown Literary Society.

There's more lesbian fiction out there than most of us have time or money to read, so happy reading!  Let me know what you end up reading/liking!

Creampuff As Hostess

My lovely friend Ron Hudson over at 2sides2ron has asked me to hostess the March edition of the International Carnival of Pozitivities, a blog carnival intended to provide "an international forum for interaction among those of us who are living with HIV/AIDS and for their caregivers, family and/or friends or those who are involved in the fight to end this Worldwide pandemic." 

So if you've written (or have been meaning to write) a blog post about the ways that HIV/AIDS has touched your life, drop me an e-mail with the link to your post or submit your post here so that I can feature it in the March edition! The deadline for submissions is March 2nd and the carnival will be up on March 10th.

The next carnival is up now at 2sides2ron. There's some excellent, thought-provoking writing on offer, so make sure to check it out!

As you may have noticed, my blog tends to be more about donuts, knitting and my own extreme dooficity than important world issues, but as I said to Ron, hosting a carnival like this is a great way to meet some cool new bloggers, educate myself a little more on these issues and give a little back. 'Cause, you know - Bono can only do so much. In that vein, Ron is always looking for carnival hosts, so if you're interested in hosting a future edition, let me know and I'll pass your info onto him!

In other hostessing news, I'm going to be presiding over the montly Queer Youth Cabaret at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre on February 7th. I even bought a new shirt. Jealous? The theme of the evening is Homo Heroes and Queer(ing) Characters, which is the polite way of saying Roro Thinks Anne of Green Gables and her bosom friend Diana Were Drinking THEIR Currant Wine From the Furry Cup. YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

The evening is FREE and begins at 7 p.m. in Tallulah's Cabaret. I promise queerness, possibly some angst, a few laughs and my hot new shirt. Also, booze is available (but only if you're of age, queer youth!! I've got my eye on you!)

The final event that I am hostessing is my ongoing "I'm 4489 km Away from My Beaverancéefor Two Months" Sniffle n' Honk Fest '07. Katr is hosting her own "The Apartment Is So Empty Without You!!" Blues Jam back in Vancouver. I know that compared to the long distance relationships of certain other people, Katr and my separation is very teeny tiny potatoes and also, I'm here in Toronto living the playwright-in-residence dream! And living with/catching up with wonderful friends! But I still miss her horribly. The way goths miss eyeliner. Like Siegfried misses Roy. How donuts miss other warm, soft, inviting donuts. And it blows, people! It blows so hard, I had to knit myself a hat. Photos to follow.