Dick Cheney's Holiday Spectacular 2006

Yes, that's Dick Cheney. Can't you feel the grope of Billionaire love? If so, come and see the Billionaires For Bush Follies show from December 3-20 (Sundays and Wednesdays, 8:00 PM) at the Ace of Clubs, 9 Great Jones Street at Lafayette.

This year's cast is great and the All New Election Season jokes will delightfully tempt you to laugh instead of cry at the present Administration. Sometimes, you have to laugh to keep from throwing something, thereby busting your television set.

Come and hear some of your cherised and beloved holiday tunes, such as "Rest Easy Wealthy Gentlemen," "Prison Cells," "Toys for the World (Are Made by Kids)," and the soul-rousing and sweetly stirring (as the driven snow), "Halliburton Chorus." Ah yes, good times, indeed.

Hope to see you there.

Sweet Jeebus, tis the Season

Home of the Order of the Blessed Saint Scully the Enigmagtic

Well, another holiday season has arrived. Yeehaw.

Sorry to sound so depressing, but this year's holiday season is not one filled with cheer for me. It's actually been a great year, full of good things like a new job, opportunities to meet fellow bloggers from the Al Franken Show blog, trips to Martha's Vineyard for relaxing times, a conference trip to New Orleans exactly one week prior to Hurricane Katrina. I published a major paper in the Journal of Genocide Research, and this past weekend, had a fabulous time as Shopper X in the Billionaire for Bush Follies show, "Dick Cheney's Christmas Spectacular." And tomorrow, I head home to see my family. All in all, a good, solid year.

The season, though, brings such sadness as I've gotten a new diganoses on my lovely little kitty, Zanzibar. I thought she had a fatal heart disease, as was diagnosed by my original vet. It was fatal, but with the right medications, she could live longer than expected with the disease. Now I have found out that she actually has a tumor on her adrenal gland, a little bitty gland that rests above the kidney and squeaks out adrenaline and hurts like hell when it's impacted with a tumor.

She needs surgery to correct this, if the tumor hasn't metastisized and spread throughout her little body. The surgery is risky, and after having spoken with the prospective surgeon, it's not impossible to carve it out if it hasn't moved into a major artery between the gland and kidney. The kicker is, though, I don't have the $2500 needed for the surgery, so I have to make a choice: scramble to get the money to pay for a risky surgery that she not make it through, or leave it alone and let her live out her life, however that may be.

I hate this choice. I hate that it comes at the holiday times. I hate that I don't make enough money to pay for it easily. I hate that I live in New York at the moment, a most expensive place for everything. I hate it all, and the holidays just aren't helping with the overwhelming feeling of helplessness about my best friend, my companion, my heart.

I know it sounds corny, but for those of you with friends, I know you know what I'm feeling. It sucks. Badly.

I've been thinking of ways to scramble the money together, and I think I can do it, mostly, with maybe some help from friends. I haven't made up my mind one way or the other about the surgery, I have to wait and see if it's spread to her lungs first.

So, there's my sucky holiday season. Tis the Season. Ho Ho Ho.

I hope everyone has a great holiday. I will still have a great holiday. But I will be thinking and crying and working out a way to come to a decision about this. I've had her since she was born. It would be hard to lose her because I'm unable to pay for it. It would hard to lose her because the surgery is risky or the tumor has spread. It would be hard to lose her after the surgery is done, and complictions set in. In short, it will be hard to lose her.

Happy freaking Christmas.

Bound for Glory: The Depression Era in Color

Vicinity of Natchitoches, Louisiana, August 1940
Reproduction from color slide

When I think of the Depression Era, I first think of my parents, who are Depression babies. I know from them that it was an incredibly difficult time in our nation's history, and I'm not quite sure how our citizens now would deal with such a crappy economic downfall. Let's hope it never gets to that point again.

I was watching CNN today (home sick from work today, and also have to get ready for my performance in tonight's "Dick Cheney Holiday Spectacular"), and saw a piece about a fascinating new online-only exhibit at the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress (LOC) of the United States is an amazing place. They are the nation's repository of its own history (along with the National Archives and Records Administration or NARA), and have such a vast collection of books that I hear tales of books piled high on the floors because they can't keep up with the decades-old backlog of books that are deposited at the LOC.

They have a fascinating 'new' collection of materials, a set of over 1600 color slides, "Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943."

Here's what their front page says:

Bound for Glory: America in Color is the first major exhibition of the little known color images taken by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI). Comprised of seventy digital prints made from color transparencies taken between 1939 and 1943, this exhibition reveals a surprisingly vibrant world that has typically been viewed only through black-and-white images. These vivid scenes and portraits capture the effects of the Depression on America's rural and small town populations, the nation's subsequent economic recovery and industrial growth, and the country's great mobilization for World War II.

The photographs in Bound for Glory, many by famed photographers such as John Vachon, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott, document not only the subjects in the pictures, but also the dawn of a new era -- the Kodachrome era. These colorful images mark a historic divide in visual presentation between the monochrome world of the pre-modern age and the brilliant hues of the present. They change the way we look -- and think about -- our past.

Take a look. I love black and white photographs, but these color photos of an era that we only know of through the brown dust of the prairie and from stories told by our parents or grandparents, really open the eyes to a time gone by... and a time one hopes will never return...

Brockton, Massachusetts, December 1940
Reproduction from color slide

And by the way, my mother was born and raised in Putnam County, Georgia... her family sharecropped... this is what it might have looked like:

White Plains, Greene County, Georgia, June 1941