That Would Be Me (dot net)

I am surprised when people I meet don’t know I’m gay. How could they not figure that out? I am also surprised when I meet someone and they do know. How can they tell? It’s a little schizophrenic, I guess (no disrespect intended to any of my schizophrenic readers) but both are true. I have been out of the closet for so long it’s almost like water to a fish for me and yet I don’t think I come off as particularly “gay” (whatever that means. And I know at least Steve will have several comments about it. Be nice, Steve. This is my blog and I’ll equivocate if I want to.)

As unexceptional as it is for me to think of myself as gay, the process of coming out was a long and circuitous one. (What, you may ask, should I have expected, that the path be straight?) It was not, I’m sure, as arduous as that of numerous other gay men and women, but it took many, many years. I knew I was attracted to men even before I really knew what sexuality was. I grew up in a tavern in a small town in northern New Jersey and most of the patrons were blue collar men. Trust me, I noticed a lot of them.

I have no idea when I first knew what a homosexual was, but I remember quite clearly when I started to realize there may be something wrong with being one. My older brother, who was perhaps thirteen at the time, told me that the way they treated homosexuals was to show them pictures of naked men at the same time as giving them an electric shock. He didn’t call it aversion therapy, I’m sure, but it seemed to me at age ten a rational way of dealing with the issue. I also wondered when I would have to have the procedure.

Several years later, and on the other side of the continent, my mother decided to have a “talk” with me. I had no idea of her agenda, of course. We had decided to take a drive to visit some family friends who lived in a big, old house on a scraggly piece of land in a small town about two hours drive from us. We often visited them on a moment’s notice, both families enjoyed each other’s company. It was a little odd to me that it was only Mom and me going, but what the hell, I was fourteen or fifteen and not that inquisitive about such things. We had a nice visit. Then, on the way back, my mother initiated “the conversation.” It was obvious she was having a hard time starting, but I didn’t help. In fact, I didn’t say anything. After a lot of hemming and stammering, she said she thought I might be (might be, mind you) gay, that she didn’t know if I’d had any overt experiences, that I could talk to her any time and that, if I needed it, we’d find a good therapist.

I didn’t say a single word the entire ride home, which couldn’t have made her task any easier. Thinking back on it, it must have been excruciating for her. What if she’d been wrong? What if her supposition put the thought into my head for the very first time, made me question, then experiment, then BECOME gay? My silence couldn’t have eased her trepidation, yet I remained silent. Being a parent can’t be easy sometimes. When I got home, I went downstairs to my room, dragged out my dictionary and looked up the word “overt”. I was disappointed. I’d thought it was something sexual. To be truthful, “overt” is the only actual word I remember from her long talk, the rest is only a vague sense of extreme discomfort and the sound of my heart beating fast.

I hadn’t had any overt experiences at that point, though. My first was when I was seventeen, with a twenty-eight year old relative of that same family, ironically, at their house during a weekend visit. My heart beat fast then, too, as I recall.

Many years later, again in another corner of the country, I finally “came out” to my mother. I was in my mid twenties and living in Los Angeles. I had moved here in part to have a big, anonymous place to figure out what all this sex stuff was about. I told myself and others I came here to be in the movies, which was true to a point, of course. I’d been here a few years by then, living in a house in the Silverlake area. I called my mother long distance (back when long distance actually meant something momentarily) and this time it was I who hemmed and stammered. Which I did for some fifteen minutes before I got out the operative sentence. I’m sure my mother figured out within the first two seconds what was up, but there wasn’t much she could say until I actually said, “I’m gay.” She said, “I know, honey.”

I cried and said the thing that hurt the most was the thought that I would be with someone who wouldn’t be welcome in her home. She said, “Oh, Honey, anyone you love I love.”

She proved it, too. When I was with Jerry, my one long-term boyfriend (if two years can be considered long-term), we took a trip up to her cabin in Idaho. One day I’d been out doing something in town with mom’s husband. That night, Jerry told me that my mother had asked him if he felt like part of the family.

“Of course, Toni,” he’d told her.

“Good,” she’d said. “Could you pick up all the coffee mugs in the living room and bring them into the kitchen?”

He said he’d felt very welcome, indeed.

The one thing she asked of me was that I not tell my great aunt. She didn’t want any blowback from that side of the family. I did anyway (many years later, of course, I said it was a long process.) Aunt Lou’s only comment was, “Well, do you have a friend?” I said I had lots of them and she said that’s not what she meant. I told her no, I didn’t have a friend and she told me I’d find someone and then changed the subject.

As the years progressed, my mother began wearing a pin that said, “Straight but not narrow”. She called me her fairy god son, and once asked if I were bothered that she had used me as an example when she showed the documentary Pink Triangles, about homosexuals in Nazi Germany, to her YWCA luncheon group. One of the group had said, “Gay people are disgusting.” My mother was horrified and said, “That’s my son you’re talking about.” I gave her retroactive permission and told her she could use me to enlighten someone anytime she wanted.

Oh. By the way. I’m gay. Did you know?

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Many years ago I got into the habit of answering the ubiquitous question, “How are you?” by saying, “Dandy, how are you?” Most people just smiled and said they were fine. I was working in a law office in Los Angeles at this time and there was one lawyer who worked there, a junior partner, tall, smart, proper, very straight and very New England reserved. When I answered his salutation with my usual, “dandy, how are you?” he looked at me for a brief moment then said, “Foppish,” and sauntered down the hall with the bearing of a man who was very secure in his intellectual prowess and dry wit. I still admire him after all these years.

I rarely say “dandy” anymore, although I’m not sure why. I have found recently that I answer that question with the word “fabulous.” A friend once said to me that he could tell how good I really was doing by how long I stretched out the first syllable. “Only two ‘A’s today?” he’d say. If it were a one “A” fabulous, it was merely a good day. A five “A” fabulous would likely send one into convulsions of ecstacy. I think I usually hover around three.

I like the word fabulous. Okay, yes, it sounds really gay, but so the hell what. And they called Frank Sinatra fabulous and no one would ever consider calling him gay. I dare you to say you’re fabulous and, at least for the few moments you’re saying it, not actually feel fabulous. It’s impossible. The vibrational tones of that particular combination of letters won’t let you. I challenged one of the tellers at the bank I go to to try it. The next time I was at her window, I asked if she had. She said she’d tried it once and it didn’t work. I said to try it one more time. The next visit I was at a different window. That teller asked me how I was and I simply said “Fine.” The first teller called over three windows to say, “well, I’m fabulous!” She smiled and so did I. She was, indeed, fabulous. It works, I tell you.

More people should say they were fabulous. The more they say it, the more fabulous they’d be. President Bush should say it. If he were fabulous he might not be so inclined to incite war and strife all over the place. Andy Rooney should say it. At least momentarily he wouldn’t be so grumpy. It probably wouldn’t last with him, but we can all savor moments.  We should start a movement. The Be Fabulous Movement.  “How are you? You’re fabulous, of course!” It would be the only acceptable answer.

I think it’s a dandy idea.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

“You are now officially an old lady,” he said to me when he saw the pothos cuttings in a vase on my kitchen windowsill. That was five or six years ago. I told him the pothos needed trimming and it was a waste to just throw the cuttings out. He shook his head sadly. They are still there. Pothos like to grow long tendrils and look sickly odd if you don’t trim them back. If you do trim them back, the plants can become full, lush and bountiful. I liked my plants lush, so I trimmed the pothos and put the cuttings in water to root.  Sometimes I then replant them. It doesn’t make me an old lady.

Steve is a guy. He loves sports and women and action movies. And grilling steaks on a raging barbeque fire. He also loves cooking a delicate spaghetti sauce, but that is how straight Italian men behave. I’m also Italian and love making a good sauce, but prefer a Scandinavian tear-jerker to an action movie and date men. When I date. Which isn’t often. (I tell people that, if being gay means you sleep with men, I’m not gay anymore. It usually gets a laugh.)

So it was with a bit of glee that I chuckled when Steve called me a few moments ago and asked if I wanted the cuttings from his pothos. They were already rooted, he said, and there wasn’t any room for them in his pot.

I reminded him of his previous response to cuttings. He said that must have been someone else. I love inconsistencies in people. It’s part of what makes good writing interesting. It’s part of what makes people interesting. As famously gay Walt Whitman once famously said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

But the main point is that Steve is now officially an old lady.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I was at the gym the other day, getting a good shvits in the steam room after my workout. It was billowing and very hot, so I put my little towel over my head, sat back and enjoyed myself. After a few moments of that I heard someone complaining, full voiced, which is odd. Usually, when people talk in the steam room it’s in a soft, personal voice. Something about it being sort of a private experience, I imagine, and not wanting to disturb the other occupants. This woman was talking loudly. I wasn’t really paying attention to her, assuming she was talking to her boyfriend or something, but some of it seeped in.

“It’s too hot in here. Did you turn the heat up all the way or something?”

Someone answered her, I didn’t quite hear what he said, but she replied, “If you need to sweat that badly, work out first, for God’s sake.”

I was still trying to ignore her. Again, she asked, “Did you turn it up all the way or something? It’s just too hot.”

Her friend (or the person I assumed was her friend) said, “I don’t think you can turn it up.”

“Sure you can, you just pour water on that metal thing there. If you want to sweat that much you should go work out, not turn the steam up all the way.”

A point of explanation: at the gym I go to there is a little aluminum bar on the wall of the steam room, beneath which, I assume, is the sensor or thermostat that checks how hot it is in the room. When it’s cold it sends its little signal to the steam making apparatus deep in the bowels of the gymnasium (or, perhaps, next door in the janitorial closet) and steam magically fills the room with a satisfying hiss. Often, when you go into the room, there is simply no steam (or heat for that matter) so someone will pour water on the metal thing and soon steam will bellow out and everyone will be happy. The last few weeks, however, the steam itself seems to have been set at a slightly higher temperature or something because it’s been really, really hot. I liked it. Obviously some didn’t. In any case, back to this other gym patron.

The fellow (her boyfriend?) again said something to the effect that you can’t really adjust the heat, and the woman said, “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to this guy with the towel over his head.”

That would be me.

I lifted the towel and looked at her. She was standing by the door, pretty, slight, maybe late twenties, had long black hair and a towel wrapped tightly over her swimsuit from breast to knee. I asked if she had been talking to me.

“Yes. Why did you put the heat up so high? It’s awful. If you wanted to sweat so much you should go work out.”

Now, why did she assume 1) I had turned the heat up, and 2) I hadn’t worked out? Probably because my belly can best be described as bouncy. Anyone with a bouncy belly couldn’t possibly go to a gym to work out, they would go to turn the heat up in the steam room. Obviously. I thought about telling her that, not only had I worked out first, that I’d lost 40 pounds in the last few months, (yes, it’s true. Thank you) so my belly probably wouldn’t be as bouncy in a few more. I didn’t say that. It was none of her damn business.

“I didn’t put the water on the sensor,” I told her instead and more to the point. “And it has been hotter in here the last few times I’ve been. However, I am enjoying it.”

“No, you put it all the way up. It’s never been this hot. It’s awful. You should work out, not try to loose weight in the steam room.” There it was.

“If you don’t like it,” I said, “go to the Sauna. It’s right next door.” I wanted to say it nicely, but might not have managed. I’m sure it didn’t slip into snottiness.

Her boyfriend, (I assume it was her boyfriend) said something very similar. In a similar tone of voice.  He then left and went into the Sauna.

“I don’t want to go to the Sauna. I want steam. It’s just too hot. You’ve ruined my entire gym experience!”

She left. Then, a few moments later, came back again to complain once more. I put my towel back over my head. The ironic thing is that, with her going and coming and standing in the door complaining, the heat in the room dissipated greatly, and if she’d just noticed that, she could have regained some sense of accomplishment from her workout (I assume she had worked out) and enjoyed her shvits.

I’m glad I’m not her boyfriend. (I assume it was her boyfriend.)

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

When I still lived in Northern California, fresh out of college and settling into life before my planned foray into a life in theatre, I took a vacation trip to Ahsland Oregon to attend the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for a week. Once there for few days, I decided I wanted to be part of something like that, contacted the administrative office and scheduled an audition. I’ve always been a bit ballsy about such things. I knew that several people who had acted there had gone on to have fairly respectable careers in both New York and Los Angeles. My audition was in front of Jerry Turner, the long time artistic director of the festival, who has since passed away.

I went to the local library to look up some scripts and worked up a couple of monologues, the requisite comedic piece, a cut and pasted monologue from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood, “Mr. and Mrs. Pew are silent over cold grey cottage pie,” and a dramatic piece from Hamlet, “Oh, that this too too sullied flesh would thaw, melt or resolve itself into a dew.” I did, I think, fairly well. Because I had already planned on moving to Los Angeles, I gave them the family homestead address in Spokane to make sure any mail would eventually get to me, then told my family to look out for anything from them. I went back to my job in Northern California, then moved to Los Angeles in another ballsy move that deserves it’s own essay.

Two years later I was happily ensconced in my Los Angeles dream, working at a tacky answering service, living in a room in a fourplex in Hollywood, sharing the kitchen and bathroom with the crack heads and hustlers in the other rooms. I was having a phone conversation (on the payphone out front) with one of my siblings when they announced, “Oh, I never told you. A year or so ago you got something from Ashland in the mail.” Now, I could have done any number of things at that point. I could have said, “Well, find the damn thing and send it to me.” I could have called the festival administrative office and explained the situation, asking if I had actually gotten in and if I could do it that next summer instead. I could have sent them my new address in LA as soon as I had one. Instead, I said, “Oh” and left it at that.

Several years later (and several years ago), I quit acting, figuring that the Universe was against me. (I didn’t yet get that I had more than a little to do with the whole not getting an acting career going thing.) Three months after I quit, I got my first professional acting job. File under “Irony”. I was called by the Los Angeles Theater Center. They had my picture on file and could I come in for an audition. I’d thought it odd because I hadn’t remembered ever sending my picture to them, but when I quit acting I said that I would no longer pursue acting, but if it pursued me, I wouldn’t say no, so I went.

The play was to be a new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s tragic piece about selfish fathers called The Wild Duck. I went to their huge wonderful theatre building in downtown LA and was ushered upstairs to a large rehearsal room. The producer and casting director of the show introduced themselves to me and said that the director was still in Norway, but they were casting the smaller roles. I did the monologue from Hamlet. “Oh, that this too too sullied flesh would thaw, melt or resolve itself into a dew.” It felt okay, I knew I had done the speech better. In any case, I didn’t really give a damn one way or the other at that point. I’d quit acting, remember?

We talked for a moment or two and then they asked me to leave the room for a moment. Something felt strangely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. You know the feeling. Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters playing with his mashed potatoes. There I was in the hallway of the upper recesses of the Los Angeles Theater Center wishing I had a plate of mashed potatoes to form into some recognizable shape.

Then it hit me, and I knew why it had felt so familiar. Several years before that, (I know, I’m jumping around a lot. Stick with me,) when still that diligent but naive young actor doing everything I had heard was necessary to do to get a job, before I had spent ten years being unemployed, I had heard through the grapevine that the Los Angeles Actor’s Theater was having open auditions for their new company to be housed in a theatre somewhere downtown. I called and scheduled myself for an audition.

I was told to go to the Variety Arts Center, that venerable, stately old building. The audition was in a medium sized rehearsal room upstairs. I brought in the requisite comedic and dramatic pieces, the same two I’d used in Ashland. I walked into the room and was introduced to Bill Bushnell, the artistic director of the theatre, and his assistant. I did the Thomas piece. It felt good. It felt wonderful. I peeked over at the two sitting behind the long folding table and they had smiles on their faces. I did the Shakespeare. I was dead on. I had never done it better. It rang with emotion, with betrayal. “Oh God, God, how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seems to me all the uses of the world that it should come to this… But two months dead. Nay, not so much, not two.” I felt it in my bones. I was Hamlet. Albeit an overweight one with dark curly hair, but I was Hamlet.

When I was done, Mr. Bushnell looked at me, smiled and said “That’s it.” I said “That’s it?” He said “That’s it.” I was a little surprised, but I knew that to make a graceful exit was almost as important as the entrance and the actual audition. I had been to all the seminars. I knew how to behave. As I gathered up my coat, Mr. Bushnell started asking me where I was from. I answered casually as I gathered up my appointment calendar and papers. He asked me about my training as I backed out of the room. I answered and closed the door behind me. I hadn’t lingered past the welcome point. I had done well.

As I walked down the hallway, I had a very strange sensation; I knew that I had done well. I thought that they had liked me, but the whole end part seemed very odd. I could still hear him say “That’s it.” “That’s it.” But why was he making casual conversation as I was leaving? As I went down the elevator, the odd sensation became a rumbling in the pit of my stomach. “That’s it.” It didn’t fit. Something was off.

As I got into my car, it dawned on me. He had said “Have a seat.” I pictured my bizarre exit from their point of view: a talented young actor had given a very creditable audition and then had slunked out of the room during the interview. How very odd. Is slunked a word? Well, even if it isn’t, I’m sure I had slunked. I put my head down on the steering wheel. That image, the image of me leaving in mid word has haunted often since then, as have the things I could have done to have repaired the damage and become a member of what became a very respected acting company. A company which, once established, was called Los Angeles Theater Center, headed by Bill Bushnell.

During my second audition for LATC, that one for Wild Duck, I was called back into the room and told I had the job. I started to laugh. They asked what was funny and I told them I had quit acting about three months earlier. They also found that funny, and said that that was probably why I had gotten the job. I didn’t tell them I had missed out on the opportunity to be part of their company all those years ago. You see, Wild Duck was part of their final season.

We are told that we are often our own worst enemies. In a nod to Oliver Perry, Pogo Possum once famously said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” I write, now. But if acting ever pursues me, I still won’t say no.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

My mother liked extreme foods. The tea she liked was smoked. I have no idea what the brand or type was, although I have a vague memory that it was something British. It came loose in a tin and my mother would put well over a teaspoon of it in a tea bell, put it in her large coffee mug and pour boiling water over it. Then she would let it steep for hours. Literally hours. Some days she’d make her tea right after breakfast and it would still be sitting on the kitchen counter in the late afternoon. The water would have cooled by then, of course, and there would be a dark grey-brown ring on the ceramic just above the level of the tea and the musky, smokey aroma of it would permeate the house. Tea should not be smokey. Scotch is smokey. Which, of course, is why I prefer a good Irish. Steak grilled over hickory chips should be smokey. Not tea.

Once my mother got her tea to this tepid, almost viscous state she would put a little more hot water in to warm it up, pull the tea bell out, stir it a few times to mix all the tannins evenly and contentedly sit sipping the venomous brew. I was sure the bowl of her spoon would dissolve while she stirred, but it never seemed to.

She also enjoyed Limburger cheese. Not the pot of mildly fragrant cheese you find at your local greengrocer, jar cheese that spreads smoothly across your rye cracker. This cheese was a gently aged block of runny offal that had legs. And feet. And armpits. I used to say Limburger smelled like dirty socks, but that’s not quite accurate. It smelled like athletic socks that had been worn for eight days on a forced march across a burning desert by a very masculine man who suffered from severe athlete’s foot and profuse sweating, then stuffed into moldy sneakers and left in a damp basement for a couple of years. It actually singed the hairs in your nose. Mom would store her chunk of precious matter in a small, tightly sealed Tupperware container in the fridge so that it could marinate in its own essence to its most piquant fullness. (I recently read that the bacteria that is used to ferment Limburger is the same found on human skin that causes body odor. So, in essence, if I wear the same tee shirt two days in a row, I’m a delicacy. Who would have imagined?)

She liked her Limburger in a sandwich, but not just any sandwich. She would cut two thick slices of bread which, I assume, was rye or pumpernickel. She just called it “black bread.” Then she cut a thick slice from a Bermuda onion. Then a couple of hacks from the cheese, put them all together and once again sit down to her special treat. She rarely made these sandwiches while we were around, from fear of Child Services, I suspect, but I would know she was indulging when I turned the corner at the end of our block on the way home from school. Something in the air would quietly whisper, “go visit someone for an hour or two.”

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mother. She introduced us to some amazing culinary delights such as lox, pickled schmaltz herring and pasta con pesto so strong you sweat garlic for three days. And she never forced Limburger or smoked tea on us. It was there if we wanted it. We didn’t.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Many years ago Toyota had an ad campaign with the catchy slogan, “What Will You Do with All the Money You Save?” The thinking was, I assume, the consumer had $20,000 in their checking account allotted especially for the purpose of buying a car. When they bought the Toyota and it only cost $18,000, they had $2,000 worth of FREE MONEY! Woo Hoo! I’m going to Disneyland and have dinner at one of the real restaurants!

Of course, how many people actually have the cash already set aside to purchase a car? (Or even a pack of gum these days, even that’s put on a credit card more often than not.) We usually don’t even have the down payment ready at hand. So, when a car costs less than originally expected, you don’t actually “save” money, you just don’t spend as much potential (read “imaginary”) money as you would have on the more expensive item. You can’t do anything with the money you saved, because in actuality it never really existed. Except in your mind. Which, now I think about it, is how most of my money exists.

Why do I bring this up so many years after the fact? Well, there is a new ad campaign now running from Hyundai, called Dollars & Sense, where the wide-eyed consumers, having fallen in love with the car, are admonished by either Larry Winget, Ray Lucia or Adam Smith (all presumed to be best selling authors of books about money) that they should “put the money they saved into an insured CD” or some such drivel. These renowned economists should be ashamed of themselves! What could it possibly do to an economist’s reputation to advise people to put money that never existed into savings? Isn’t that illegal? Would there eventually be a margin call? Would you have to give the car back when that happened? What if you’ve already spilled ice cream on the upholstery during your trip to Disneyland?

I don’t really begrudge these authors getting their truck load of money for giving this fictional advice in a commercial, it is good economics. For them - lead by example, I always say. Are Hyundai cars relatively inexpensive? Yes. (I didn’t say “cheap”!) Will you spend less money on one than if you buy a comparable car from another maker? Probably. Does that mean you’ve saved money? Theoretically. What are you going to do with that money? I’m going to invest mine in an imaginary gold mine in Argentina. Hey, I don’t even have to buy the car to do that. How much more money can I save, then?

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

It didn’t take the movie The Italian Job for me start coveting a Mini Cooper. The first time I saw one, I decided it would be my very next car. I was then driving a black 1988 Nissan Sentra, a wholly practical, dependable, sensible, staid box of a car. I loved my Sentra, who I named Sebastian, but had ridden him hard and long for almost 20 years with only spotty maintenance and care. It is a miracle (and testament to Nipponese technology) that the poor thing had lasted as long as it did, but it had gotten to the point where everything was bent, corroded or falling off. I held up the driver’s seat with a big plastic crate in the back seat. Really. Without the crate, I would have had to drive in the luge position.

Once I became aware of them, I started noticing Minis everywhere. It was funky, odd, more in keeping with how I was beginning to see myself. I set my sights on a red Mini and began to save. Then I saw a review of the new convertible which said, “they’re so cute you want to pinch the fender.” I went onto the Mini web site and “built” my own, personal car - convertible, bright orange (a new color for them, then, even more funky then the red I’d planned on), with white wheels and bonnet stripes and lots of internal customization.

Of course I’d never been in a convertible, much less driven one, and didn’t want to spend all that money and decide a month later that I hated the thing. I found a car rental place that had one on it’s lot. It was even the same color I wanted, bright orange. No bonnet stripes, but that was completely beside the point. I rented it for a week. Two minutes off the lot, I knew I had to have that car.

Sebastian was well past the need for retirement and I finally had the money, so I had a friend drive me down to the Mini dealership. They had one on the lot that was very close to exactly what I wanted. The rag top color was wrong and it had a few extras I wasn’t interested in, but it was the end of the month and they wanted to get their stats up so I was able to negotiate them down to a very nice price, insisted they make a couple of modifications and wrote a check for the down payment.

A week later another friend drove me back to the dealership. There, in the showroom, was my car. Bright orange with a black top, white bonnet stripes, white wheels and white mirror covers. It was delightful. The salesmen were standing around it admiring the white mirror caps saying I wasn’t crazy after all. I walked around it, got the “new owner” talk, named it Nigel, put the top down and happily drove it away. The only time after that that the top is up is when it’s raining, freezing or the car is parked.

A year later I took a cross-country trip in Nigel. On the way back, I stopped in St. George, Utah, a fair sized town on the far western end of Utah’s stretch of Highway 70. I was sitting in the car writing down the mileage in my little notebook, but the door was open. A thin, older fellow in worn jeans and a dim white tee shirt looked over my way and said, “What the hell is that?” “A Mini Cooper,” I informed him. He shook his head and said, “I’d rather be shot dead than be seen in something like that.” He was smiling, but I didn’t believe it.

What an extreme reaction, I thought, and considered asking if he wanted a test drive. “It’s a cool car,” I said, completely unruffled, returning his smile. He looked in and studied the dash board. He seemed fascinated and slightly repulsed, like just looking might somehow make his feminine side bubble to the surface. “Does it really go 150 miles an hour?” he asked after seeing the speedometer. I let him know that it did indeed, that they raced them in England where they were made. He shook his head and said, “It’s just wrong, somehow,” and walked away. He had the same crooked smile the whole time, as if to say, “I really don’t like your kind, but this is a bright, public place and I can’t get away with stomping you.”

What a hoot. If I hadn’t already loved my little car I did then. It makes small minded people uncomfortable. It would really be poetic if I then sang sixties folk songs for the next twenty miles. I didn’t, of course, but my heart cockles were warm.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

It would probably come as no surprise to anyone who knew me that I’m a college graduate; I’m fairly well spoken, fairly well read, use multi-syllabic words and have a subtle air of pretension that precedes me into any room. It may come as a surprise, however, to know that not once in the thirty years (!) since I graduated has it made any difference that I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree. In fact, no potential employer, potential business partner, potential casting director, potential arresting officer or potential date has ever even asked if I even attended college. It was all, it seems, entirely solipsistic. (Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll try to behave. Solipsism is a theory that the self is the only reality, so a solipsistic experience is one that only matters to the person who experienced it. But you knew that. And it doesn’t matter.)

This is not about that, however. It’s about my experience getting my degree at a small, private, liberal arts Catholic girls’ school. Okay, so it was no longer a girls’ school when I attended, they had started letting boys in a few years before. They also closed down a few years after I graduated. They’d been having financial trouble for years, a circumstance that I assume contributed to both milestones.

Fort Wright College was run by the Sisters of the Holy Names and was housed on what at one time had been the base and barracks of the famous Indian killer, Colonel George Wright, on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington. I first became aware of it the summer out of high school while performing a very small role in a play at a local civic theater in Spokane called Spokane Civic Theatre. The two leads in the play were the couple who ran the drama department at the Fort and I fell instantly enamored of them. They seemed to know things about acting and theater in general that I had never imagined.

I applied, and with government grants, work study and a job at the campus cafeteria in hand, entered academia. The school was very progressive; most classes were “pass/no pass” with evaluative comments that went on your permanent record. You could request actual grades, of course, at the beginning of each term, which most of the math and science students did and few of the art, music or drama students did. The Sisters of the Holy Names were a fairly liberal order, few of them wore habits, those that did either very old or very Korean. In fact my English professor, Sister Jean Concannon, often said she feared sounding too “nunny”. She needn’t have worried, of course. She taught Dylan, both Thomas and Bob, and Joyce, both James and Carol Oates, who have all been accused of everything from sensualism to obscenity. One professor, who taught math, had been kicked out of several African countries for agitating. I liked it there.

There was a subtle tension between the nuns and the lay faculty (I wonder if they’re called that because they’re allowed to get laid. I digress) and all but one teacher in the drama department was lay, so it was natural that there was tension between our department and the rest of the school. (That one non-lay teacher moved to the English department after only a year with us, poor thing.) The year before I got there, they were preparing to mount a production of The Marat/Sade, a play in which, among many other questionable activities, the inmates of an insane asylum attack and rape a bunch of nuns. The college didn’t demand they not do the play, but made their life so miserable they closed down the production and instead did the “happy and likable” James Thurber comedy, The Male Animal. The nuns were quite pleased, saying that it was a grand show and exactly what should be being done. They entirely missed, it seems, the theme of the play, which was a plea for academic freedom and against censorship.

I was one of perhaps three people in the drama department, students and teachers alike, who didn’t smoke. I was one of very few students who didn’t also smoke pot, drop acid and sleep around. (It was, after all, the Seventies.) I was the only one, as far as I can tell, who didn’t drink. I was naive. (Least you think me unnecessarily pure, I assure you I made up for lost time in the Eighties.) Even so, my four years at the Fort were a happy blur. I fell tragically in love with one of my roommates, a big, burly straight man who always smelled slightly of marijuana, spent hours upon hours every day in the ramshackle theater building that always smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke, successfully straddled the divide between “us” and “them”, making lasting friendships in and out of the department, acted in four or five plays a year, started classes most days at ten and finished rehearsal most days at midnight, learned so much about so much and graduated never having had to write a single term paper.

I say I’m a college graduate, but I barely remember our actual graduation. It was in the Commons building, I remember, where the cafeteria was, one of the very few “new” buildings on campus. I also remember one of my classmates, that same burly roommate, getting angry upon hearing someone say “now we enter the real world.” “No,” he insisted. “This is the real world. This is as much the real world as any place you will ever find.” I also remember the party afterwards, at the house of Chris and Heather Welch, a couple who had actually been married, where we all helped to prepare and bake a huge tray of “Nachos Especial”, everyone ate and everyone else drank and we never thought to say good bye to the Fort.

In the thirty (!) years since then I’ve moved to Los Angeles, owned several businesses, had several careers, grown slightly less neurotic, loved and lost, written and published, loved and gained, made up for lost time and, now, on an almost daily basis, get email come-ons to get my degree on-line. I would consider it, of course, but no one would care.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I think the whole “six degrees of separation” theory is based on faulty science, but has become so ingrained in the American Zeitgeist that anyone daring to disbelieve it is at best considered an idiot and at worst labeled a heretic.

That being said, I recently had a series of “small world” experiences.

I decided to join the social netorking site MySpace, in part to promote our book, and in part to see what all the hoo ha was about.  Not knowing quite how to build a circle of friends, which you need to survive on a social networking site, I’m told, I did a search for gay men in Los Angeles that were around my own age. I looked at their profiles one by one and those that seemed interesting I sent friend’s requests to. After the initial contact, I corresponded with very few of them. So much for social networking.

One, Peter, had been in my friend’s list for quite some time when he posted a bulletin regarding a blog in which he had linked a video discussing a conspiracy about possible government involvement in 9/11. In his blog, he was skeptical but intrigued by the notion. I sent him an email with my thoughts on the matter - there was a loud rumor that Roosevelt knew ahead of time that the Japanese were headed for Pearl Harbor but did nothing so he could have an excuse to enter World War Two. If we can believe that, why couldn’t we believe that at least someone in the government may have known about the imminent attack and not only did nothing but prevented others from doing anything in order to start, say, a war over oil - and he wrote back.

We started a delightful correspondence having little to do with politics. We talked about pop culture, travel, our lives thus far. And we made each other giggle. At least he made me giggle.

Shortly before this, my writing partner Steve and I went to a marketing seminar where we met (among other people) a movie director named Marc Rosenbush, who had made an independent movie called Zen Noir. I talked with him, picking his brain about movie making. (I’m picking the brain of anyone I can about movie making these days.) When he put up a MySpace page for his movie, added that to my friends.

One of the Zen Noir page’s friends was a strange fellow called The Alien. He was so weird, surreal and wonderful, I had to have him join me and invited him to be my friend.

Back to Peter. One afternoon, feeling I knew him well enough, now, to ask personal questions (we still hadn’t really met, mind you) I asked him if he had a boyfriend. He said he did, and that his boyfriend was one of my friends, The Alien, whose real name was Jon Harris and who was one of the actors in Zen Noir.

Well. I’m not done, yet.

Peter, Jon and I decided we should actually meet at some point, so I joined them for lunch at a charming little café in West Hollywood. During lunch our conversation was so easy and our sense of conection so strong, we all decided that we must have known each other through several incarnations. We were talking about our travels and lives and Jon told a story about when he lived in Seattle. He directed a play there and in it was this wonderful actress who made him laugh. Her name was Therese Diekhans. Well, I dropped my teeth (which is fairly amazing considering they’re all originals). I went to college with a wonderful actress named Therese Diekhans! We were both founding members of the original Interplayers Ensemble in Spokane, Washington. (Really. I still have letterhead.) Jon went outside for a moment and when he came back, he handed me his cell phone and said, “It’s for you.” It was Therese! We chatted briefly, caught up and have kept in touch since.

I now have two wonderful new friends who came at me from entirely different directions and have been reacquainted with an old friend who I cherish!

Small world.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend