Porn Drinks

Two things: thing 1) everyone commenting on my post earlier about my friend The Fashion Sensation’s determination to screw up her life agreed that people sliding headfirst down the Whoops Path are going to go on regardless of advice and the best thing one can do is to be supportive and prepared to help pick up  the pieces.  Got it.  Mainly because I was already pretty much convinced of that.  As I told the Sensation this afternoon “I’ll support you in whatever bad decision you make.”  What more can a girl ask for?

Thing 2) the consensus was unanimous for Santiago, so here he is again, looking all insouciant and stuff.

After lunch we wound up at the porn bar.  That’s not its name, but since I don’t know what that is, let’s stick with “the porn bar.”  The outstanding local porn company Kink.com  (their mission statement:  “We demystify and celebrate alternative sexualities by providing the most authentic kinky experiences.”  Well, duh.) which purchased and sort of renovated the enormous San Francisco Armoury as their studio headquarters and shooting site, also bought a shabby little bar across the street and has turned it into the sweetest and most stylish watering hole I’ve been to.  (Ed. note: subsequent research reveals its name is The Armoury Club.)If you plan on hanging out with a friend intent on messing up her life, I can’t recommend highly enough.

Dark, pretty, alabaster bar, and tasty, tasty drinks.

I like Kink’s work a lot.  Their sites include Butt Machine Boys, Divine Bitches, TS Pussy Hunters, Public Disgrace, and many others.  My fave is Bound Gods which gave us the classic Creepy Janitor series.  When the company bought the Armoury, which had been sitting mouldering away for decades, there was the expected outcry from the small minded sector of the public who took exception to movies about firm bodied young men being whipped while duct taped to a toilet.  Well, get you, that’s what I say.  Welcome to the sixties, mama.

Another day at work, right?

This Just In:

mrpeenee is just the teensiest bit drunk.  We went out tonight with friends to see the one man show of Leslie Jordan, who is, as a side note, like mrpeenee also a 57 year old big sissy from the South, so a lot of his stories resonated, except for the ones about doing speed fueled drag as a teenager.   Still, it was pretty amusing.

The show required a two-drink-minimum, so I had a couple of Cosmos, because I am a Lady, and they were tasty, tasty, tasty, but STRONG.  So I’m a little drunk.

Back in the day, mrpeeenee was a Big Mess.  A Big Drunk Mess.  As loaded as I am at this moment was merely a brief stop on the Big Drunk Mess Line; it was the I Think I’ll Have Another Pitcher of Margaritas stop.  So very much not happy times.  Let me just say how very glad I am to no longer be on that sloppy train.  Plus typing is hard when ones fingers seem slightly unconnected.

Instead, muscle pussy:

This Just In

Yes, I am a cranky old man

And I am not paying $350 for a goddam pair of jeans.

On the other hand, isn’t this guy adorable?

Secret Agent Fred and I went out for drinks tonight and I had a “Gaupo” which turns out to be basically a margarita made with grapefruit juice.  Tasty.  I might be a tiny bit loaded.

The Brunch Project, episode 1

Dress code: ties not required.

MJ has called me out on my lack of blogging.  I attempted to claim I was actually blogging by mime, but I knew the bitter truth would out eventually.  So let me just admit now that I was abducted by aliens.  Again.  Fucking aliens.

Fortunately, I was able to escape long enough to nip out for brunch with Secret Agent Fred and our dear friend Anne, the Fashion Sensation.  Unfortunately, brunch was at the Four Seasons hotel.  Many years ago, when the earth was new and so was the Four Seasons, the joint was a chi-chi place of asian fusion cuisine and lots of gorgeous deco inspired furniture in luxurious finishes like silk and marquetry in a beautiful palette of gold and verdigris and taupe.  Now asian fusion has run its course and the menu has settled down to eggs and bacon and french toast, which is ok with me, and the furnishings are looking a little tatty and worse for wear.  Here’s a free tip from mreeenee Decorating Services, ltd.:  if you go for a luxe look, you need to keep that shit up.  Chipped inlays and frayed velvet are only okay if you’re old money.

The service?  Bad.  We were there late, so they only had two other tables to work and yet they managed to avoid us adroitly.  Miss Sensation thought our waiter looked like “Maria Callas’s ugly niece,”but he reminded me of Eric Blore and sounded like Peter Lorre.  You know he watches cop shows and titters a little too knowingly to himself “Oh, right, like that’s how they question serial killer suspects.”

Food?  I suppose there was food, I don’t really recall, something about eggs benedict with a sauce that strongly resembled mayonnaise.  Drinks?  The Creature from the Blore/Lorre Lagoon denied they could make a Pimm’s Cup even as I looked past his shoulder to the bar where Miss Sensation and I had settled in a couple of weeks ago to discuss over Pimms Cups the sorry state of our respective lives.  or “lives.”

On the plus side, there was a very attractive guy near us for Fred and me to ogle.  At different points during the afternoon, it seemed likely he was going to mount the young woman he was with.  Tragically, it was no go.

In summary, the Brunch Report gives the Four Seasons a C.  And an expensive C to boot.

Brunch and More. Or Less.

How mortifying that my drink of choice is a Cascade Ice Pink Grapefruit flavored sparkling water with an Alka Seltzer thrown in, cause I am a Wild Man.  Just a regular panic, I tell ya.  It’s sparkling!  It’s grapefruit-y!  It makes me burp!  Sort of like a now,  happenin’ Fresca.

How did Max Veneziano get in here?

Speaking of surveys, I have decided to create The Brunch Project since going out to brunch seems to be the highpoint of my week (which also raises the question “Is it really ‘brunch’ if it lasts eight hours and includes three bars and two restaurants?’  To which I can only reply “Fuck yeah.”)

The Brunch Project will report back about these bacchanals with details on where we went, what we ate, which drinks were the tastiest, who was the cutest queers spotted and any police action involved.  But impertinent monkeys that you are, I am sure mrpeenee readers will want more, so here’s the deal.  You send me the questions you want us to include on the Project Report and I’ll be sure to use them in the survey which brunch participants will be asked to complete.

Stupid Back

My back, never terribly cooperative at the best of times, has been giving me grief all week.  I took to my bed with ice packs and muscle relaxants, hounded my chiropractor, prayed to the Psychic Friends – nothing helped.  Then this morning I dragged my sorry ass of to a “late brunch” (which is code for drinks and vicodin) with Secret Agent Fred and several friends and now, many hours later, I feel ever so much better.   Maybe it was the pizza.

A graphic representation of my backache this week:

Ick.

Much better.

Worthless.

Much better.

Sunday Plans

A dear friend is going through a rough time, another and I haven’t connected in far too long, and Super Agent Fred is always up for a good time, so the obvious answer is Sunday Brunch and then possibly shopping at Gump’s.  Gay?  Why do you ask?

We’re headed off for a swank little boite in an odd part of downtown.  Since making the reservation on Tuesday, they have called me twice and sent me two emails less about confirming our party and more like badgering me.   I suspect that were we to not turn up they would track us down with bloodhounds.  Still, it sounds like a sweet  place and one of the drinks they feature on their brunch menu is the Mary Pickford: white rum, pineapple gum, lime, grenadine and maraska.  I have no idea what maraska might be and I’m fervently hoping “pineapple gum” is a typo, but I’m planning on swilling it down and will report later, if the vicodin holds out.  I figure it it’s good enough for America’s Sweetheart to knock back, how bad can it be?

Also, speaking of The Gay Life, here:

And They’re Off

Secret Agent Fred and I went out for drinks this afternoon. I stopped drinking in 1980 and only started again, rather timidly, a few years ago. I still stick with one drink, partially because that’s all it takes to get me loaded and mostly because more than that and I turn into a nasty drunk. Not nice.

Anyway, we had fallen into a shabby joint called Martuni’s that’s marooned in a no man’s land between downtown and the Castro. It’s the sort of comfortably unattractive place you can stay for an hour or so complaining the whole time “This place is a dump.” Decoration is squarely in the camp of fussy old queens from the Nancy Reagan school and the waiter we always get is surly. And yet, it’s where we wind up.

Today they had a special “Electric Lemonade” so of course, I ordered one based on my theory that if you only have one drink, it might as well be ridiculous. Surprisingly, this turned out to be rather tasty. As I told Fred, “Looks like anti-freeze, tastes like fruit punch.”

All of this bacchanal was sort of in the way of warm-up. Fred and I are off for a vacation in New Orleans next week and the always attractive Diane von Austinburg will join us there. I suppose middle-aged shenanigans will follow. Also, I’m hoping to visit with that blogger of bloggers, Jason from Night is Half Gone. I could promise to post updates from my travels (we’re also going to hit Austin while we’re out on the road,) but I know that’s a lie, so I’ll just say adieu for now and ask you to check back April 14 for all the fascinating details I can make up.

In the meantime, here’s my new favorite pretend boyfriend, Sadik Hadzovic .

Remember

Throwing Up a Storm

Our dear sistah in New Orleans, Cow Queen, sent us a wonderful new cookbook “Cooking Up a Storm.” It’s a collection put together by the New Orleans newspaper in response to Hurricane Katrina stricken readers who had lost recipes clipped out of the paper over the years. It’s a very clever idea; I think all cooks have a stack of clippings that they would hate to lose. I have a binder filled with them, some of them decades old that I’ve never made, but fully intend to one day, and others that I turn to time after time.

So we were leafing through the book and ran across a cocktail called The Bushwacker. Composed of ice cream and run and liqueurs, it sounded most enticing and it was. R Man and Urban Street Pirate and I ran up a blender full and then kept sending Pirate into the kitchen for another round. We finally stopped after four. The recipe had included a gay little caveat “Be careful, they go down easy!” How very true. Unfortunately, in my case, they also came up, perhaps not easily, but certainly spectacularly.

I threw up everything but my toenails. I was heaving things I had consumed during the Clinton administration. I puked things from another dimension, like a bad Star Trek episode.

Oh dear.

I mentioned in my earlier post about drinking Cosmos with the boys that I had gotten tipsy after one potent cocktail. Now it appears that not only can I not hold my liquor, I can’t even hold it down.

Fine, fine. I don’t care. If you want me, I’ll be right over here, back on the wagon, attempting to memorize the Ladies’ Temperance League’s Oath.

Paging Samantha Jones

Mrpeenee is not a drinker. Mrpeenee used to be a fairly serious guzzler. Mrpeenee was, on occasion, a Big Mess. Mrpeenee will now revert to the much more user friendly first person pronoun.

My father is a drunk. Not a mean or abusive one, just a soggy Scotch sponge. One evening 28 years ago, shortly after moving to New Orleans, I was sitting on the curb in a tequila induced haze when I realized I was turning into my father. Since that was not really a goal I wanted to pursue, I stopped drinking. Right there, right then. I didn’t struggle with it, I didn’t have relapses, I just quit. One of the finest services a parent can ever provide is as a role model. Or a warning.

So now, all these decades later, I’ve realized I don’t have to be him. I can actually have a drink without following it up with so many that I turn into a sloppy muddle. Case in point: Tuesday evening, I met up with the Urban Street Pirate and R Man after work for cocktails at Moby Dick’s, an almost stylish bar in the Castro. Don’t judge, it’s next door to where we were headed for dinner.

I boldly ordered a Cosmopolitan. Yes, it’s true. I drink like the girl in your 9th grade class who listened obsessively to the cast recording of Cats, could never get a date, and ordered drinks based on the fact they’re so Sex and the City and they’re pretty.

One drink, after which I insisted we go on to dinner rather than sticking around to get blotto. I have an absolute will of iron. Plus I was already tipsy off one damn Cosmo. Hmm. I started out worried I’d turn into my father the lush and wound up as a girl-drink lightweight. Maybe that’s progress, I’ll take it.