The Hi-Lo Update

[It was only a matter of time. Somehow, I got thru my twenties and my early thirties (let's face it - I'm almost 33) without getting a job in the hospitality industry. Now that I'm about to finish my first year of law school, I thought I was definitely in the clear: I would never be one of those oh-so-typical gay men who is a waiter/bartender/hotelier. I will be a Professional (whatever that means) for the rest of my life. However, events have conspired to land me a second interview for a summer job - at the front desk of a cute Victorian hotel around the block. I didn't pursue an legal internship for the summer, John just lost his job (and our joint medical insurance, eek...), and we need the cash now. So, it looks like I'll be spending the next few months telling tourists which neighborhoods to avoid to get that "real San Francisco experience." Considering my previous life in tenant relations, and my ongoing infatuation with the romance of this city, I'm sure I'll be good at it. But it's temporary, y'all, and I want you to remind me of that come fall.]

[Yeah, John's at rest. It's just like him to survive the brunt of the dot-com bomb, only to have his company go belly-up a year to a year-and-a-half after the holocaust. He seems to be taking it pretty well, and we made a killing on relatively unused office furniture the company had to liquidate in a hurry. At least he can read the want ads on our spankin' new Ikea couch and two chairs.]

[Other bits and pieces: There was a time when I firmly believed that there are two kinds of people in this world: people who are excited to see Kirsten Dunst in The Cat's Meow, and people who are excited to see her in Spider-Man. Leaving aside that other category of people who couldn't care less about Kirsten Dunst, or the movies, the desnobbification of my last few years have taught me that the high and low cultures are not mutually exclusive. So there. (Cat's Meow, consumed by us yesterday, was the bee's knees, by the way. Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Tilly are sadly underemployed these days, even if, as John also says about Lili Taylor, they play the same characters in everything they're in.)

[In the movie, Lumley plays "racy" English novelist Elinor Glyn, about whom I know nothing except for primal childhood memories of Shirley Jones's Marian the Librarian advising that Hermione Gingold's Eulalie McKechnie Shinn's daughter would be better off reading the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam instead of Glyn. "This Ruby Hat of Omar Khay-ay-ay...I am appalled!" When our Contracts professor sang part of "Trouble in River City" in class a few weeks ago, my poor Iranian immigrant friend could make neither heads or tails of it. While she speaks perfect English, she's constantly getting tripped up by American cultural references. I told her she should rent The Music Man sometime for valuable insight into how we Yanks see ourselves. She shrugged and said, "OK."]

[Lesbionic woolgathering: if Lili Taylor married Jennifer Tilly (combining, as it were, their roles in I Shot Andy Warhol and Bound), she'd be Lili Tilly.]

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