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independence vintage

 

Although the parking area at The Linden is sadly empty because most of our good neighbors has fled our sweet city for beachier parts, our Fourth of July weekend was a “staycation.”  Well, it was more of a “stay,” actually.  As Mo is tied to her computer with law school-related hijinks (don’t you adore all those dots!?) all weekend, The Bods and I have been left to our own devises — namely watering the monster tomato plants of the Viney-ationing Muscovado and Zephaniah (us), making homemade caramelized onion, pesto, and fresh mozzarella pizza with which to nourish our scholar (me), and eating underpants (him).

In standard form, we managed to sneak out for some revelry.  I had a pedicure, lunch, and baby-holding with mom, and was actually joined by Mo at the Half Door for impromptu “I’ve had it!  I can’t write anymore!” drinks, politics, and marketing with Lyrical,  and again at the Half Door for brunch, gender, and Jewish-ness with the incomparable and mostly-new-to-you Milk and Finger Paints. 

As it was Independence Day there were also hot dogs and hamburgers, though I confess that the former were grilled on our panini press.  Very New American, non?

It wasn’t the most festive Fourth we’ve had, by a long shot.  So I will close with this personal patriotic tidbit:

I was born in 1976, which was, of course, the bicentennial.

And, my parents considered, seriously, naming me Liberty.

 

I’m back from Kansas City.  It turns out that if you take a map of the United States and fold in in quarters (thank you, handy map in Delta’s Sky Magazine) you will discover that Kansas City is located right there at the very center of the map.

I can also confirm that rumors of Kansas City’s superb steak are not at all overstated.  These good people are not screwing around with their meaties.  I’ve eaten in a lot of steakhouses in my day, part of the gig, and this steak was in my top two, ever. 

(Let me also say that I am exceedingly picky about meat, much to the shagrin of my family and friends, and will often opt for tofu or a veggie burger rather than have some questionable (by my hysterical standards) meat turn on me and turn me off.  A Meg who has ordered a dish with a meat or poultry she finds suspect is not someone you want to share a dinner table with.  There is pouting and refusing to eat.  There is also refusing to send back to the kitchen.  Then, once calmed, there is me eating your successful order off of your plate.  I know, I’m obnoxious.  I’ve learned that it’s best to avoid the possibility of such an event because I want people to continue to eat out with me, so I often dodge the issue and go veg.)

In other news, next weekend Mo and I are heading to the W New York, – The Tuscany in the City for a much needed long weekend getaway.  There will hopefully be tickets to Shakespeare in the Park (Anne Hathaway in Twelfth Night!)

And . . .

 . . . there will be The Bods.

Yes, The Bods takes Manhattan.

Hot doggie in the city; hot doggie looking pretty.

dodo

 

I had occasion to meet a gentleman yesterday who, when discussing his career as a seller of sub-prime mortgages, described it as his “journey.”

I chose not to give him the final rose.

A journey, to me, even in a post-Bachelor world, is something that requires the Himalayas, or at least Sub-Saharan Africa, and probably a hobbit or two as well.

Here’s my quick list of cringe-worthy words and phrases that should be banned from the fake English language. 

1.  “Jump the shark” has.

2.  Businesses aren’t “franchises” unless they are franchises.  See McDonald’s.  It is a word with meaning not a synonym for company.

3.  In the same vein as no. 2, “enterprise” is best left to starships.

4.  “Level-set” is not a verb.

5.  I don’t want to “reach out” to people anymore.  I want to call them, or email them, or ask them to assist me.  Heck, if I reach out the wrong way, I might have a harassment lawsuit on my hands.

6.  “Proactive” is a acne medication hawked by Jessica Simpson.

Ah, maybe I’ve gone too far.  As Jack Donaghy teaches, never badmouth synergy.

At least we are all back thinking inside the box and no longer attend confratutes — but unfortunately the uptick in nonsense words has broken free of its corporate nest and now swims in the mainstream.  Yesterday, I was in line for a tea at the Coffee Bean and the woman in front of me said to her three-year-old, “Madison, Mommy has some feedback for you.”

Of course.  Madison. 

Madison, Meg has a quick rap on the bum for you.  If you reach up on the counter and knock a hot coffee down, you will get burned.  It’s not a time for feedback; it’s a time for action. 

On second thought, Madison’s Mom, Meg has a quick rap on the bum for you, too. 

And not in the fun way.

st francis hotel at night

I woke this morning to the ding of the trolley. 

I remember now, as I always do when I am here, why San Francisco is my very favorite city in the country.  (So sad that this city among cities in which I’m, you know, not married.)

The time spent away from Mo is made at least somewhat better when my work travel gives me occasion to meet or become better acquainted with fabulous American cities.  (Not always, remember the West Virginia situation?)  And in those cities, occasionally I have had the privilege to stay in some legendary hotels.  (Not always, remember this beauty?) 

This is a trip with the optimum combination of spectacular city and spectacular hotel.  My bed for the next night here in the “Paris if the West” is at that hotel up there, the St. Francis.  San Francisco has an inordinately high concentration of the world’s premier hotels, on previous trips I have been fortunate to stay at the Mark Hopkins on the top of Knob Hill — and my favorite cocktail spot and my favorite cocktail are here:

Fairmont Hotel lobby san francisco

That’s the lobby of the Fairmont San Francisco, across from the Mark Hopkins, where they serve my very treasured, very rare cocktail, the Moscow Mule.  I suspect you will find me there tonight with a book, a Mule, and a smile.

Good gracious do I love a grand old hotel.  The St. Francis has played host to Emperor Akihito of Japan and his father Emperor Hirohito, Queen Elizabeth II, King Juan Carlos of Spain, the Shah of Iran, General Douglas MacArthur and every U.S. President since McKinley have been guests at the hotel.  Ethel Barrymore’s pet chimpanzee was looked after without question by the staff, and when Anna Held demanded her daily bath in 30 gallons of milk, she got it.

Oh, and the St. Francis has a ladies gallery.  A ladies gallery!  It’s made for us!

st francis lobby and ladies gallery 

Now if only I hadn’t left my heart in Hartford.  Those are clearly tables meant for two.

lesbian wedding vintage

 

Being on the radio, it seems, is intimidating.

I am not one who suffers from stage fright (too absent from my id, too healthy is my ego), but something about the radio studio set the ole belly butterflies to aflutterin’.

It may have been the company we kept yesterday.  Anne Stanback is by far the single most influential person in the Connecticut marriage equality movement, and I am a dizzy lady who writes about car bombs (the kind you drink), rivalries (the kind that are friendly), walruses (the kind that talk of many things), and birds (the kind you flip).  I’m sure that I’m not exactly the company she tends to keep — but she was warm, patient, and gracious.

By the time Mo and I joined the show, right around minute 27, Anne had already done a fabulous job of explaining the history and status of the marriage movement not only in Connecticut but in other states and federally.  It was left to me, therefore, to mention Manhattans (the kind you drink) within my first two minutes on air.  (Though not somber, I promise you that I was sober.)

Host Lucy Nalpathanchil (who hiked Machu Picchu on her own honeymoon) did manage to get us back on more serious ground, and we shared the basis for our decision not to have a civil union, the obligation of those who can safely do so to come out, the importance of language in framing the marriage equality movement, and the impact of federal DOMA on our marriage.  (I retold an abridged version of our honeymoon travel story.)  At least we’re not solely fluff.

We spent quite a significant amount time on the coming out issue, with some particular focus on how often I come out at work – because I travel throughout the country, because of the male and military tradition of my company, and because I have occasion to frequently meet new people.

Coincidentally, today I came out to a woman in my office that have known for a few years.  It was easy — she was in my office, saw my wedding picture, and asked who Mo was.  Upon my reply that Mo was my wife, we had a nice conversation in which she was perfectly lovely and candid about her surprise.  She has never known a person in a same sex marriage before.

When folks see a lady in a certain kind of white dress next to another similarly aged woman, it is perfectly normal and understandable that they think the non-white clad woman might be her sister, or maid of honor, or best friend.  (As I’ve been around this same block a few times before, I can confirm that sister is the most common assumption — albeit the one that creeps Mo out the most.  “Ew!  Sisters!”)  Thanks to one little wedding photo on my desk today, at least one more person might add another option to the list of possibilities.

In the discussion about the obligation to come out, Anne astutely added that we shouldn’t make assumptions about what someone’s position on marriage equality will be because of arbitrary factors like how they look or their race or age or ethnicity.  We didn’t discuss, although we may have been at least subconsciously aware of it hanging there, the issue of folks being surprised that Mo and I are in a same sex marriage because of how they might expect us to look.  Lucy did ask us whether people were surprised to learn that we were married — but I’m not sure whether she was getting at this issue and we missed her drift, or rather she was merely alluding to people’s general unfamiliarity with the existence of marriage equality in Connecticut.  If that’s a show she’d like to do, it’s certainly a discussion I’d love to hear.

Maureen here.  I’ve been given a task: post the link to Where We Live.  So, if you’re interested, check it out!

We had a really fun time this morning.  The folks at WNPR couldn’t be more hospitable, and it was great to spend an hour talking with Anne Stanback and Lucy Nalpathanchil.

Enjoy!

Radio vintage lady

 

On Monday morning, Mo and I are going to be guests on Where We Live, a show on our local NPR affiliate, WNPR.

From 9 am to 10 am, guest host Lucy Nalpathanchil is interviewing Anne Stanback, the Executive Director of Love Makes a Family.  Love Makes a Family, you may recall, played a major role in obtaining marriage equality in Connecticut.  The Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision in Kerrigan v. Commisioner of Public Health brought closure to a decade of work by Love Makes a Family.   Having accomplished their core mission, the group has begun preparations to cease operations at the end of the year, allowing its staff, board and community of supporters to focus their energies on the myriad of community issues still facing our state and country.

Ms. Stanback will discuss the marriage movement in Connecticut and how the group is now helping other states achieve the same right for its residents.

And Mo and Meg?  Well, we’ll be there in the last segment of the show — from 9:40 am-10:00 am — to talk about the Connecticut marriage movement, Love Makes a Family’s impact, and our own little story.  Our bio isn’t up on their site yet, but should be shortly.

Why the heck did we get the invite, of all the married gays in this Connecticut filled with marryin’ gays?  We cleverly suspect it has much to do with our darling Chion Wolf, who, when not taking fabulous photographs, is a producer at WNPR.  (Speaking of photographs, some of ours are newly up on her website, so click on through and find us under “Events” and “Meg & Mo’s Wedding.”)

I believe you can listen live online or download the Where We Live episode later, should you desire to mock us.

nights of love lesbian vintage

Hits and Misses.

Today we are going to talk about things like “lesbian daryl hall saloons.”

But first, allow me to thank you for still checking in to see whether we happened to update this blog today, despite the fact that we have been horribly negligent about posting.  I confess that the number of hits we receive each day has substatially decreased in the lackadaisical past few months, and we do truly appreciate your patience. 

Really it’s only the hardiest of you that remain.  Well, you know — the hardiest of you and those that land on us by googling such things as “little kids little gay gay kids,” “lipstick lesbians in Massachusetts,” and “mongolia lesbians hit video.”

I’m pretty sure, minimally, that this bloggity was a grave disappointment to the Mongolia folks.  Oh, and I am also confident we continuously disappoint the good people behind the multifarious daily hits we receive resulting from search terms a lady simply can’t discuss — suffice it to say that they are along the same lines as today’s “two ladies dirty.” 

At least we are equal opportunity let-’er-down-ers.  Some poor soul’s search for “purposely waiting marital sex.com” landed here at Two Ladies in Waiting instead of at its likely intended target, premaritalsex.info – which is a “Christsites.com top site,” no less.  Not to make assumptions, but don’t think we’re likely to find ourselves in the running for the same distinction.

While we’re at it, does anyone know what “سكس امريكي” translates to?  Because that has also led more than one person to these pages.

Kevin Bacon Would be Stunned.

heather has two mommies

My dear mother is a semi-local college English professor.  I’m biased, but I believe accurate, when I describe her as much beloved by her students and very highly regarded by her college.  (Appropriately, she cares much more about the former.)  In the course of her teaching, and over the course of my life, she has had cause to meet many local authors of note, several of whom she now counts among her friends.  No surprise there, right?

Well, things have, of late, taken an interesting turn.  My mother recently met and subsequently developed a friendship with the woman who wrote that book up there, Lesléa Newman.

You may know or recall that my mother has her struggles with my “lesbianism.” (Ew.)  She loves me, she loves Mo, and I know that she’s trying like heck to get there.  Or, at least, to get somewhere closer.  For instance she no longer says “The Event” when she talks about our wedding– although she does still occasionally refer to it as “March 7th” — as in “Now, Meggie, is this the same champagne we had on March 7th?” 

Maybe it’s a silly distinction, but it’s easier for me to let “The Date” slide over triscuits and a shared bottle of sauv blanc than it ever was to let “The Event” thing slide.  I’m confident that whatever “The Event” is it has corporate sponsors and I don’t care for my chicken.

I will back-fill this tale a bit for those who have not met my mum.  She is, by her own account, square.  I think she’s a little proud of how square she is, and I also think she knows quite well how very “square” the expression “square” is.  I’ve always though that a little bit of it is an act, that she’s actually a bit more progressive than she lets on.  As a devoted progressive myself, I tend to chalk that up to her extreme intelligence. 

Because our lives are all so often reduced to the anecdotes others tell, let me scatter a few Mom chestnuts here.  She is a lady who is a life-long registered Republican but who dressed her eight-year-old only daughter in a purple “Massachusetts Republicans for Choice” tee-shirt.  She looks like Sandy Duncan.  She once, in approximately 1969, left a friends’ house in Vermont when, on a hunt for a sweatshirt, she discovered a small bag of marijuana in a dresser drawer.  Why?  Because she was convinced that she would lose her teaching job in Massachusetts, prompting her immediate, midnight, 100-mile drive back home.  (She’s a veritable Paul Revere of the gateway drug.  Needless to say we don’t have exactly the same aversion to risk, she and I.)  Mom is also a woman who just last week dropped everything to come to Connecticut to help me organize the house.  I had, you see, in a moment of incredibly unbecoming panic, called her crying and insisting that Mo and I simply couldn’t take care of ourselves and needed a nanny. 

(I was completely earnest about the nanny then, and I have not changed my mind.  Mom has advised that she will be gifting us a professional organizer in the near future.  I do not think that this is a long term solution, because I understand that an organizer will not follow you around for the rest of your life, organizing you.  Alas, beggars can’t be choosers.)

The short of it is, though, that to my mind my mother and I are in a nice place of good, if somewhat poky for my million-mile-per-hour taste, forward momentum in our mother/daughter relationship — of which the gay thing is only the latest twist.  If not the gay, I imagine it would be something else, and after the gay thing turns, will certainly be something else still.  And so it is for us and so it is, I imagine, for you and yours. 

None of this removes the strangeness of my mother’s recent bonding with Ms. Newman: Lesbian Icon.  How do I describe how this feels to me?  Perhaps as how it might have felt had my mother one day in 1995 offered to be my high school Mary Jane hook-up  — and offered a particularly appropriate piece of  my Grammy’s Belleek to function as the bowl.

Even though Heather Has Two Mommies was published twenty years ago, in 1989, it remains controversial — likely because it stokes the easy go-to “fear” of the right that we’re all out to gay-up their kids.  It was ranked the 11th most challenged book by the American Library Association in the 1990s.  It was at the center of the Sarah Palin book banning controversy in the last presidential election.  As recently as late May, Heather Has Two Mommies was the subject of an (attempted) zinger in the District of Columbia marriage equality fight.  “I do not want my grandkids sitting in a classroom hearing about Heather has two mommies, or the prince and the prince grow up to marry and become the king and the king.”  (I know, you’d think they’d be a bit more clever by this point.)  Heather is also featured in a current exhibition at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan — I won’t tell you how I know that, though, because my mother may be reading.

And my mom is friends with the author of this picture book that launched a thousand homophobic ships.  And I’m not friends with her at all!  In fact we’ve never even met!  How ’bout that?

Ready for the kicker?

Lesléa Newman is friends with Rachel Maddow.

So, you see, I am three degrees of separation from Rachel Maddow, but my mom is two degrees of separation from her.

Maureen and I are playing it cool lately with my mom.  Trying to get her to, you know, introduce us to her friends.

 Love you, Mom.

My mother and I at my wedding.  Photo by Chion Wolf.

My mother and me at my wedding. Photo by Chion Wolf.

 

Doodle Zone or Danger Zone?

Before I sign off, I leave you with a picture I took at home the night before last.  It is related to the teaser at the end of my previous entry.

Biohazard

 

On your way here to Hartford yet?  If you bring Fever-Tree tonic water as your hostess gift, we promise Boddington will wear false eyelashes and a wig for his role in the reenactment, and that I will play Boddington.

Circus.

From The Library of Congress, via www.zazzle.co.uk

From The Library of Congress, via www.zazzle.co.uk

The amount of balls currently hovering in the sweet Hartford air above the Ladies is somewhat staggering.

Before we get to the banal, we must put up-front-where-they-belong our two very shiniest orbs.  They are très handsome, not-so-wee Wadsworth and our freshest, sparkliest jem, Good Queen Bess.

Heaps and heaps and heaps and heaps of gratitude to those four best-est friends who have Auntie-ified us.  If I didn’t love you four so I would steal both children and take them for our own. 

I do not kid.  I would keep an eye on me.

Sadly, our ability to spend all our hours with the babes, as we so desire, has been squelched by an unusually staggering to-do list — even for us.

Let’s first talk about my Love.  The end of Maureen’s Spring semester tumbled right into the heat of Summer classes, which will finish up a mere day before an she digs into a intensive two week long law journal write-on competition.  And you know that she also works full time, of course.  What a lovely way to spend a summer, eh?

As for me, well, I will share with you what Mo told me last week.  “You are a work robot.  An animatronic lawyer.”  Indeed, I have lately dwelled among the busiest of bees — but I don’t anticipate reaching full-on android until at least September.  Happily, we have been able to multi-task a bit.  While I was in Cambridge for a seminar we did get to spend too little time with Googie Baba, her Jen, and their boy. 

Blogging here has fallen victim to the Circus of the Ladies — we only have three rings, you see.  I do miss it so, and hope to find a way to be present here more often.  My neglect of others’ blogs has been tremendous — and is my own loss, of course.

One last thing before I leave you.  We have a story to tell you that involves a bloody crime scene, our hallway, Boddington, and a drag queen — but it seems unseemly to splash it all over the interwebs.  Methinks you’ll have to visit Connecticut and we’ll do a live reenactment in the Linden garden over Bombay tonics?

Design from vintagedge.com

Design from vintagedge.com

And then, my Friends, there were six.

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