🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April (the rabbits rush in tomorrow, bearing muguets pour le premier mai), with my response to a posting on Facebook by John McIntyre yesterday
Hail! Bright Jeremiah, hail! fill ev’ry heart!
With love of thee and thy celestial art
— adapted from Nicholas Brady’s text for Henry Purcell’s “Hail! Bright Cecilia” (Z.328)
(This posting devolves fairly fast into oral sex between men, so it is, alas, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
Musical overture: the chorus and verse 2 of the 1960s song “Chapel of Love”:
[chorus]
Goin’ to the chapel
And we’re gonna get married
Goin’ to the chapel
And we’re gonna get married
Gee, I really love you
And we’re gonna get married
Goin’ to the chapel of love[verse 2]
Bells will ring, the sun will shine,
I’ll be his and he’ll be mine
We’ll love until the end of time
And we’ll never be lonely anymore
Save this thought. In the original, written for a girl group, the narrator is a woman writing about her man. A later version was performed by a guy group; the narrator is a man writing about his woman. Finally, we get performances by Elton John singing to his husband David Furnish (they got a civil partnership in 2005, were married in 2014).
Yesterday’s Wayno/ Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) The coupled life, with cook and diner; cooks — I was the diner and helper in Ann’s and my life, the cook in Jacques’s and my life, and I can say that the cook is often anxious about pleasing their audience, the diner (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Now, highlights of an exchange between Wayno and me that starts out being about this cartoon.
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)
From my 7/14 posting on this blog: my life has recently been extraordinarily difficult and extravagantly painful; and so it continues, with the added complications of medical appointments, on 7/14 and 7/16; a new helper / caregiver, starting on 7/15 and 7/17; and a series of computer disasters, one a day for three days (7/14 – 7/16) running.
But then in clearing out the innumerable closets, shelves, drawers, and storage spaces in this house, preparatory to moving, many months from now, to a much smaller apartment in an assisted living facility, I have unearthed two decorative artworks — of cross-stitching and Mexican folk pottery — recognizing and celebrating threesomes, more specifically the affectional and sexual triple of me, my wife Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, and my husband-equivalent / Ann’s lover Jacques Henry Transue, in the years 1975 through 1985 (when Ann died, and Jacques and I became just an everyday gay male couple). Both were presents: the cross-stitching of three monograms from the creator, our daughter, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky; and the three pottery doves from my former UIUC student and our old friend David Stein, who found them in a crafts market in Tijuana during a day trip from San Diego that David took me on, all those years ago.
