Charlie

During my senior year in high school, I was a member of the National Honor Society. We had a faculty advisor who wanted our club to be perceived in our suburban school as culturally cutting-edge, so she arranged for us to have lunch in the city and then go to a matinee of an off-Broadway production of a new musical called The Fantasticks at the Sullivan Street Playhouse. I don't remember anything about it except the performance of "Try to remember," which I couldn't stop singing over and over in my head for days afterwards.

I hate the thought of giving up my one glass of wine with dinner every night.

The Nexium was prescribed by my primary care doctor when I was in my late 50s. I took it for several years, by which time it had become available over the counter. I stopped about 15 years ago, because it didn't seem effective any longer. I have had the endoscopy, and I don't have H.pylori. I used Tums when needed, until an allergy specialist put me on Omeprazole a few years ago, because he said the reflux aggravated my respiratory allergies. My current primary care doctor prescribed the pantoprazole, which seems to cause me fewer bowel problems than Omeprazole did.

I read about this only a few minutes before logging on here! I have had acid reflux problems since middle age, and have used over-the-counter and prescription meds (starting with Nexium) for it for many years. I usually found that each one of them became ineffective after a while, and switched to something else. I am currently taking prescription pantoprazole, one of the PPIs, and I have found better results from that than from most others, but I haven't been on it for very long. I have never had more than one cup of coffee in the morning and a glass of wine with dinner, I eat a fairly simple healthy diet, I get a lot of exercise, and I never lie down after eating. My spouse, on the other hand, does all the things one is not supposed to do (he often goes straight from the table to the sofa to nap), and he has never had any trouble from reflux, so he has never taken any of those medications. And he has dementia. So what to do?

'48 Pontiac?

I had to fill out an application from the CA DMV yesterday for a senior ID card for my spouse (he is giving up his driver's license on his 88th birthday next week in exchange for the card), and I was surprised that he had to indicate whether he was male, female or nonbinary. If he had been filling out the application himself, he would have been baffled by the question.

One time I told Rex Brant that I was hiring him to celebrate my birthday. At the end of the appointment, he pulled out a bottle of wine he had bought me for a birthday present (it was a cheap Australian wine, but it was the thought that counted).

That happened to me once with an escort in New York. He also gave me advice on a text I could use in a course I was planning to teach.

When I mentioned this to two straight female friends of mine yesterday, one unmarried and 55 and the other married and 73, both of them said they would have done the same if they could! Obviously, I am missing something important about the TS phenomenon.

After a very enjoyable evening appointment at his apartment, Eric Ryan suggested that I come back the next morning for a relaxed breakfast. I couldn't do it, but I thought it was a very nice gesture that implied he would like me to be a friend and not just a client.

I have never been interested in cooking, so I have been lucky that for most of my adult life I have lived with men who liked to cook. Now that I am a fulltime caregiver for my husband, however, I have to do all the "cooking," which mostly means microwaving frozen dinners. My favorites are Stouffer's, Amy's, Michelangelo's, Rao's, Lean Cuisine, Healthy Cuisine, and Trader Joe's, plus an occasional one-off kind. I have a neighbor who loves to cook, and she often makes extra and offers it to me out of sympathy; I rarely turn anything down.

Some of today's threads are making me feel like an old man. 😕

Ditto.

I was surprised to learn that my nephew's 36 year old wife, an educated, sophisticated mother of two young children, somehow scored a ticket, and is flying to L.A. on her own to see Swift's concert at SoFi Stadium. And her husband and friends seem to think that is perfectly normal.

Our family went to see the movie at a drive-in when it first came out.

It was in the mid 1970s, at Bang's. Rudy wanted someone to dance with him, but everyone was too shy or nervous to do so. I thought, "What the hell? Everyone will be watching him, not me." So I joined him on the floor for about ten minutes. I figured that whenever anyone questioned my evaluation of a dance performance in the future, I could always roll my eyes and say, "Well, I danced with Nureyev."

I danced with him once at a disco in London.

"Mascular"?

As soon as I saw this in the comics this morning, I felt sure it would show up here.

In case some readers here are confused, it's winter in Canberra.

In fact, the experts say that is correct.

I was looking for something to take with me to read on a trip, and on our bookshelves I found a copy of The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, the American composer who lived and worked in Europe in the early 1950s, and whose art songs are still performed in classical concerts. It was published in 1966 by George Braziller, a respectable publisher, and my spouse had obviously bought it at that time under the influence of his then-partner, a musician who had studied in Europe, despite the fact that Rorem frequently lapses into French, which my spouse doesn't understand. It is a book that I have often seen mentioned in memoirs over the years, so I decided to give it a try. What surprised me most about the book was how frank Rorem was about his gay sexual experiences and love affairs not only among the haute monde of musical society, but also his casual sex experiences with the lowlifes he picked up on the streets and in Arab bathhouses. He also makes veiled references to what sounds like a proclivity for rough S&M. At the time he was in his late 20s and early 30s, and from the many photos it is clear that he was a very beautiful young man, which was part of the reason he had easy access to such a rarefied world of famous artists, intellectuals, and wealthy French aristocrats of both sexes. The sexual material seemed to be seamlessly integrated into his commentary about music, politics, and his social life in the 1950s. I'm sure that in person I would have found him intellectually stimulating but obnoxious in those years, and he wouldn't have found me worthy of mention in his diary. Since he often comments on his fears about death, particularly about dying young, I decided to google him, and was amazed to learn that he died only last year at the age of 99!

At least one can drive 80mph most of the way on I-10 across the state, but we still spent the better part of two days to get from Austin through El Paso because of stretches of "road work." Aaron made no comment about my AMEX Gold Card. My first partner was born and raised in west Texas, and decamped for the east coast as soon as he discovered he liked opera and men more than hillbilly music and women. Aaron seems more determined to stick it out on the plains.

The nametag he/she/they was wearing said AARON.

This wouldn't fit in the long "Travel sex stories" thread, because there was no sex involved; instead, it's a "travel gender" story. A few days ago I spent a night in Fort Stockton, a small town (pop. 8000) spread out on the windswept plains of west Texas. When I called the hotel, a familiar national chain, to make the reservation, the desk clerk ("Aaron") sounded like a pleasant young man with a possibly gay vibe. When I got to Fort Stockton, I managed to get lost trying to find the hotel (I had the wrong exit number from the Interstate), so I phoned the desk and got "Aaron" again. I stayed on the phone while he guided me through twists and turns to the hotel. When I arrived and approached the desk, I was confused: "Aaron" appeared to me, based on hair styling and clothing choices, to be a woman! Was "Aaron" transitioning, and if so, in which direction? From his/her/their friendly interactions with other staff, I also had the impression that "Aaron" was new on the job, and the co-workers were very friendly and helpful toward him/her/them. When I saw "Aaron" the next day--his long black hair pulled back in a bun and wearing what looked like ballet slippers--I was still confused: was "he" simply a very effeminate young man with a deep voice? I wasn't about to ask. I would not have been at all surprised to have encountered such an employee in NYC or L.A., but in the ultra-conservative rural heartland, where the majority of the hotel's clientele seemed to be pretty rough-looking truckers and ranchers, I didn't expect to find such an exotic character as the public face of a business. I found it very heart-warming.