Barry Livingston, I Presume

My slow progression from animal to vegetable continues apace, readers. I know and remember that after April 15, humanity returns, but it doesn't feel like it. It feels more like one day you might surf over to the blog and read, "One morning, as TED was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a large Belgian endive. Much as I might prefer to quietly braise myself in a cream sauce, I recognize that hibernation is not an option, so I try to keep up with my friends. Generally, this involves seeing a movie, which does not require me to hold up my end of a conversation and allows me to fall asleep so long as my snore doesn't grow any louder than the sound of popcorn being chewed. Sadly, many of my friends will also want to get dinner. This is fine in groups of more than four people, where I can fall asleep under the table, and instead of thinking, "Geez, TED, go home and get some sleep already," my friends will think, "Thank God. It's about time he started practicing his oral technique." Though, of course, when no one yelps and says "Watch the teeth, willya?" they eventually become suspicious.

This weekend, though, b&c was in Haiti (still not kidnapped!), and I was too tired to round up a larger number of people, so when my friend George said that he was free for dinner and a movie on Saturday, I was trapped. George is a great guy, but he reads this blog (hi, George!). This causes two big problems: a) whenever we're in a group of people, I live in fear that he'll mention the blog (I deal with this fear by always having on my person a Bic pen barrel and a small dart laced with a horse tranquilizer, so that if he starts to say, "Oh yeah, I read...," I can say, "Is that Jared Leto streaking?" and, when everyone's looking the other way, knock him out unobtrusively), and b) I can no longer talk to him about my sexual exploits, because he's already read them all. And, of course, I have no other conversational topics. George can talk about his sexual exploits and about his job, but his job is interesting in its own right; plus, it regularly allows him to travel to the far east, especially Beijing, where he spends your tax dollars and mine chasing young Asian tops. He is, in other words, a Kung Pao chicken queen.


Anyway, we had dinner Saturday night, and then we made our way over to Bethesda Row, where we had tickets to see Persepolis, which I can recommend without reservation. I didn't nod off once, and I found the film both enlightening and entertaining. Plus, I got to hear a whole lot of French. And we even had decent seats. After that debacle last fall where I ended up with a sore neck and a bad attitude because George had to have a second glass of wine, I made sure that we were at the theater twenty minutes prior to the posted time. This gave me the chance to hear the latest about George's boyfriends.

I'm not exactly sure how it happened (I'm guessing a head wound, but who knows?), but George's formative years coincided with the long television run of My Three Sons, and George has somehow become convinced that he's Fred MacMurray as Steve Douglas. Except that instead of three sons, he needs three boyfriends. Three young, far eastern boyfriends, of course. For a while, everything was going according to plan. His first bf didn't get along with his second bf, but they were rarely in the same state, so it didn't matter. And, of course, there were times when all three of the bfs were too busy with homework or whatever to come play catch, but his tastes don't run exclusively to the young and the Asian, so he'd go online and run down an Uncle Charlie, and household order would be restored. But then Mike went and married Nancy, and suddenly he was caught in the hell of My Two Boyfriends, and, well, that's just wrong, isn't it? So the past few months have been a constant search for Ernie.

So far, that hasn't quite worked out, and while some people would say that two boyfriends ought to be plenty, I say that he might as well go for it. Heck, he's going back to Beijing sometime soon, so while he's looking for Ernie, he might as well go ahead and pick up Dody. The more the merrier, yes? But the particular story he told me last night happened back when he still, sort of, had the three original boyfriends. Apparently, George was over in Beijing and had picked up very cheaply a couple of very nice cashmere sweaters for bf2. But when he returned to Maryland, he and bf2 got into a bit of a spat, so bf2 refused the sweaters. Fortunately, all of the bfs are the same size (it makes buying the cheap foreign gifts so much easier), so he shipped the cashmere off to bf1. Subsequently, bf2 decided that he did want the cashmere after all, but George told him that he'd already had his chance and that perhaps he would come to understand that refusing a gift out of anger was not wise. This is the sort of thing that the older generation is always trying to teach the younger. As it happened, bf1 -- something of a clothes horse -- didn't really like the sweaters all that much. Bf3's closet was sorely lacking, so George asked for the sweaters back, but bf1 was only willing to part with one of the sweaters because he knew where they were going. Kids these days, eh? I'm pretty sure that at some point during this whole thing, bf2 (who, you remember, turned down the sweaters and so had none) was heard to exclaim, "Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!" Of course, it's hard being the guy in the middle: keeping yours inside one guy while making sure another guy's stays inside you is beyond the ability of many.


Anyway, it was an amusing story. I've been trying for months to pitch the whole situation to one of the networks for a sitcom. It seemed like an obvious winner: surely you'd be able to line up plenty of advertising from the condom and soy sauce manufactuers. It's been hard going, though. Maybe I've been pitching the idea to the wrong people. I reckon I should have done more research about which network I was targeting, but, you know, Fox and Logo sound an awful lot alike, don't they? Who knew their demographics were so dissimilar?

Anyway, I was sure the cashmere sweater story would put me over the top, so I tried again. And I was, well, partially successful. The networks loved the idea generally, but they insisted on a few changes. Instead of four gay men in the mid-Atlantic, they decided to go with four retired women in Florida. George does look an awful lot like Estelle Getty, though, so I reckon it all came out fine in the end.