Sorry I’ve been remiss in writing in this blog but I’ve been busy on the road touring for the paperback of Sissy. First of all, I want to thank all of you out there who keep discovering the book - especially now that it’s out in paperback - and writing me here on the blog to let me know how it has touched you. If I haven’t written back to all of you, please know how much your messages mean to me. I am humbled and touched and thrilled each time you take the time to write to me here. It means the world to me. More than you can know.

Let’s see .. where to start …

A few weeks ago I began the tour by going down to Ft. Lauderdale to participate in the Literary Feast, a weekend event that is a fundraising drive for the Broward County Library. First, however, I had agreed to interview Robert De Niro for an upcoming story in Travel+Leisure about his new hotel in Tribeca called The Greenwich. Our schedules were so crowded we each could only meet for an hour or so on the day I was headed to the airport to fly down to Ft. Lauderdale. So I showed up at the hotel - which was still in that last throes of construction and being decorated - with my suitcases in tow as if I were checking into the place. De Niro could not have been nicer or more open. I’d always wanted to interview him so wasn’t going to turn the assignment down and was determined to make it work - even if it meant writing the story in airports and hotel rooms on my paperback book tour. I gave him a copy of the paperback and he said, “I can’t promise you I’ll read it, but I’ll give it to Grace, my wife. She’s from Mississippi you know.” I didn’t know. “All my in-laws are from around Jackson. I think she’s mentioned this book to me already. This is really sweet of of you.” De Niro himself was rather sweet. Nothing like his screen image of the overly macho guy. His father was a famous abstract expressionist painter - Robert De Niro, Sr. - who met his mother, Virginia Admiral, who was also a painter - while they were studying with Hans Hoffman in Provincetown in the early 1940s. De Niro was their only child. In fact, Robert De Niro, Sr., divorced Admiral soon after their son was born and became quite open about his bisexuality, becoming the lover of the poet and gay rights pioneer, Robert Duncan. De Niro, as a boy, grew up hanging out in his father’s loft in Greenwich Village surrounded by his father’s friends Anais Nin and Henry Miller and Jackson Pollock and Tennesee Williams. Artitsry is a part of De Niro’s DNA. And the hotel is beautiful

I had a great time once I got to Ft. Lauderdale. I was one of about 20 writers invited to particpate in the weekend. In fact, I was late arriving because of my De Niro interview so missed the welcoming cocktail party at the penthouse of some rich local entrepreneur. But I ran into Christopher Rice who was starting out the tour for his new book, Blind Fall, at the front door of our hotel on his way out for the evening with friends. I had just read a rave review in the New York Times on the flight down of his mother’s new book about Jesus and was the first to tell him the good news. Made me feel good - putting a smile on his face. He obviously loves his mom a lot. Of course, Chris is a bit of a diva - a loveable one, but a diva nonetheless, I guess being the son of Anne Rice, divadom, like artistry, is a part of his own DNA - and he didn’t like the hotel and yacht club where the festival had put us so he checked out the next day to check into the St. Regis Hotel right next to Ft. Lauderdale’s gay beach. If you want to see how sexy Chris is looking these days, check out his interview on Towleroadtv.com.

The next morning - Friday - I got up early and met with a class of honor students at a local high school. I gave out a few awards for a short story writing contest and talked to the class and read from my book. Instead of opening up the floor for questions, I decided to ask them all questions. When we began to discuss how difficult it is to be different as a teenager, one young boy - beautiful, soft spoken, soft in many ways - raised his hand and began to confide how he poured his own difference into his artwork. Two boys in the back of the class began to laugh at him. As their laughter reached him, I saw the bit of pain the sound engendered flicker in his eyes. I did not look away from him but kept him talking about himself, commented on his bravery, until the laughter quieted. But does such laughter ever really quiet. In the laughter of those boys in the back of that class I heard the echo of the laughter that I’d heard so often behind my own back when I was a teenager trying to celebrate my own difference in my own brand of art. Sometimes artistry is not to be found in our DNA but in our defiance.

That night there was a big cocktail party at the Broward County Library and we writers were placed in a circle facing outward at our tables in order to sign the books that the cocktail partygoers bought. We then were assigned to one rich person each in order to be a guest at their homes at the dinners that their guests had paid to attend - hence, the name Literary Feast. We were asked to sit at one table of guests during the first course. A second table during the main course. And a third table during desert. I then did a reading from Mississippi Sissy in my host’s media room. It was an exhausting but fun evening. Felt a bit like a performing monkey but that’s what book tours are about sometimes.

The next day we were asked to on panels at a local college as part of the literary festival. I sat on a memoir one with the wondeful Lucinda Franks, who has written a remarkable memoir about discovering family secrets, My Father’s Secret War, and Terri Cheney, a lovely woman who has written about her bipolar condition in Manic. We were a good threesome. Our stories and personalities blended well.

After the panel I flew back to New York to prepare for the next week of travel down south for another leg of the tour. I signed books at the University of Southern Mississippi and the next day at the Georgia Tech Barnes and Noble. After those two events I headed to Charleston - my first visit to that amazingly beautiful city. I kept wondering if I could live there. Though I certainly responded to its architecture, friends of mine who know it better than I do told me that the population tends to be a bit more stuffy than I could endure. But there was nothing stuffy about my reading on Pawleys Island, about 90 minutes outside of Charleston.

Pawleys is a barrier island and one of the most scenic places I’ve ever been. I spoke and read at a luncheon series called Moveable Feast which was sponsored by the wonderfully laconic Tom Warner, of Litchfield Books, and the Sea View Inn. The inn hasn’t changed a bit since it opened in the 1937. There are no telephones and televisions in the rooms. And there is a vast back portch overlooking the ocean, a porch filled with comfortable rockers. The lunch was sold out and we sold out my books there as well. The audience was almost completely women of a certain age who crowded into the quaint dining hall of the inn. They laughed uproariously at all the right parts. Teared up. And were completely silent and moved by the end. The applause was sustained and heartfelt. At the end of the lunch - one of my favorite appearances I’ve had on either the hardback or paperback tour - one of the women came up to hug my neck and said, “Honey, I was afraid to come to this one because I thought it was going to be too gay. But you’re just about the best writer we’ve had here. Cokie Roberts is coming to speak to us in a couple of weeks and she’s going to have to be damn good to top you.” And then she tried to fix me up with a gay nephew of hers who lives in New Jersey.

I’m going back to the Sea View Inn at some point to not watch television and not talk on the phone. And hug me some more necks.

Next up: The Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans ….

I’ll be hitting the road again for a book tour for the trade paperback of Mississippi Sissy from Picador that’s in stores now. Below are the dates and cities and locations. Come see me if you live nearby and have the time.

March 15th
Literay Feast Festival/Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
Nova Southeastern University’s
Alvin Sherman Library
Davie, Florida
1:30 p.m.

March 19th
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Barnes & Noble
Hub Building
University of Southern Mississippi
1 - 2:30 p.m.

March 20th
Atlanta, Georgia
Barnes & Noble
Georgia Tech University
48 Fifth Street, NW
6 - 7:30 p.m.

March 21st
Pawleys Island, S.C. (Outside Charleston)
Litchfield Books
14427 Ocean Highway
11 - 3 p.m.

March 30th
Tennessee Williams Literary Festival
New Orleans, Louisiana
Panel Discussion
Eudora Welty: First Lady of Fiction
with John Lawrence and Suzanne Marrs
Moderator: Rebecca Mark
Muriel’s Jackson Square Restaurant
Festival Pass or $10 at the door
10 a.m.

March 30th
Tennessee Williams Literary Festival
Panel Discussion
Truths Stranger than Fiction: Lives Revealed in Memoirs
Panel Discussion
with Betsy Carter, Joshua Clark, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Moderator: Bev Marshall
Bourbon Orleans Hotel
St. Mary Salon
Festival Pass or $10 at the door
11:30 a.m.

Howdy, y’all.

I’m down in New Orleans right now after a quick trip to Mississippi to attend the opening night of an art exhibit called “Backyards and Beyond” at the Mississippi Museum of Art. It is an exhibit that my sister, Karole, and her partner, artist H.C. Porter (check out hcporter.com for details) have been working on since Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It consists of over 80 paintings of some of Katrina’s survivors in their destroyed homesteads right after the hurricane hit. H.C. painted the images and Karole recorded their stories that go along with the paintings as well as wrote their stories posted on the walls next to each painting. It was a gargantuan undertaking and they have pulled it off brilliantly. I was so proud of my little sister. She has spent the last few years spearheading this project and, for all the doubts I had about it from time to time, seeing it last night all pulled together under one roof was a very moving experience. There are plans to tour the show to Washington D.C. and other cities so watch for it. Governor Haley Barbour’s wife, Mississippi’s First Lady, opened the exhibit with a moving speech and Congressman Chip Pickering and his wife were there as well since Mrs. Pickering has been a big supporter of the project. It was interesting to witness their well wishes as well as their genuine high regard for Karole and H.C. who have been in a lesbian relationship for almost twenty years now. Though their sexual orientation has nothing to do with the caliber of the exhibit, it did dawn on me while being in that crowd full of very conservative folk in Jackson that, as much as they were moved by the work that Karole and H.C. had done on behalf of their beloved state, that it still doesn’t translate to honoring them in a real political sense. Ahhh .. the south in all its glorious contradictions.

I spent the two nights in Mississippi with my brother, Dr. J. Kim Sessums, at his lovely home in Brookhaven and had a great time with him and his sexy sprite of a wife, Kristy. Kim is an ob/gyn but - those of you who have read Mississippi Sissy already know this - is also a reknowned sculptor. He is currently working on a commissioned sculpture - 1 1/3 life-size - of legendary Ole Miss football coach, Johnny Vaught, to be unveiled at the Ole Miss football stadium at the beginning of the school’s next football season. So I had a great time hanging out in Kim’s garage where he was working on the piece and watching him work as he shaved and molded the clay on the giant figure. I am in awe of his talent.

I took the train back down to New Orleans today to spend the night here in the French Quarter and I’m about to head over to Meaux Bar, my favorite restaurant here owned by a couple of old friends from New York who migrated south a few years ago and themselves survived Katrina. I’ll be catching a flight back to New York City tomorrow morning and be heading back out on book tour next week to coincide with the trade paperback publication of Mississippi Sissy from Picador. My first stop will be Ft. Lauderdale on Thursday afternoon after first interviewing Robert De Niro Thursday morning for an article I’m doing on his new hotel, The Greenwich, for Travel+Leisure magazine that slated to be in its June issue. On my next post, I’ll let you know about all my stops in the next few weeks so maybe you can catch me if you’re close by one of the cities I’m in - Ft. Lauderdale, Hattiesburg, Atlanta, Charleston, and then back in New Orleans for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival.

Anyway, just wanted to begin limbering up my blogging muscles for the next few weeks. Kim took me into his frame shop, We Frame It, in Brookhaven while I was there and the owner of the place - a sexy young guy named Matt, to bring the discussion back full circle to art and sculpture - told me he missed reading my blog entries. So here’s to Matt and the matted paintings of Katrina survivors and matte gray clay that Kim uses to mold his sculptures as well as the even deeper matte clay of the Mississippi soil I just left behind in my native state that molded me as well into the man I am today, a place from which I made an early escape but also one that, whenever I return there, reminds me how much I love my brother and sister and what amazing grown-up people they have become. I am so proud of both of them - they are two of the state’s premiere citizens - and I am lucky to be their big brother. Mississippi Sissy is about the importance of family and this trip reminded me yet again of that importance.

Now all y’all go call your own brothers and sisters and let them know how much you love them too. Tell’em a Mississippi sissy told you to.

You can read my 2000 Vanity Fair cover story on Heath Ledger which was just posted on vanityfair.com and also a personal reminiscence of him I quickly wrote this afternoon to accompany the story online. I hope the reminiscence is appropriate. I only had half an hour to write it and my mind was - is still - reeling. There is no circus atmosphere like Anna Nicole’s death created. Only sadness.

Hope all my readers out there had a great New Year’s Eve surrounded by those you love or by those you loved for one night or those you will grow to love in 2008. Me? I went to see Charlie Wilson’s War by myself - an odd movie: a comedy about a serious subject, a right-wing movie made by liberals, its two leads miscast but oddly affecting, a kind of sweeping epic-like war movie that came in at 90 minutes, and yet it finally all worked in spite of itself. I interviewed Tom Hanks years ago on the morning after his Oscar win for Forrest Gump - he came up blurry-eyed after a sleepless night to my hotel room for breakfast at the Bevery Wilshire and ended up, surprising us both, spending most of the day with me - and he became one of the actors with whom I’ve always remained on friendly terms. His wife Rita is a gem. Both are “real folk” and have been so nice to my nephews and niece when I took them each out to LA for Oscar weekends for their graduations from high school when we would run into them at parties and picnics during that weekend’s small-town atmosphere. So I’m always glad when I can recommend a Hanks movie. He’s at his rascally best as Charlie Wilson. Anyway, I then came home and - old theatre queen that I am - plopped down in front of the tv and watched a Jerry Herman documentary on PBS and then headed over to a friend’s party for 45 minutes. I stayed till 12:10 a.m. and then headed home to Archie, my dog, and my Ambien. Another friend - who runs the Times Square Business District - asked me to come up to a private party above Times Square right next to where Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin were broadcasting above the throngs, but the thought of making it through those throngs to get there and then to make it through them again to get home scared me away. He asks me every year and one year I’m going to brave the throngs. But, yet again, I was asleep by 12:30 on a New Year’s Eve.

Christmas Eve was spent for the second year now over at Jason Moore’s beautiful loft in the Chelsea art gallery district. Jason is the director of Avenue Q and the current off-Broadway sensation Speech & Debate and is also staging the Broadway musical version of Shrek that Dreamworks is producing this coming year. He graciously has a group of us “Christmas orphans” over for a delicious meal and a game of Celebrity. Christmas Day I went to see Sweeney Todd with all the cute Jewish boys. I’ve seen so many productions over the years - including the originial with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou - and, though I thought that parts of the film version were enthralling, I also thought the critics had over-sold it a bit. Johnny Depp is always good and interesting to watch. He’s another of my favorite cover story subjects back during my old days at Vanity Fair and is one of the few of my subjects who made a point of calling me after the story came out to tell me how much he liked it. A real gentleman and the only person I’ve ever interviewed I wanted to kiss. I’ve wanted to fuck a few of them - and maybe even have - but he’s the only one I ever wanted to kiss. Director John Waters, a mutual friend, once told me when I told him that that I should have. “You should have just leaned over and planted one on him. Johnny would have been flattered,” he said. “Believe me he’s cool enough - and secure enough in his hetero-ness - to have been complimented.”

Okay. I realize this is turning into a gossip column posting, one that will no doubt invite some snarky comments. But sometimes dropping names is like dropping breadcrumbs behind me as I try to retrace my steps to find out why I’m sitting here alone on yet another New Year’s day. So I might as well keep going as I tell you what else I’ve been up to since I posted last. A few weeks ago I went with my old boss from Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, to a private screening that Madonna gave for her husband’s new movie and a little dinner that followed. (The movie had me at-a-loss, a kind of hipster/gangster cinematic treatise re: the id and ego and superego, as full of violence as it was of itself.) Tina and I sat with Barbara Walters at the screening and behind Sarah Jessica Parker. I’d seen Sarah a week earlier at a friend’s baby shower. Modern gay life is like old-fashioned straight life as so many of my gay friends are now having babies through adoptions or with surrogates. I’d asked Sarah about how the filming of the new Sex and the City movie was going - we’ve been acquaintances since back when she was dating Robert Downey, Jr., with whom I’d also been friendly since a wild weekend around the pool at the old Mondrian Hotel in LA when I was Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s interview magazine back in the 1980s and a subsequent even wilder one at the Cannes Film Festival. …. Ahh … The Wasted Youth of The Wastrel … Sarah is one of the coolest and kindest women in NY. As glamorous as she is now, she stays grounded in her midwest working-class upbringing. Everyone in NY who has ever met Sarah, adores her. She makes you remember why you moved to NY in the first place and continue to live here despite its many increasing Wall Street yuppie drawbacks: that a lovely artsy creature like her can move here too and still bestride it with beauty and innate good taste and not just conquer it because of the thickness of a yet another Wall Street wallet. “Can you go back to high school?” I had asked Sarah at the friend’s shower, referring to her returning to portraying Carrie Bradshaw. “You can as long as you realize you’re a helluva lot older and you don’t have the same set of friends as you did in high school,” she said before we turned to more important matters, i.e. how cute and precocious her son James Wilkie is. At the dinner after the screening - when Tina and I had finished our meal and she fled into the snowy NY night - I lingered to ogle A-Rod, the NY Yankee star - who was there hanging with Madonna and her husband Guy and other of their guests, including Josh Groban. It was one of those, yes, lovely artsy yuppie-free NY guests lists, an odd menagerie made even odder to me by my own presence there in the midst of it.

Later that week I was part of the “entertainment” at a fundraising dinner honoring writers at the Waldorf for the Democratic National Committee. I had done similar duty - reading excerpts from literary works - at an earlier dinner that honored gay and lesbian writers. I had almost backed out of doing it this time because I was so mad at the Democrats in Congress - especially NY Senator Charles Schumer - for caving to President Bush yet again and approving his water-boarding (i.e. torture) supporting new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey. If we Democrats can’t stand up as a party against torture then what the hell do we stand for? I told Andy Tobias, the Treasurer of the Committee, that I hoped they would take some of the money from the dinner and check the spineless Schumer, et al, into one of NY’s hospitals for a vertebrae fusion so they could grow stronger backbones in facing Bush. I finally decided to do the dinner as a favor for Andy, an old friend, more than any allegiance to the yellow-bellied Democrats. Gov. Howard Dean was the featured speaker and Andy pulled me over to the side before the evening began to tell me that he had told Gov. Dean how upset I was re: Mukasey and that he had convinced him to open up the floor for questions so maybe I could voice my concern at that point instead of doing any grandstanding during my portion of the evening. I agreed. When the floor was opened up for questions - after a couple of soft-ball ones for the governor - I told the technician to turn my microphone back on and hit him with the Mukasey question and how could we approve an attorney general who would not come out against torture. Dean hemmed-and-hawed about how different we were from Republicans re: health care and the minimum wage. I interrupted him: “I asked you about torture. Don’t filibuster me - which, by the way, we had the votes for in the Senate. We could have filibustered Mukasey but we didn’t. It seems the Republicans are the only ones who ever have the balls to threaten to use the filibuster.” He then started to talk about how we must be doing something right since Senator Trent Lott had just resigned. “I wouldn’t bring up Trent Lott, if I were you,” I interrupted him again, “since we also approved his pet homophobic, racist Mississippi judge.” Governor Dean: “I think you can tell we didn’t plant this rather inflamatory question.” Me: “Are you saying it’s inflamatory to bring up being against torture at a Democratic fundraiser?” Dean: “Look, Kevin, I think you and I are from the same wing of the Democratic party, you’re just further out on the leftwing than I am.” Me: “So now you’re accusing me being left of you since I’m against torture? What is becoming of our party?” At that point, the crowd began to applaud me but my mic was cut off. Dean never did address the question directly but I did go up to him after the dinner to thank him for engaging me. Also after the dinner, Tony Kushner and Edward Albee and Nora Ephron all hugged me for stirring things up a bit at what was becoming a rather boring night. It was, in a way, the most fun I’d had in a long time. Rabble-rousing does tend to make one feel a bit more alive - though I’m not sure if Tony and Edward and Nora and their ilk would appreciate being referred to as rabble.

So as much as some of you might think I’m just a name-dropping nabob-wannabe who lives a rather shallow life much of the time, I do love politics as much as show business. I think it has a lot to do with my growing up during the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the 1960s and witnessing the passion and purpose it put into people’s lives. I’ve always been a political junkie. Sunday morning talking-heads shows and Keith Olberman at 8 p.m. on MSNBC and Chris Matthews’s Hard Ball at 5 p.m. are my favorite tv shows and Andrewsullivan.com and Talkingpointsmemo.com and dailykos.com and americablog.com and huffingtonpost.com are my favorite websites. So I can’t wait till Thursday for the Iowa results and then Tuesday for the New Hampshire primary. (I’m an Obama and Edwards leaner.) I’m even starting to do some work for Parade magazine - I decided, believe it or not, I’ve had enough glamor in my life and want real readership and Parade has 71 million readers a week - and I’m heading down to my little hometown in Mississippi next week to do a story about the effects of immigration on it. I’ll next be doing a story for Parade on my mentoring of Brandon - those of you who read this blog know about how I’ve mentored him for the last five years. And then, alas, I’ll be doing an interview with yet another big movie star.

But back to New Year’s. Here I am watching CNN do a marathon of all the presidential candidates and their speeches and town meetings in Iowa and New Hampshire. Feeling, I have to admit, rather lonely - which just seems to be my existential state though, existential or not, I do resolve to be less so in 2008. Yesterday I was feeling very low before I went to the gym to try to work it out of me. Sweating from my extra long treadmill run, I walked out into the brisk cold day and at the corner a stranger named Peter - thank you, Peter, if you’re reading this - stopped me to introduce himself and to thank me for writing Mississippi Sissy this past year and how much it had meant to him. I teared up on my way home but tried not to cry so I wouldn’t look too crazy to other strangers I passed on the street. But teary-eyed right now I would like to thank all you strangers out there - well, not strangers really, if you read this blog or have read my book, but friends I have yet to meet in person - who have supported me so this past year. It’s been a true blessing. I even signed on to Amazon for the first time in a long time this morning when I woke up and saw - though I know it changes from hour to hour - that Mississippi Sissy was at that particular moment still the #1 gay and lesbian memoir/biography. And the paperback - which will be out on March 4th, you can see what it looks like already since its image is up on Amazon - was already #18 in the same category. So the book in hardcover and paperback took up two places at the end of this year on that particular list’s Top 20 spots. I thank you for that.

And don’t forget to read my theatre reviews on Towleroad.com. I haven’t mentioned seeing all the plays I’ve seen since I have written so extensively there about them. Also, you can log on to the NYtimes.com and click on Real Estate and then on the past Habitats columns to read about Archie and me and our apartment in an article that recently ran in the Sunday Times. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that before.

Okay. Enough. This was a bit stream-of-consciousness-y today. But New Year’s Day calls for that, I guess. Again, to everyone out there: Have a happy and healthy 2008.

Onward.

Then I guess I should be writing these posts again. I want to apologize for not writing more these last couple of months but have been quite depressed and down re: the novel-in-progress. I wanted to wait until I had great news to announce. But several publishing houses have turned it down so far and, though it’s still at a few other places awaiting an assortment of judgements, it’s not looking so good. I’m trying to remain hopeful but it hasn’t been easy. Hence the light blogging.

I remain convinced it is good and moving and funny. But we writers are a fragile lot and have to admit my faith in my talent has been shaken a bit. But for those of you who have read Mississippi Sissy you know I’m a survivor and a fighter and God knows I’ve survived worse than a novel not receiving the reception I had so hoped for it. But, as I said, there are still several houses to hear from so we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ve started the sequel to Sissy. It’s titled “I LEFT IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, A Midlife Search for Meaning, and MYSELF.” The first chapter is called The Climber and is about my successful climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro. Chapter Two is called The Role-Player - it is about my time at Juilliard and my starring as Alan Strang opposite Tony Perkins in “Equus” among other roles I’ve played in life and on TV, including parts in “Tales of the City” and Truman Capote’s “The Grass Harp.” Chapter Three: The Mentored, which is about the two late men who first cut me out of the herd here in New York City - Howard Moss, the poetry editor of The New Yorker and a great poet himself, and Henry Geldzahler, who was curator of Twentieth Century Art for the Metropolitan Museum and also Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of New York under Mayor Koch. The Mentor is the title of Chapter Four and that is about my relationship with Brandon Gonzalez. For those of you familiar with this site, you’ll know Brandon as the Brooklyn kid I’ve written about so often who is a big part of my life. Chapter Five: The Starfucker, which is about my years interviewing everyone from Madonna to Johnny Depp to Cher to Barbra Steisand to Tom Cruise and on and on and on during my tenures as Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview and as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. I’m calling Chapter Six The Visitor and it will tell the story of my trip to Louisville to see my first friend who died of AIDS in the late 1980s during his last days in the hospital. The Expatriate is the title of Chapter Seven and it will summarize my time living in Paris which coincided with September 11th. Chapter Eight is about my diagnosis with HIV when I was living in South Beach and it is titled The Diagnosed. The Dogged is the title of Chapter Nine and is about my best friend Archie, who is a 15 pound Chihuahua who has changed my life. And the final chapter is titled The Searcher about the return month-long trip to Africa I plan to take in the near future.

The sequel may be announced in a story the New York Times is doing about Archie and my apartment and me in the Habitats column in its Sunday Real Estate section on December 9th. For those of you who don’t live in New York, I guess you can read it online since I don’t think the Real Estate section is part of its national Sunday edition.

What else? Hmmmm …. I’m still enjoying writing my theatre reviews for Towleroad.com. So check those out. I’ll be writing about William Finn and a few other things this week or next. I went to see a screening of Atonement on Tuesday. Don’t miss it when it opens at your local theatres. It’s a great movie. I loved the Ian McEwan novel, though that word “novel” catches in my throat these days. It was one of my favorites of the last few years as is this movie. I didn’t think the filmmakers could capture the interior quality of the novel’s story - and they haven’t quite - but they have made an astonishingly good film. Joe Wright, the director, and Christopher Hampton, the screenwriter, have accomplished the near-impossible - translating a work of literary art into a cinematic one with a completely different set of tools. Bravo to them and to the cast which includes Keira Knightley and James McAvoy (my new favorite actor) and the always great Vanessa Redgrave. I interviewed Knightley for the cover of ELLE magazine when she was only 17. She could not have been more self-possessed for a teenager. I was smitten with her back then and even more so now. She was staying at The Ritz in Paris with her mother - a left-wing playwright - since at that point Knightley didn’t even have a publicist. She was game from anything. I even suggested I needed a great opening few paragraphs for the story and would she meet me downstairs at The Ritz’s indoor pool to swim a few laps at 8 a.m. so we’d be alone. She arrived the next morning with her bathing cap in place and in her tight little one-piece bathsuit beneath her plush Ritz terrycloth robe. I thought of that groggy Parisian morning with the heated pool’s steam rising Ritzily around us when she, as her character Cecilia Tallis in Atonement, languouously leans back in her own bathing cap and one-piece swim suit on her family’s divingboard in the film. Go see it and you’ll know what I mean when I say Keira has never been more lovely than in that moment on film. Well, perhaps she was in that fleeting memory I had of her when I saw the scene.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the passing of the great Norman Mailer since I’m back to blogging. His Executioner’s Song was a book that changed my writing life. And I’d often ride my bike by his home way down on the east end of Commercial Street in Ptown hoping to get a glimpse of him or hear him pecking away at his computer of typewriter the way I could hear Eudora Welty working away when I’d walk by her opened bedroom window back in Jackson, Mississippi, where she lived a few blocks from my college dorm in her old family homestead on Pinehurst. I met Mailer a couple of times. The first time was with my aforementioned mentor, Henry Geldzahler. We were in the back of a limo with Mailer and - I catch my breath even writing this - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. This was when Jackie O was fighting to save Grand Central when Henry was Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. We were on the way to a fundraiser or a party or something pertaining to signifying Grand Central a landmark. Mailer regaled us all about his college days with Henry back at Harvard when he taught him how to box and Henry taught him how to smoke a cigar. “Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar,” Henry said, paraphrasing Freud. Jackie giggled. I - Zelig-like - giggled along with her, not knowing at that point that Freud was being paraphrased but knowing that a giggle was called for simply at finding myself - a twenty-something from the Missisippi countryside - in such august company.

Years later after interviewing the actress Sally Kirkland for Interview - it was the year she was nominated for Best Actress for her performance in the title role in the film Anna - she invited me to be her date at a Halloween costume party at Norman Mailer’s house in Brooklyn Heights. She went as a flapper and I dressed in a 1920s tux. Mailer was dressed in a toga. I found myself in a corner flirting with Ali McGraw at one point and noticed Mailer observing us. More nervous at the prospect of my flirting with a woman than conversing with the renowned author, I nodded his way. He nodded back. I excused myself and went over and shook his hand and asked if he recalled our ride in the backseat of Henry’s car with Jackie O. “I knew you looked familiar,” he said. We carried on a polite coversation about Henry and, looking at the cast of characters mingling in his Brooklyn brownstone, marveled at how New York City throws such divergent people together. I admitted to him that night how I wanted to be a writer but found myself on the magazine path at the moment. “Come with me,” he said. I did. Yet again Zelig-like, I followed Mailer, busily tucking his toga into place about his square squat body, down the brownstone’s stairwell into his study. “This is where I do my writing,” he said. “I thought you might like to see this.” We talked about Executioner’s Song and how much it had meant to me, had meant to him. “Some day maybe I’ll have one of your books on these shelves,” he told me, so generous with his time and advice. Maybe he just wanted to get away from the drunks at his party but I’ll always be grateful for those few quiet moments alone with that giant of a square squat man. Mississippi Sissy probably wasn’t the kind of book with the kind of title he responded to so I doubt if it found a place on his shelf. But as I’ve doubted my own talent these last couple of months after receiving the rejections for my novel I’ve found solace in the words that night from the toga-wearing Mailer: “Make sure you’re your own audience, kid, and be kind to yourself in this unkind world.” I pray that Mailer has gone now to a kinder world for I’ll always be grateful for those few moments of genuine kindness he showed to - all appearances aside - a very frightened southern sissy on a Halloween night so long ago.

I apologize to any readers out there I might still have since I haven’t posted in so long. But I’ve been working very hard on my new novel the past couple of months.

I promise to post within the next few days. In the meantime, check out my new gig as the theatre critic for Towleroad.com. I just posted my first three takes on Black Watch and Rock’n'Roll and Fuerzbruta.

I’ll be back on here, though, in a day or two.