Thanksgiving Past

Broadway.com is honoring the upcoming Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade by highlighting one classic performance from years past each day this week.

I mention this because they started the week off by featuring a performance from the 2007 parade starring two talented people who were then little known outside of the world of the stage: the leads of Spring Awakening, Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff, both now world famous thanks to a little TV show called Glee.

It's a very nice performance of 'Give My Regards to Broadway'. It goes without saying, of course, that they sound fantastic singing together. I love that they clearly have a great deal of affection for each other.

I wonder if it's at all possible that we'll have a Jesse St. James return appearance sometime this season on Glee? I know that Jonathan is performing in London right now, but I miss my weekly fix, especially after seeing how completely adorkable he is in his winter jacket in the parade clip!

How do I get Santa to leave Jonathan under my tree this year?!

Speaking of Glee, I'm going to have a write up on my thoughts on the season so far at some point in the near future. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!

Southfork Calling

I've written before about my undying love for Dallas, the Grand Dame of 1980's prime time soaps, and about how excited I was that TNT was thinking about updating the show with a series that focused on the younger generation of Ewings: John Ross (son of J.R. and Sue Ellen) and Christopher (son of Bobby and Pamela). The best part, though, was that there was also talk of Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy, and Linda Gray reprising their roles from the original show.

Since that time, there hadn't been a lot of news about the project. I read awhile back that TNT had decided to order a pilot, which was fantastic news since that's obviously the first step in the series becoming a reality. But overall, news was scarce and that was a bit worrisome since I'd been through the same process earlier in the decade when there was a lot of talk of a big screen adaption of the show and it ultimately came to nothing.

Just when I was starting to despair of ever hearing anything more, a new article popped up on the TV Guide website earlier this week. The show is clearly very much in the works, as original series stars Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy and Linda Gray (J.R., Bobby and Sue Ellen) discuss the script and reveal certain details, like the fact that matriarch Miss Ellie and her husband Clayton have both passed away (as, of course, have their portrayers, Barbara Bel Geddes and Howard Keel) and Bobby has remarried.

Larry Hagman notes that he remains 'ambivalent' about the idea and is waiting for a firm offer, but Patrick Duffy sounds a much more optimistic note:

"I read the script and was extremely impressed with it," says Patrick. "I'd managed to read the scripts for the feature films Fox was planning a few years ago and they were atrocious. Just awful, so I didn't know what to expect from TNT. But this read like one of the better episodes at the height of Dallas. It's a perfect sequel to continuing the Dallas tradition."

I'm so excited to see this show become a reality! If they manage the mix between the older and younger characters just right, throw in some real eye candy as John Ross and Christopher (and, for those who are into that sort of thing, some attractive women to play their love interests), this thing could be great!

I feel like a little kid counting down the days until Christmas, only I'm starting on December 26th and it's going to be a looong wait!

Books, Hold the E

Last month I read with dismay that Alyson Books, the oldest LGBT Publishing firm in the United States, was converting itself into an E-Book only publishing house. I know that many newspapers and periodicals are making the switch to digital only, but the idea that publishers may stop printing actual books and move exclusively to E-Books really worries me.

As someone who loves books (and by that I mean actual printed books!) this new trend towards E-Readers is not something I'm thrilled with. Part of that comes from working in a bookstore that is trying very hard to get ahead of this particular trend. We're made to push E-Readers like crazy, even though roughly two thirds of the staff dislike them.

I remember fondly the days when we just sold books (okay, and movies and CDs), but now we're constantly having to take training courses on the latest E-Reader and being asked all sorts of technical questions by customers.

Frankly, I hate E-Readers. I suppose if you travel a lot they're handy to have around, but they're certainly not for me. The idea that a cold piece of machinery could ever replace the experience of holding a book in your hands, turning the pages, and smelling the scent of the paper is just insane to me.

Not only are the things apt to break down eventually (or perhaps quickly, as evidenced by the many we've had returned to us as defective) and wipe out your whole library (!), but with the way that technology is constantly changing, who is to say that the E-Book you buy today will even be accessible to you a few years down the road? I guess that wouldn't matter to people who never want to re-read something, but I think most true book lovers should find that idea disconcerting, to say the least.

I know I'm not alone in this. Many of my co-workers feel the same way and so do a lot of our regular customers. I always want to cheer when I overhear a customer at work say "No, thanks, I'm a book lover," when asked if they have any questions about our E-Readers.

The thing the really gets me is the sheer number of questions we get about whether or not the E-Readers will actually read the book to their owners. Is that what we're coming to? Are that many people so lazy that they can't be bothered to even read for themselves? They want to be read to like they're still in Kindergarten?!

I know that I could never be happy if I wasn't surrounded by my books. They're a part of my life in a very physical sense.

At any rate, I cheered up a bit today when I read the news that the former head of Alyson Books, Don Weise, is launching a new indie press that will be dedicated to LGBT books. Magnus Books will publish 15-20 titles a year.

I really like the idea of publishing books from a small independent press. If I had the money, I would love to do that myself. There's an interesting memoir by Felice Picano called Art and Sex in Greenwich Village which is about the founding and running of SeaHorse Press, his independent LGBT press, in the late 1970's. It's definitely worth a read if you're at all interested in the inner workings of publishing books or in that particular time period in LGBT writing.

LuRe/Nuke: The End (In So Many Ways)

Almost two months have passed since the venerable soap opera As the World Turns aired its final episode, bringing to a close over 54 years of television history. That history included the groundbreaking character of Luke Snyder, whose story I have covered here in detail over the past several years.

The last time I wrote about Luke's story was back in May. After that point, I became too busy in my personal life to keep up with the show. I did save all of the Luke related episodes on my Tivo, though, and last month when I'd taken a week off of work I managed to catch up with the final four months of the LuRe/Nuke storyline.

It's rather sad that I stuck with the show through some really terrible stories (The Z Twins? Ameera? I could go on for a few paragraphs, but let's leave it at that) and then, just when I was delighted with the electric chemistry between Van Hansis and Eric Sheffer Stevens as Luke and Reid, I had to step away.

I've been wondering since I finished watching the show just how much I should write about the way it ended. Too much time had passed for me to try and do any sort of thorough recap of the story. In the end, I decided to just do a brief summary of the action and then talk about what, exactly, this story meant and the impact it had.

There was much talk among fans about how the show would end: would Luke end up with Noah or with Reid? Both couples had their die hard fans who believed that the wrong choice would be a betrayal of their favored pair. I myself was firmly in the LuRe camp.

In the end, the show opted for door number three in an attempt to try and satisfy everyone involved.

Luke chose Reid over Noah, who decided to leave for school in Los Angeles. Luke and Reid were briefly happy, though they never actually got to make love. Luke wanted to hold off, since he'd only ever been with Noah, and Reid agreed to wait until Luke was ready.

This being a soap opera, things didn't go as planned. Reid's rival at the hospital, Chris Hughes, needed a new heart quickly, or he was going to die. Reid learned of a heart that was a match in nearby Bay City and rushed off to bypass the bureaucratic red tape and get the heart. His car stalled on a train track on his way there and he was hit before he could escape.

He lived long enough to be taken back to the hospital in Oakdale and say good bye to Luke, to whom he gave his power of attorney and instructions to make sure that Chris Hughes got Reid's heart if it was a match (which, of course, it was).

It goes without saying that Van Hansis was heartbreaking in these scenes. Watching Luke grieve Reid was incredibly hard.

So, the show gave the LuRe fans what it wanted, sort of: Luke and Reid remained in love and would have lived happily ever after except that Reid died a noble, heroic death.

They also gave the Nuke fans what they wanted, sort of: Noah and Luke didn't end up together, but the possibility of Luke eventually joining Noah in L.A. after he'd grieved Reid was very much hinted at.

Instead of making both sides happy, I suspect that it actually left everyone unsatisfied. Still, I greatly appreciated that the very last scene we ever had of Luke Snyder was of him placing his head on Chris Hughes' chest to listen to Reid's heart beating.

I bemoaned the awful writing on this show many times but in the end there is no denying that Luke's story broke a lot of ground. Like many pioneering stories, it won't be as good as what comes after it, the stories (like the much superior Kish storyline on One Life to Live) that don't have to break down the same taboos themselves.

Those stories, though, would never be able to exist if Luke's story hadn't lead the way. Let's recap here:

Luke was the first out gay male character from a core family on a daytime soap. This means that the character wasn't a disposable one, easy to remove when his purpose had been served.

Luke was the first gay male character who remained a leading character on a daytime soap once his coming out storyline was finished.

Luke and Noah shared the first romantic kiss between two male characters on a daytime soap. In fact, they shared the first several.

Luke and Noah were the first two male characters to make love on a daytime soap, though of course we didn't get a scene of them in bed together before or after (that ground was broken by Kish).

Luke, Noah, and Reid were the first true all male love triangle on a daytime soap (one in which both sides of the triangle had fans rooting for them).

Luke and Noah were, in fact, the first gay supercouple on daytime TV.

In the end, these milestones will be what truly matters, not the awful plot twists that cluttered things up along the way.

None of this would have happened, of course, without Van Hansis. His talent was what made people care about Luke. Van quickly developed a legion of fans that championed Luke and then the Nuke pairing, bringing the show the sort of attention in hadn't had in years.

If the writing had been up to the level of Van's talent, this attention could have been parlayed into ratings and the show might still be going strong today.

With the end of As the World Turns, there are no longer any out gay characters on daytime television. A truly sad state of affairs given that just a year ago we had Luke & Noah, Oliver & Kyle, Nick, Mason, Philip, and Rafe spread out over three different soap operas.

With all the talk of ground being broken, it's a bitter irony that we're suddenly back to where we were before Luke ever came out of the closet.

Mary Ann in Autumn

I have a lot to catch up on here, there's so much I want to write about. I suppose I'll have to just take it one post at a time.

Let's start with Mary Ann in Autumn, the new Tales of the City novel by Armistead Maupin. If you've followed my blog at all, you know that I'd been looking forward to this book for quite awhile now.

I picked up my copy the day it came out, of course, and I pretty much devoured it all in one sitting. Maupin definitely still has the touch when it comes to weaving an engaging tale.

Reading this novel (and the earlier update, Michael Tolliver Lives) was very much like running into people you dearly loved in the past but haven't had the chance to see in ages. You may worry at first that too much will have changed in the ensuing years, but you quickly discover how easy it is to fall right back into your old rapport.

Don't think for a second, though, that Maupin is only interested in the characters that he first created over thirty years ago. In his two latest updates to the series he's introduced a new generation of characters to catch our interest and he's been able to seamlessly intertwine their lives with those of the classic characters.

Mary Ann in Autumn focuses, as you'd imagine, on the character of Mary Ann Singleton. In the original series of books, she was the character who arrived in San Francisco from Cleveland, wide eyed and naive. Mary Ann ended up being the character who most personified the times she lived in, going from the open hearted and free spirited 1970's to the ambitious and self obsessed 1980's.

Maupin managed to actually make this change in Mary Ann feel quite natural. Looking back, you saw that the seeds of it were always there. It still hurt, though, to get to the end of the series (as Sure of You was for so many years) and to feel just as abandoned by Mary Ann as her friends and family in the books did when she left them behind to pursue success in New York.

When the series was updated in 2005 with Michael Tolliver Lives Mary Ann was largely absent, with the exception of a telling cameo appearance toward the end. We learned at that point that she'd continued to mirror the changing times by becoming an upper class suburban wife in Connecticut who hadn't seen her San Francisco friends in years.

Mary Ann in Autumn, then, is the first real chance to catch up with this particular character as she returns to San Francisco in the face of both health and marital crises.

The book takes place in December of 2008, when the country is still hopeful over the recent election of Senator Obama to the White House but California itself is reeling from the passage of Proposition 8. One of the younger characters, in fact, is a sexually confused Mormon who'd been in town on a mission to help pass the law.

As with any Tales novel, there is no shortage of intrigue or heartfelt moments, mixed in with a lot of laughs and plenty of wisdom dispensed from Mrs. Madrigal.

I loved the book. I loved getting to know Mary Ann all over again and discovering that the ambitious woman who'd left everything behind for the sake of her career was still very much present, but that the open hearted young girl who'd first arrived in San Francisco was there, too. They were, in fact, very much the same person.

In the first books, I tended to identify with her as the outsider coming into this new world. Maybe that's why it was so hard when she later turned her back on the world I'd come to love, why it seemed so unforgivable to me.

I picked up the new book hoping that Mary Ann would be redeemed in my eyes as a character, but I quickly realized that she didn't need redemption. In the end, Mary Ann is simply a woman who has made her decisions in life, for better or worse, just as we all do. Maybe being a bit older myself than I was when I read the original six books is part of why I can see that so clearly now.

I hope that this won't be the last of the Tales novels. There is still a lot of story to be told, both with the original characters and the newer ones. If it is the final book, though, I will at least be glad that I finally came to a new understanding of Mary Ann.