Archive for the ‘Acting’ Category

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Tomlin and Fonda

September 4, 2025

A very brief appreciation I posted on Facebook on 9/2, which seems to have caught the attention of a number of my readers, corrected and edited a bit here:

It’s that time of the year when I’m pleased to hear that Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda (both a bit older than I am) are still flourishing.

The immediate trigger was LT’s birthday — 9/1/39 (so she’s a year older than me) — with JF’s birthday — 12/21/37 (so she’s three years older than me, as Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, born 5/9/37, was) coming soon. So they’re roughly my age, and their acting, their activisms, and their passionate public commentary have brightened my life and moved me since the 1960s. Despite the considerable differences in their class backgrounds, their personalities, and their sexuality, they have been good friends for many years and have frequently acted together, to my mind most satisfyingly in the comedy tv series Grace and Frankie (aired on Netflix from 2015 through 2022):


(#1) Fonda (as Frankie) and Tomlin (as Grace) in Grace and Frankie; their house in the story is set on the beach down (by San Diego) in La Jolla; the filming happened up (by Los Angeles) on Malibu’s Broad Beach (photo: Melissa Moseley / AP)

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Posted in Acting, Actors, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Marriage, Movies and tv, Quotations | Leave a Comment »

SoCal lads with spread-lip smiles

November 12, 2024

…  and boy-foot bear with teak of Chan … no, no, Kent McCord and the Nelsons’ Rick, that’s the ticket.

(Tales of male-male desire and sexual acts — so this posting will be edgy for some readers — but not particularly vivid tales, and the photos are there for faces and torsos, not genitals)

Rick and Kent, figures of attractive, desirable masculinity — the first from my teenage years (there was a lot I didn’t understand in the Rick, or teenage hard-on, years, during which Ricky got me off, a lot), the second from young adulthood (it was during the Kent years that I gained some self-knowledge and entered into serious, life-long relationships with other men; suddenly it was important that Kent was not only a really hot guy as Officer Jim Reed on Adam-12, but that he also presented himself as a sturdy, dependable and empathetic nice guy, so an eminently satisfactory object of adult lust). Note: I was perfectly aware that Rick and Kent were, by all accounts, uncomplicatedly straight (as it happens, they became buddies when they worked in tv together); what I had in my head were fantasy Rick and Kent, and their kisses were sweeter than wine.

Now I tell you that Rick, Kent, and I were / are all essentially the same age; Rick 4 months older than me, Kent 2 years younger. (Rick died in 1985, but Kent is still alive, and he’s a great-looking 82-year-old.)

And while they’re interesting as objects of desire (on tv and elsewhere, notably from the 1950s through the 1970s), they get a posting here because of a characteristic facial gesture that they share: the spread-lip smile, a feature of Rick and Kent that large numbers of straight women and gay men find powerfully attractive (and that, no doubt, makes many straight men envious).

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Posted in Acting, Actors, Facial expression, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Phonetics, Photography, Variation | Leave a Comment »

You’ve gotta eat your Froot Loops, kid

October 13, 2024

The cartoon. Today’s Zippy strip is a translation of an everyday family drama into a surreal Dingburg version, in the household of Zippy and Zerbina and their children, the boy Fuelrod and the girl Meltdown:


“Eat your Froot Loops, Meltdown, or th’ force field will remove your topknot”

Just think of that as how Dingburgers say “Eat your spinach, kid, or the lack of iron will make you weak” — but much much more dramatically. Or as the song “You’ve Gotta Eat Your Spinach, Baby” (from the 1936 movie Poor Little Rich Girl) puts it:

You’ve gotta eat your spinach, baby
That′s the proper thing to do
It’ll keep you kind of healthy too
And what it did for Popeye it’ll do for you

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Posted in Acting, Conversation, Implicature, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Pragmatics, Relevance, Semantics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »

Gavin Creel and his little wounded dude

October 2, 2024

In print in the NYT today, a story (by Michael Paulson) I’ll talk about here in its 9/30 on-line version, headed “Gavin Creel, Tony-Winning Musical Theater Actor, Dies at 48: He won the award playing a Yonkers feed store clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” and was also nominated for roles in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Hair” and beginning:

Gavin Creel, a sly and charming musical theater actor who won a Tony Award as a wide-eyed adventure seeker in “Hello, Dolly!” and an Olivier Award as a preening missionary in “The Book of Mormon,” died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 48.

His death was confirmed by his partner [AZ: his male domestic partner], Alex Temple Ward, via a publicist, Matt Polk. The cause was metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, which Mr. Creel learned he had in July.

Mr. Creel was a well-liked member of the New York theater community whose death comes as a shock, given his age. He had been performing on Broadway for two decades, mostly in starring roles, and just last winter his physical and vocal agility, as well as his charisma and curiosity, were on display in a memoiristic show he wrote and performed Off Broadway called “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” about learning to love the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The obit continues with a detailed account of his career, which springboarded from his amazing singing voice and his projection of energy and enthusiasm, wrapped up in a big smile. He was noted for working well with others, and as being supportive of other actors’ careers. In short, an immensely talented really nice guy. All of this is wonderful, and I’m sorry I never got a chance to see him perform live, but I’m here because he also talked publicly about his life as a gay man, and how gay men compose and manage their lives is one of my areas of academic (as well as personal) interest.

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Posted in Acting, Actors, Death notices, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality | 1 Comment »

On the plot of Die Zauberflöte

November 19, 2023

(Side material for a posting in preparation about Julie Taymor’s Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte)

Opera plots are notoriously packed with preposterous and incomprehensible details, but at least at first glance, The Magic Flute would win some sort of grand prize in the problematic plot department. But some of it makes sense when you understand it as a fairy-tale (so accommodating many of the fantastical elements) in which someone (the prince Tamino, with whom the opera opens) undertakes a quest and undergoes an ordeal to achieve some prize (admission into the wizard Sarastro’s (S’s) Brotherhood of the Sun); it’s also a love story, with Tamino (T) falling in love with the princess Pamina (P) — daughter of the otherworldly Queen of the Night (Q) — through seeing a portrait of her brought to him by his quest-companion (acquired in the early scenes of the opera), the bird-catcher Papageno (Pg); T&P become a couple, undergo the trials together, and so join S’s band.

Summing up this much, there are five central characters:

three ordinary mortals (in the order of their appearance): T, Pg, P (T&P become a couple; Pg picks up a mate along the way, instead of undergoing the trials)

two otherworldly mortals, S and Q

More of the details become comprehensible if you know that the opera is full of allusions to and symbols of Freemasonry; Mozart and his librettist Schikaneder were both active Masons, and they seem to have viewed Die Zauberflöte as their “Masonic opera”. The Taymor production is way overloaded with Masonic symbolism. But unless you’re a Mason or read analyses of the opera, you’ll miss all this.

But we’re still left with two sources of audience bewilderment: the nature of S and of Q, which appears to shift dramatically between the two acts of the opera; and a sixth character, Monostatos (M), a third otherworldly mortal character, who keeps cropping up in a creepy subplot that stretches through a considerable span within the opera. A Moor in the original, in the Taymor production M is white but bizarre, hawk-beaked and grotesquely fleshy (with a troupe of Turkish followers). But the question is what M’s intrusions are doing in the opera at all; they might just be Mozartean effusions of dark and dangerous Turkishness, with M replaying the character Osmin from Mozart’s earlier German Singspiel opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). A bit more below.

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Posted in Acting, Actors, German, Music, Narrative, Translation | 4 Comments »

Camp sexiness meets porn sexiness

September 2, 2023

(Yes, man-on-man sex — and a penis — discussed in street language, with hot photos, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

Through the random confrontations of different things in my e-mail today: camp sexiness from John Travolta, porn sexiness from Skyy Knox and Milo Madera.

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Posted in Acting, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Brief shot: three gay porn faces

August 4, 2023

(Well, about gay porn and men’s bodies and man-on-man sex, discussed in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Today in my e-mail, a Lucas Entertainment new (gay porn) scene, cropped here so I can focus on the faces:

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Posted in Acting, Facial expression, Gay porn, Gaze, Language and the body, Language of sex | Leave a Comment »

Bad Dog Mackenzie

July 31, 2023

(Naked men, gay BDMS fetish porn discussed in street language, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)

In today’s e-mail, from the Falcon | Naked Sword Store (with hyphens inserted for clarity): summer cyber-Monday half-off hits on sale (1 day only):

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Posted in Acting, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language of sex | Leave a Comment »

Death of an instar

June 7, 2023

Yesterday’s — 6/6 — Wayno / Piraro Bizarro: “Today’s Theatrical Cartoon”, as Wayno’s title has it:


(#1) An outrageous — I hesitate to say brutal — pun, also learnèd, drawing on the technical terminology of zoology and the rather elevated locution the stage for acting, not to mention knowledge of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Acting, Articles, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Happy P Day, Mr. President

February 20, 2023

(men’s bodies and sex between men, illustrated just a bit shy of a X-rating and described in vivid detail in street language — tons of F for P day —  so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

It’s Presidents / President’s / Presidents’ Day — P Day, for short — in my country, and suppliers of gay porn flicks have mounted P Day sales of their wares. Their ads sometimes display an image from such a flick, ornamented with patriotic symbols (American flags, stars, plenty of red, white, and blue); the image itself usually has nothing whatsoever to do with P Day, but is an illustration of the deeply satisfying fantasy sex a man-desiring man can get off to by watching one of the flicks on sale. Often the sale ads are just gigantic displays of the covers of the merchandise, so you can search for what might work for you by scanning the titles and cover photos.

Two images from this year’s crop of P Day sale ads. One, from the Falcon company, shows an image of Flying Cowboy, an image in which a grateful citizen thanks his President by serving as the receptive partner in this acrobatic approach to anal intercourse. (The emotional landscape of the actual act is very different from this: the President is working hard to provide pleasure for his constituent.)

The other image is just one of the many covers in the Gay Empire ad for its P Day sale — a cover for a costume flick about pedication among the Norsemen.

This is the end of the careful talk in this posting. Below the horizontal line, and then the fold, is where the wild things have sex.

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Posted in Acting, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, Myths | Leave a Comment »

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