TKM

Katherine Heigl and I don’t look very much alike. Oh, sure, there are similarities—the swanlike sweep of the neck, the winsome girl-next-door quality, the overall luminosity—but few would mistake us for twins or sisters or even species mates. Which is why it was worrying when my partner of 13 years went, well, kinda moony when Heigl arrived at The Advocate’s 40th anniversary party last week.

One minute I was holding forth about how much I dislike drinking perfectly respectable beverages out of martini glasses—

“Katherine Heigl is here,” le domestique blurted.

I looked toward the door and traced the ethereal glow to its energy source.

I would show you a picture of myself from the party, but my efforts to duck the paparazzi were apparently completely successful. Instead, here I am in my front yard.

Eerily dissimilar, aren’t we?

“T.R. must have brought her—they’re best friends,” I said knowingly, having fact-checked T.R. Knight’s cover story in which he said so. (I didn’t actually check with Knight or his publicist to confirm that Heigl is his best friend because [a] we don’t verify interview quotes unless they seem wrong, incendiary, or just weird, [b] I think it’s reasonable to think that Heigl is in fact his best friend, [c] ringing him up to ask “But is she really your best friend?” would regress us both to grade-school sensibility, and [d] fact-checking is, much as the term connotes, concerned with objective facts—spellings of proper names, exact dates, ages, etc.—whereas best-friend status is subjective, as can be seen by flipping through the autograph pages of your high school yearbooks.)

Knight was among the last of the invited celebrity hosts to arrive. I had already stalked Jane Lynch to some degree, or she had stalked me—I’m honestly not sure which. All I know is that every time I looked up she was within six feet of me, and she’s very tall, so if she had lain down at any point during the night her head might have landed in my lap.

Had Jane Lynch’s head fallen in my lap, I’d like to think I might have said something terribly witty—which would absolutely exclude “Come here often?”—but I was in a bit of a buzz state most of the night, so I probably would have said something like, “Yer hair’s pretty.”

The buzz wasn’t so much cultivated as thrust upon me. Immediately after entering the venue and ascertaining the whereabouts of the facilities, as one should, le domestique and I were confronted with one of several bars sprinkled about the event. In keeping with the evening’s general conviviality and open-bar rules, which practically insist that one take on hard liquor, I ordered a Manhattan, bourbon being my favorite among your grain alcohols.

The pretty and somewhat flirty bartender gamely reached behind the many bottles of (event beverage sponsor) Skyy vodka for the lone bottle of Maker’s Mark. She poured the bourbon generously, augmenting it with the merest glances of vermouth and bitters, and dispensed it into a Skyy martini glass. Then she frowned and, with a mock-pout that reads as sexy, said, “I don’t have any cherries.”

“Quite all right,” I said. “No garnish necessary.”

“I’ll give you more bourbon instead,” she said brightly, turning back to her bottle stock to retrieve the beverage sponsor of generations of sailors and prostitutes. Listen, nothing garnishes a 98% bourbon drink better than bourbon, especially when there’s none of that messy ice to potentially melt and throw off the delicate balance of the bourbon and air that make up one’s cocktail.

Ordinarily I’m kind of a wallflower at parties, but you know how wallflowers get with the aid of multiple-shot bourbon cocktails. Yep, I was a sort of fuzzy wallflower—like maybe a bulrush. And with all those lowered inhibitions I was not about to move along when the wall I happened to choose, sort of off to one side of the stage, turned out to be the zone where all the fancy people were queuing before and after taking the dais.

I will stand very close to as many celebrities as I please, thanks very much! Not that anyone was trying to get me to move. But, you know, sober me would have of her very own volition hustled out of fancy town to make way for fancier folk than myself.

I think I was saying something about wanting to lick William Baldwin, because really, how often do you get your chance to lick a Baldwin, when—

“Katherine Heigl needs a drink,” le domestique said with no small amount of urgency. “Someone should get Katherine Heigl a drink.”

I turned my head toward the Knight-Heigls to see them just chitchatting away with the gays. She didn’t seem in crisis at the time, but I understand an elevated hydration level is required if one is to glow so constantly. Also, I think fluids help to maintain healthy pores, and an actress can’t be too careful in the age of hi-def TV. Just as squeaky-voiced silent film stars lost their livelihood in the transition to talkies, HD may prove ruinous to the careers of the large-pored set.

“She was doing this,” le domestique said, tipping her hand toward her mouth with her pinky extended—the universal symbol for thirstiness.

Le domestique’s enchantment with Heigl was only fair. On the way to the party I mentioned that the guest I most wanted to meet—or more appropriately, stand really close to—was Jenny Shimizu. Le domestique hadn’t heard of her.

“The really androgynous dyke model from those Calvin Klein ads in the ’90s,” I offered.

Blank stare.

“She was a mechanic in West Hollywood until she was ‘discovered,’ then she became a big-time altie model,” I said. “Oh, and she was Madonna’s lover.” With that, I had offered my entire inventory of knowledge about Jenny Shimizu. “Anyway, she’s hot.”

“How androgynous is she?”

“In the Calvin Klein ads she could have gone either way,” I enthused.

“I worry about your type,” le domestique said, not being at all androgynous herself.

Over the years, and certainly in the week since the party, we’ve had a conversation or two as to “types”: whether we have them, what they are, the number of ways in which we each seem to resemble the other’s not at all.

Is le domestique interested in a willowy, blond evocation of Audrey Hepburn? If so, I’m in trouble. I go whole days and sometimes weeks without remembering that I’m a chica. And my moments of feminine lucidity are generally prompted not by a mirror but by a stranger whose quizzical eyes dart furtively from my face to my breasts and back again. (It’s fun or irritating, depending on my mood.)

Am I obsessed with straight-hipped, flat-chested boy-girls? Le domestique is very much a woman, with hips and breasts and curves and everything. She has medium-long hair, soft features, and a professional wardrobe that I would describe as “flowy.”

In light of such disparate attractions, neither of us can be faulted for worrying that we’re not keeping the home fires stoked properly.

But when we scrutinized each other’s supposed types, we stumbled on an interesting truth: We had each identified an ideal that reveals much more about our personal conceptions of womanhood than about what we’re attracted to in a partner. Mine is outwardly tough, even forbidding, and inscrutable to those who don’t know her—though in my fantasy she has a soft nougat center. Le domestique’s ideal is outwardly soft and radiant, but she’s approachable and authentic and, one gets the sense, having the last laugh on folks who only think they know her.

Heigl and Shimizu, I think, provide us with real-world faces for our personal mental constructs of gender. Mine is just a little more, um, third-sexed than hers.

Readers, you’ll be pleased to know that someone did retrieve a drink for Katherine Heigl. Sadly, I never did see Jenny Shimizu at the party; I just assumed she hadn’t made it—she’s very distinctive, and the guest list was cozy enough that one could fairly easily find anyone she might be looking for. But in the days to follow I saw pictures from the party, and there she was—with a new “girl” haircut!

Sweet Jenny, I thought we had an understanding.

(Psst. Click here to read my new piece on Advocate.com.)

Q: If a tree falls in the wee hours of the morning, crashing onto the garage roof, yanking electrical wiring from the wall, and demolishing the attic fan from one’s brand-new HVAC system along the way, does anyone hear it?

A: Yes.

Especially if one has already been roused by worried dogs. I feel terrible now for having told Scout repeatedly to “Shut up, shut up. Oh, my god, shut up!” in the midnight to one o’clock hour, during the whole of which he alternately whimpered, growled, and barked his fool head off. Had he the vocabulary, he would undoubtedly have said, calmly, “I’m hearing strange noises from the backyard. Would you like me to investigate?” But no matter how many times we tell our dogs, “Use your words,” they unfailingly turn to their primal barking language in a crisis.

The strange noises, which I did not hear, were undoubtedly the cracks and creaks of our 1,000-, or at the very least 50-year-old mulberry tree as it succeeded in casting off its mortal coil. To look at the tree, one might conclude that this was a long time coming, appearing as it does to be consumed by disease. I’d come to think of it as the “elephant tree,” such are the tumorous growths that riddle its core from the trunk up. Were it possible to send trees out on film shoots—as one might her cat or middle child—our tree would surely have enjoyed a career as a set piece in horror flicks.

So jarring is the tree’s appearance, we assumed when we bought the property that it would have to be removed. But when we consulted with an honest-to-god arborist, who winced when he first saw it but later affectionately patted its trunk like the head of a beloved nephew, he pronounced it sound—diseased, to be sure, but uncompromised in its integrity. In other words, it wasn’t about to fall on our house. So, really, the question became, Can we live with the tree and its gothic grotesqueries? Or, more to the point, Do we want to drop a couple grand taking this sucker out?

A funny thing happened during those deliberations: I grew fond of its beautiful ugliness. To be sure, no one else in the neighborhood has a tree quite like it, and such a prop can be seasonally decorative come Halloween. But for a little Spanish moss and Béla Lugosi, we could shoot a rogue indie monster movie, Ed Wood–style, entirely within the confines of our backyard.

But fall it did, about one third of it, as though the rotten core at the base of its trunk had simply exploded.



And while I didn’t hear the creaking and cracking, only Scout’s fretting over it, I certainly heard the crash as the tree fell onto our garage roof, after which there erupted paroxysms of pure dog panic. I got up to investigate, but finding the patio undisturbed I went back to sleep with glass-half-full thoughts: The cacophony that had sounded so near was nothing to worry about, really; maybe someone at the apartment building next door had thrown a body into a dumpster from their third-floor window.

Interestingly, had the latter scenario occurred, the owners of the apartment building might have called precisely the folks we did—as recommended by our insurance company—because when shit happens to your house or property, you need the kind of one-stop shopping Disaster Cleanup can provide. Fire? Flood? Mold? Rotten tree? Crime scene? They’re on it. And while I at first balked at the idea of having our tree removed, roof repaired, and wiring restored all by the self-same company that would, by the by, be happy to come and mop up after a murder, when I started to think about contracting with tree people, roofers, and an electrician—and having to submit all that billing through insurance company channels—Disaster Cleanup appeared as a beacon on an otherwise invoice-riddled horizon.

As one might expect, Disaster Cleanup is more of a contracting superstore than a jack-of-all-trades. So it is that Michael, a local construction contractor, was dispatched to my location for an initial assessment. And, because you know I asked, Michael tells me that he has neither the stomach nor the desire to clean up trauma sites. “There are contractors who do nothing but, and they’re better at leaving their job at the office than I could ever be in the same situation,” he says, but he’s happy to take care of my structural damage and subcontract for my tree removal, wiring work, and anything else I might need seeing to—short of human viscera.

It occurs to me that there are more contractors in the world than there are people who actually carry out contract labor, but the idea of a single invoice is so compelling that I don’t want to interrupt the choir of angels in my head to question the American Way. They’re having enough trouble rising above the din of the chainsaws at work dismantling the elephant tree.

Scout, meanwhile, continues to bark his fool head off. If only he could presently access his language center, he would say, calmly, “There are guys I don’t know in the backyard. Would you like me to investigate?”

So, le domestique and I were visiting friends over the weekend. J. is a programming whiz, and his lovely wife, S., is a dang cool designer. Together, they’re a force to be reckoned with—they and their two dozen or so domains—and they’ve been selling us on the idea of colonizing the Internet’s rapidly diminishing unsettled territories since way before we felt we had anything at all to say to anyone we don’t know IRL.

In fact, I remember distinctly the queasy feeling I got when S. told us, back in the late ’90s, that she was keeping an online journal, right there out in the open for any fifidoodle, retro_babe, or mva1966 to read. And it wasn’t as though she were limiting herself to benign topics like her favorite ice cream (currently Breyer’s “No Sugar Added” Double Churn Chocolate Fudge Brownie) and what color she should paint her toenails (any color, so long as the product is nontoxic and the manufacturer doesn’t test its wares on animals): She laid herself bare, writing about mental health, relationships, alternative religious beliefs, and anything else she might have written about in a corporeal journal, one more properly tucked away between her mattress and box spring. I remember, too, feeling unsettled when she told us she had met a guy named J. online and that they were planning to meet in person.

He could be an ax murderer!

(In truth, axes aren’t particularly popular with murderers. In 2005, 55% of homicides were committed with handguns, with another 16% involving other kinds of guns. The next most popular weapons were knives, claiming 14% of U.S. murder victims, followed by your blunt objects. The humble ax doesn’t even get its own category, falling namelessly within the 11% “other” camp. But I suppose “He could be a gun murderer,” statistical probabilities and poor grammar aside, lacks a certain rhetorical urgency.)

Since then, of course, that theoretical ax murderer has become one of my very favorite people. And I don’t just say that because he’s hosting me on his server and made things right again when the import of my Blogger archives delivered text and images in a slightly more free-spirited order than I might have preferred. And, seriously, when I try to picture J. wielding an ax, it makes me giggle.

Almost a decade into our friendship, and after demurring on countless occasions when the idea of my writing and the Internet crossed paths, I was finally the one to propose going all domain and shit with my blog. “Hey, guys,” I said casually, “I was thinking about buying Neurotranscendence.com.” After a few jokes about the certainty of its availability—I had already checked; hell, I could buy .net, .org, .tv, and just about any other permutation I’d like, except, I’m told, .edu, which is still a protected appendant—the S. and J. machine fired up the GHz and allocated all available resources toward realizing sites for me and le domestique both. The domains were procured, housed, and in the process of propagating by the time we went out for dinner. After dinner, S. tackled design issues (up to and including my sitting for a photo shoot and le domestique finding the appropriate raw image of a spork with which to craft her header), and the sites—quite independently of us, with S. and J. tag-teaming on various computers to work their respective mad skills on one site as each tackled the other, replete with intermittent assistance from their 2-year-old—began to look like destinations. And though le domestique and I admonished them to stop tweaking and debugging as we left their home, we arrived at our own after an hour’s drive to find that the sites had been improved in the interim.

I’ve spent much of the remainder of the holiday weekend rereading my archived content so as to accurately categorize entries that will likely never be read again; if I’m going to have categories, by Jiminy, they’re going to be populated. And readers, I know that it’s incumbent on me to make Neurotranscendence 2.0 compelling enough not only to reward those who click through but to make it worth your while to maybe even bookmark it or, in rarer cases, to update my URL in your blogroll, wherein many of you have been kind enough to include me. (Don’t for a moment think that such kindness goes unnoticed.)

And so, readers who have clicked through, I want to tell you a secret, a secret that, together with every secret revealed in every post from here on out, my Blogspot visitors will never know:

My name is Teresa.

Re name change, full disclosure: While not the sole intent of such action, author’s use of real name, in lieu of “Scout,” may prove beneficial in differentiating herself from her dog, Scout, in future posts.