bostonman

Yes, it's pretty common to have dress rehearsal footage as backup. (And for many years, before the HD transmissions, the "live" Met TV broadcasts were often a potential combination of several tapings in-house.) But in this case (Rent, that is), it felt like many of the actors were underplaying at the rehearsal, with the result that the portion of the broadcast I watched seemed pretty unsatisfying. I DVR'd this to watch at some point in the near future - last night I just saw a bit of it. But what I saw/heard seemed pretty lame.

Of course, it's "I Won't Dance" (not "Don't") - but close enough... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkV8fC5W0tw There's also the very silly "I Can't Dance" by Allan Sherman. He's the guy that took the "Dance Of The Hours" and turned it into "Hello, Muddah, Hello Fadduh"...here he does a similar thing with a famous Grieg melody. (Along with an inside joke reference to Camp Grenada from the previously mentioned song.)

Didn't we really just have a West Side Story revival? (2009-2011, to be exact?) I mean, I love the show - it's among my all-time favorites. But still...

Personally, I find cheerleaders annoying. Gender has no bearing on that.

I had an experience not long ago where signals got crossed a bit. I had a good back-and-forth conversation with the escort beforehand, explaining a fantasy I wanted to play out - we talked details, he seemed to understand it all, no prob. When we actually met up, he started playing things out rather differently than I expected - and when I found a way to nicely ask why he was taking a different route, he told me that he wasn't very comfortable with the fantasy I had suggested. I really wanted to ask him why he didn't say that beforehand, but I didn't. He was a nice guy, attractive, and did seem very willing to have a session together, and we found a way to play an aspect of the roleplay that made sense for him - but ultimately it really wasn't what I wanted, even though he was still nice to be with. So it wound up an awkward experience for me - the sex was decent but I had really wanted a different kind of interaction. If he had said to me off the bat, in our initial talks, something like "hey, I like your ideas but I'd be much more comfortable doing it a different way," or even "I'd love to meet and play, but this specific fantasy just isn't something I would do well" etc, I could have had the chance to adjust - maybe to still hire him but do other things together, or to thank him for his honesty and move on - but he didn't give me that chance at all. And to be clear, I don't think he was scamming me or being dishonest - he really was a very nice, easygoing, and decent guy - it's just that I really wish he had handled things differently.

Anyone with an armpit fetish should definitely get to know Russ. He has many great attributes, but his pits are a fantasy come true for a guy with that kind of craving. ;-) Also incredibly friendly. Yes, he can do the dom/sub thing, but my impression in meeting him (several years ago) is that he's really a sweetheart at the core.

I disagree. I think it's just fine. I've never understood why so many people dismiss it so easily. It's tuneful (and often quite playfully so), the plot is no less credible than most opera plots lol, the arias/duets are musically and dramatically satisfying, and it even requires that the title character have a moment of deliciously over-the-top recitation (we can gripe about soprano X or Y overdoing Violetta's reading of the letter, or Tosca's traditionally spoken lines, etc, but Adriana HAS to go there with the Phadre scene, and it's great fun.) There are other operas like this - La Rondine is one example - operas that tend to get stuck in the fringes of the repertoire, but that I think deserve much better reputations than they seem to have.

It's funny - I don't suppose anyone ever asks how black-haired men feel about sleeping with another black-haired guy lol. Such is the unique nature of the ginger, I guess. I have found that some redheaded men have a unique and, to me, very alluring and sexy natural body scent - musky and almost waxy, for a lack of a better term. To me, a huge turn on.

Slightly off-topic for the thread, but you just jogged my memory about something. There is a debate event called "The Great American Think-Off" which I first stumbled upon on C-Span (of all places) - that particular year (1998), the topic was "Is Honesty Always The Best Policy?" I didn't know that the Think-off is still alive and well - I just found their website (here) and also a video of that particular debate (here). It's over 3 hours long, but I remember it as being a fun debate, and some of you might have fun watching it at some point. here

One has to think, though - do young kids ever wonder why Santa seems to be at all the malls at once, etc? Is that just some amazing kind of magic, akin to visiting all those billions of chimneys all over the world in one night? (And wouldn't he really be up at the North Pole getting ready for the big sleigh ride?) Oh, to be that innocent again...

I really don't remember what my initial neighborhood was like, but I suspect it wasn't all that Jewish. When I was 6, we moved to a suburb that had a balance of everything but certainly had a decent amount of Jewish visibility - though I think a lot of the neighbors on our very small street were wasps lol. As I said, I'm sure I was aware of Christmas trees and the holiday in general, to some extent - I guess it was more that since we didn't have a tree and didn't celebrate the holiday at my house, I just assumed this was something I didn't need to know all that much about. But also, this was the late 1960's, and somehow I tend to think that the constant in-our-faces commercialization of Christmas was nothing like it is now. I think had I been born even a decade later it would have been that much harder to ignore lol. I tend to think that I wasn't quite as naive as I describe now - but I do remember things like not being familiar with a song like "Silent Night" and stuff like that. But I guess, same as now, that the general assumption is that "everyone" knows the standard Xmas carols even if they're not Christian. But hey - we do have to learn them at some point lol - I was just a bit on the later side with that.

I hope they tried to explain that Santa couldn't stay, but that he left all the instructions... Like Gar1eth, I'm Jewish. My father's side of the family was orthodox when they wanted to be (lol), my mother's side of the family was essentially reform, if that. We didn't keep kosher at home, etc, though we did celebrate the major holidays (I have a faint memory of my dad trying to teach me the Hebrew words to the Hanukkah candle blessings way before I was even old enough to understand what this was all about - I repeated the odd sounding words after him, then he lit the candles, and I got presents, lol.) But we didn't celebrate Christmas. And I have to say, I was barely aware of the whole culture of the holiday. I have another memory, of doing group singing of Christmas carols in music class in elementary school (probably kindergarten or first grade?), and having no f-ing idea what we were singing. Heavenly peas? Round John version? Something about a "Mr. Fezziwee?" I was absolutely clueless. And feeling a little left out, to be honest, because it did seem like all my other friends, even the jewish ones, seemed to know these songs. Maybe I just hadn't been paying attention, lol? I'm sure I knew about Christmas trees and all that, but since we didn't do any of that at home, it didn't seem to register somehow. (btw - I still have no idea where the Fezziwig song came from - something like "Mr. Fezziwig / Wears a wig / O-on his head..." with a kind of catchy vaudeville/music hall-ish tune - a song I've never heard in any version of A Christmas Carol I've ever seen. Was it from some school play version I didn't see? Who knows? But it was probably also right around that same time that I discovered all those classic Xmas cartoon specials - the Rankin/Bass stuff, the Charlie Brown Christmas, Boris Karloff's peerless Grinch, etc. But again, that's all I really knew about the holiday. So, I did get my understanding of Santa from stuff like "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" - but at the same time, I think I knew that all this had nothing to do with me. I do remember my mom explaining to me, still at an early age, that Santa was all pretend. I don't think I was surprised lol. Eventually of course I also learned that there was no Burgermeister Meisterburger, or the elf that wanted to be a dentist, or Clarise the Reindeer, etc, or any of that stuff from the cartoons lol. But then again, biblical scholars have been pointing out for years that Jesus was most likely born in the spring or summer (no frozen shepherds in the fields, let alone nuns in frigid cells), it was probably Joseph's family's house that had no room to take care of the suspiciously pregnant Mary (not an "inn" in the way we know them) and the surely filthy smelly barn with the manger was anything but a sanctified, pretty venue, let alone a safe place for a newborn child. (We are to understand that it was "a lowly manger" but we never get the rest of the lurid description lol.) So, even the way the story has been told to and by little Christian children for years, beautiful shiny creches and all, really isn't anything close to what actually happened. So, does it really matter if Santa is real or not? What's much more important, of course, is that the Grinch's heart grew three sizes that day. We KNOW that happened.

I didn't know there was an article, per se, but I've always felt mouthwash certainly isn't a bad idea, whether it's really effective or not.

Yes.

I'm very much an oral guy, and have never really been interested in anal sex. (And in the relatively few times I've received anal, it's been with protection.) And yet I've been swallowing since embracing my sexuality in my late teens (I'm now in my 50's). I've never had an STD. Whether that's luck or prudence I don't know. For me, swallowing is part of the fun of sexual male bonding. I know that many guys love the sensation of being able to shoot that way, and that makes it hotter for me - as well as my own feeling that I'm getting to share in his sperm in a very fun and sensual/sensorial way. (I imagine, yes, that guys who bareback would have a similar explanation, but for me, getting to actually taste a guy's semen is SO much more satisfying. For me, having it shot inside me during anal sex wouldn't be something I'd experience in the same satisfying way. I'd understand that it might feel great to my partner, but I wouldn't get the same kind of excitement out of it personally.) I've even had fun talking about it with guys - this may sound silly, but one playfully erotic thing I like is to personalize a guy's load, because for me, swallowing IS about enjoying that particular guy's load. So, let's say hypothetically I'm hooking up with a guy named Tom - I might flirt with him by saying that I can't wait to taste his "Tom-flavored sperm" (Yeah, that may sound silly, but it often gets the right aroused reaction lol) - or, if afterwards, he asks me what it tasted like, I might look him in the eyes and smile and say "tastes like Tom." That might get a chuckle, but I can tell when a guy likes his ego, um, stroked like that. As I said, to me, swallowing is very intimate male-bonding, and how better to do that than to make it feel as personalized as I can?

I would need to see his face. I've never been into truly "anonymous" sex in that sense. I know some guys love that, but to me it's more than about just the cock.

I would need to see his face. I've never been into truly "anonymous" sex in that sense. I know some guys love that, but to me it's more than about just the cock.

To be honest, it seems to me that you spend much more time trying to "defend" the site out here than answer questions that are posed to you about it. If you don't want to talk about the site, you have to actually do that, lol. If you want to step in to try to defend the site anytime anyone makes comments about it, well, you can't really also tell us not to ask you questions lol. Just a friendly suggestion, thanks.

yes - and the site was www.lpsg.com/forums.

Actually, if this was very recently, I think it was a gay-themed site but not an escort-related site. I think it was because someone had asked about other gay sites that had active political discussions.

One of the great great Xmas songs, though of course so very sad in the context of the film. But a truly beautiful song on its own. Thank you, William, and happiest of holidays.

I do believe Mr. Fawkes when he says that it's just a month hiatus - because I do think he would have leveled with us if the site were truly coming to a permanent end. And if it takes a month to upgrade and to give the powers that be a well-deserved vacation, then so be it. I seem to remember that we've had something similar happen before, though maybe not for as long as a month. We can handle this. We can be self-sufficient adults, and wish each other fabulous holidays, and go away for a month and then come back refreshed in 2019 ready to go at it again with an upgraded site, a rested owner/staff, and maybe even some new and practical thoughts on how to have a politics section out here lol. (And based on today's news, I bet we'll have lots to discuss there once we get back, lol.) I'm grateful for this site for many reasons, including certainly the ones it was originally intended for. And I trust we'll have more to be grateful for in the new year. Happy holidays, everyone, and see you next year!!

I would quibble that Pinza was truly a Broadway legend - he was an operatic legend that is also famous for one major Broadway role. (His other show, Fanny, is pretty much a forgotten show now, though I think it had a successful run at the time.) Most certainly Keel was a Hollywood legend, but certainly not a Broadway legend. His entire Broadway career, from what I know, was merely in replacing other leading men after they left their original runs. He never originated a show himself (aside from a complete flop stage version of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, in which he reprised the role he played in the film). Not sure that makes him a "legend" in any way. (Also, even with his major singing roles in films of Broadway properties, he was recreating someone else's roles, including a few originated by Raitt and Drake.) Raitt and Drake, however, were the real deal.

Another strange quirk of the site is that at the end of the listings, there is text that suggests one "take a closer look at" the first 2 escorts in the list. And it always reflects those first top 2, even when the ads switch around. If this is supposed to point to some sort of "featured status" for those 2 escorts, it's being done in a very ineffective way, lol. As it is, it feels like a very random and essentially meaningless bit of text. Also, the indications of "should be in town" (should be? Is he or isn't he?) and "should come to town soon" (Maybe he should? lol) are equally meaningless. How about specific dates? I do agree that the addition of "scores" (i.e. fees) are welcome, though.

I second that.