CommuniKate

Summer here in Provincetown is about half-over. My low maintenance, orange-alert, day lilies have given it their quotidian best. My green thumb for petunias is sticky from the daily dead-heading you must do to keep them from getting all straggly, whiny and I-want-some-sun-too. My impatiens are usually my prize-winners, but this summer after ten straight days of fog and rain, they looked puny and I over fertilized them. Lesson: don’t get impatient with your impatiens.

It’s not just the progression from lilacs and lilies to dahlias and hydrangea that signal summer’s midpoint. We’ve phased through several theme weekends – Memorial Day, Portuguese Fest, Film Festival, July Fourth, Bear Week - on our way to Carnival and Labor Day. Girl Splash, the newest and most recent theme weekend was a big fun success with lots of women and women performers in town. Girl Splash promises to become the bridge event between Memorial Day when the young recently-graduated college girls come to town for one last lesbo blowout and Columbus Day when the more mature babes motor in for Women’s Week.

We’re also cycling too quickly through summer’s many fundraising benefit parties: GLAAD, Mass Equality, The Pan Mass Challenge, Helping Our Women, and the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod on our way to August 29th’s big Lily Tomlin Bark Park fundraiser, emceed by moi. Organizations use cocktail parties, auctions, barbecues and drag bingo to raise money for great groups in these rough, okay hideous, economic times. I emceed the recent Gay Lesbian Advocates and Defenders [GLAD] cocktail party at the base of the PTown monument on a rare sunny afternoon. We celebrated GLAD’s marriage equality work, and executive director Lee Swislow outlined GLAD’s work on MA transgender civil rights bill, their suit challenging DOMA and their Maine campaign to defend marriage equality.

This week there’s an unsettling themelessness in town and despite my vague vertigo, I am enjoying the lull. So far no one has called for the “Skip and Jim Have a Beer with Barack Week,” the “Scavenger Hunt for Lou Dobbs’ Birth Certificate Week,” “I Hate the Insurance Lobby Week,” or the “Citizen Palin Poetry Week.” We’ve had a few hot, sunny days and I think people are at the beach. Maybe they’re just resting up for Gay Family Week.

Next week the town will crowded with double-wide strollers, face-painted kid kitties, the smallest rainbow crocs you’ve ever seen and pods of gay parents sharing tales of triumph and trial. There will be beach fires, dances, and meet-n-greets. For the past couple years I have remarked on the fact that gay parents don’t seem to bring their tweens or teens. I worried aloud that parents had turned them in for younger kids, or a ten and and six year old for a sixteen year old. But one of the fabulous, fast talking, smarty pants tweens took me aside and informed me that they were all in workshops with Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, COLAGE. The reason I had not seen them was that they are in training to be equality advocates, allies and community organizers. I told them that next summer they should invite the Obama family over from Oak Bluffs for a sunset beachfire. Those COLAGErs could make it happen.

Let’s all pull up our camp chairs around the fire and tell our scariest health care stories: the friend who couldn’t afford her thyroid medication and permanently damaged her eyes; the friend who needed a hip replacement and got caught in the dreaded catch-22 world of pre-existing conditions; the vigilant friend who called out her over-billing pharmacy when she mysteriously hit her insurance limit. I bet you’ve got scarier stories. I hope it’s not your own.

Or we could just take some burning logs from the fire, march down to DC, storm Congress and demand action. They are currently stalled, off Obama’s timetable for reform, trying to figure out how to pay for healthcare. The entitled, pork-barreling, bridge-to-nowhere Congress has suddenly become a born-again, bean-counting, bottom-lining model of fiscal responsibility.

Being in Massachusetts, home of both marriage equality and health care, I swear I don’t feel that thrumming bass note of healthcare worry here in the Commonhealth. We have all read the deleterious effects of stress. The cost of not worrying about what will become of you when you get sick is never factored into health care costs and it’s priceless.

I am not a doctor; I don’t even play one on TV, but I’ve got an idea to finance health care. My plan is full of empathy, if you will pardon the expression. It does not involve taxing the poor victimized rich. They have suffered enough. It does not involve making people bid fond, tearful farewells to their family doctor of eighty years. Who are those people? It does not involve doing your own plastic surgery. A woman did and you can see the terrible results on Youtube.

Forty years ago one very popular head-shop t-shirt read, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” It was supposedly drawn by some adorable child of a hippie. It was a bit cloying. But I thought of that shirt the other day as I listened to more squawking balking about the near one trillion dollar cost of health care reform. This from those who never thought twice or accurately about the three trillion dollar cost of the Iraq War.

We are now in two wars. My health care RX? First, quit giving the warlords free Viagra. Get the water running in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dump Paxil and estrogen into the water system and leave. The money we save will finance an amazing US health care system. It will be the envy of Canada.

Bruno did not open as well at the box office as Borat. Despite a studio publicity blitz, including a faux fight with Eminem at the Grammies and his own best worst efforts, Sacha Barren Cohen did not take into account that real life pesky thing called homophobia. It can really hurt ticket sales. Call a real gay person; we’ll tell you all about it.

Blame at least one lost ticket sale on me. I did not see Bruno. I did not go to see Borat either. I think I had a sweater soaking. My non-attendance did not harm Borat’s success. I did eventually Netflix the DVD and mutely fast-forwarded my way through it for about five minutes. I should just have settled for my friend’s tears-streaming-down-their-faces re-enactments of the hilarious, to them, hijinx of Borat with the hooker, Borat with the clueless Romanians, Borat nude wrestling his fat manager. With any luck I will not have to sit through my friend’s re-enactments of Bruno’s anal bleaching scene.

Usually summer is one big blockbuster “Woman as Afterthought Film Festival”. Studio execs in their big plush chairs watch a first cut and realize there is not a woman in the film. They find some starlet on the cheap, shoot a few love interest plot point scenes and throw them into the plot stew. This year they are not even pretending. With I Love You Man, The Hangover and Hump Day, each exploring non-sexual friendships among white men, this is the summer of the “A Fine Bromance Film Festival.” Of course there are some hilarious close gay calls, not that there’s anything wrong with that. The bromances are tame tea parties compared with Cohen’s in your face homo tea-bagging.

Maybe I should just try to “get ueber it” but I am not comfortable with the masochistic Jack Ass meets Candid Camera, you’ve been punk’d genre that is post-race, post-gay and post-p.c. and demonstrates that posture by being both racist and homophobic. It is so hard to compete with reality TV. GLAAD gave Bruno a less than ringing “it’s not that bad for gays until it is” endorsement. For some of my friends Bruno is hilarious. What do I know? It wouldn’t surprise me if Sacha Cohen is an invited keynote speaker at the March on Washington. Especially if he appears in gay-face wearing his tulip-yellow lederhosen.