"Bob Comes Out"

So this blog was created to talk about “Bob the Book,” possibly the only gay anthropomorphized book novel ever written, so I guess I had better write about it. Last night at the Cornelia Street Café was our – Bob’s, my, Jim’s, Rogerio’s – first reading, although I was the lone soul up there, feeling very strange, like I couldn’t take up too much of people’s time and attention. The audience was wonderful – small, as I am steering as many as possible toward the B&N reading on November 3, but full of people who mean a lot to me. Two comrades were there from the days when my LGBT reading group, Three Hots and a Cot, used to hold readings downstairs at Cornelia Street. The downstairs space has been spruced up quite a bit since then, with coordinated saturated colors, mirrors, anti-wobble tables, etc., and new theater lights. Also on hand were Rosemarie and Marlene, both thanked in my acknowledgments for being at pretty much every reading and performance ever (and in Roe’s case in some of them), old friends I hadn’t seen in maybe 16-17 years, a friend from grad school who hauled ass in from Edison…well, you don’t need to hear me enumerate my friends. What’s important is that, on an occasion such as this, one understands what true friendship is, and what friends will do for you, what they WANT to do for you, because it’s like doing it for themselves, too. Plenty of perfectly true friends missed, too, because sometimes that happens, and others, as I said, are being steered to later readings. So it’s true of many people who keep clicking “like” to FB posts and coming through wind and rain to hear me and their other friends read, play, act, and so on.

Coming home, we saw the supposedly pink lights strung on the George Washington Bridge. They really look more lavender because they are bluish with pink gels. Though they are really meant to be for Breast Cancer Awareness, we could not help but think of their appropriateness as a memorial to the Rutgers student who jumped last week.