Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...on Independence Day

I was all set this morning to send out my Miss Manhattan Hangs Out, when it occurred to me that, of course, today is a national holiday, and nobody checks their email on such a day. On this particular holiday, in fact, many people are far away from their computers or their jobs of any kind, with office/establishment closures and it being the height of summer and all. Not wanting to have a fascinating person lost to the wilds of one’s day-off inbox, I’ve instead decided to hold off this week’s Hang until next week, when (perhaps) everyone’s usual Wednesday attention spans will be restored and instead offer you a bag of Independence Day party favors from other times I’ve hung out across the country in these warmer months.

These kinds of events--my friend James Harrell’s 30th birthday wedding to his drag persona Diane A. Lone, my friend Stephen Chan’s bachelor party, the annual Mermaid Parade on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York City’s Pride weekend, and more--are, to me, what make America worth celebrating. They’re arenas of love and acceptance, joy and creativity, kindness and community, and of people who have paved their own way.

So with an intro shortened to exactly 250 words on this here holiday, I present to you some of my favorite moments from the summer. Whether you’re on the beach, in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, or inside blasting air conditioning, I hope you’re enjoying your time however your heart is happiest.

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Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Emily Raleigh

Emily Raleigh is just about to make tea when I arrive at her apartment, her mug from Magnolia Table in Waco, Texas waiting at the ready. She’s bubbly, full of expressive hand gestures that occasionally include adjusting the clear pink glasses that rest on her face.

She’s just returned home from her office job--she is the Assistant Director of Marketing at Fordham University--and despite the growing summer heat, her apartment is filled with the chilly blast of air conditioning. When Emily comes home, normally, she starts working on her other job at Spire & Co, the uplifting website that empowers and motivates young women to pursue their ambitions. Emily founded Spire six and a half years ago after preparing a field guide for her sister about how to navigate high school as a driven young person. This then evolved into a magazine shortly after. Emily and Spire--a name chosen because “it means to breathe easier and the highest peak on a summit”--have since been featured in Marie Claire, MSN, and MTV for their dedication to inspiring content. The site has since grown to include campus chapters, a 300+ person conference and other live events, email newsletters, daily content, and more.

One of Emily’s greatest passions is brand development. She’s curious about how others develop theirs--especially Oprah, one of her lifelong loves (her home is sprinkled with back issues of O and she even has the famed host’s 20th anniversary collection on DVD); and, of late, Reese Witherspoon--and constantly thinks about how to work on Spire. One of her latest initiatives for the site is an online bookstore, Spire Stacks, where readers can purchase “transformative reads written by and about remarkable women.” All of the books have been read by a Spire staffer, many by Emily herself. Her apartment is bursting with books in an array of colors and motivating titles, though in particular she is fond of Cleo Wade’s Heart Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, and Shonda Rhimes’s Year of Yes.

Another of Emily’s newest initiatives at Spire is developing the site’s lifestyle podcast, Spire Sessions, which will feature interviews with experts on living one’s best life, like authors, leaders, and more. The podcast launches at the end of July, and tonight Emily is figuring out how to use her new microphone. The shiny silver Yeti is sitting on the edge of her desk just waiting to be plugged in as Emily peruses its box for instructions. Her pink fingernails glide over each instruction. She puts her headphones on and after following a few simple steps she can hear me laughing in stereo. Emily is driven by how to live her own best life and how to help others do the same, and it carries over into her work.

After the Yeti has been managed for the time being, we chat for a long time about career and motivation and dating and even personal style. Even as the hours have run past, she remains energetic, expressive and, as ever, curious.

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Pride

Meet us on the northwest corner of 11th Street and 7th Avenue, SC says.

Boarding the 1 train at Times Square, there are a flurry of Pridegoers along with me. A beautiful boy whose face is beat for the gods with pink and green eyeshadow, a small star on his cheek, Pucci-esque print on his torso. His girlfriends wear glitter and unicorn headbands, and some other beautiful boys further down the train show off their muscles under barely-there neon tank tops. A person wears a transgender pride flag like a cape, pink button-down shirt tied just above their navel. For the most part, we are all getting off at similar stops: 18th Street, 14th Street, and, if you’re crazy enough to attempt to make it through the crowds, Christopher Street.

I exit at 14th, taking the 13th Street exit, and am greeted not by Miss Rose at the door, but our friend Johnny Five-O. That didn’t actually happen, but I can’t resist a good Scissor Sisters reference. What did happen was that I exited into a throng of people and police barricades, everyone kitted out in neon, mesh, glitter, rainbow regalia as they always are on this particular Sunday in June, which is always New York’s biggest Pride event. I am modestly dressed in a bright red tank top--today is not my day, of course, but I am still so proud of and full of love for my queer friends and colleagues and family that to dress without color would be, I think, to do them a disservice. I am forever glad and grateful to be able to show up and support them.

It seems there are more and more young people at the parade every year in their fishnets and leather collars, rainbow tank tops and suspenders and pasties. Though there is still so much that needs to be done in terms of acceptance and equality in this country, it gives me hope that young people who want to can make their way to an event like this and feel free to be themselves. Love is love, their shirts say. Kindness is magic. Queer and proud. A smile crosses my lips and stays there.

Making my way to the corner of 11th and 7th is a task, not just for the twisty-turny nature of the streets in the West Village, but for the cascading array of rainbowed humans I will soon be joining to watch the parade. They lean against barricades in front of restaurants while brunchgoers call over particular costumed individuals and sing the praises of their outfits. They stand on benches in front of coffee shops, obscuring the windows like a human curtain. And in this maze of people I eventually find SC, in the hot pink “Fierce” tank top from our Spring 2010 dance show in college. Cardi B blasts from a float passing by and he breaks out into song and dance, the streetlamp’s electrical box acting as his partner: “Said little bitch, you can’t fuck with me if you wanted to,” each word another bump or grind. Floats throw rainbow beads and K offers us beer cloaked in a brown paper wrapper. It’s hot and I have a sip of the stuff for the first time in what must be years, my mouth thirsty for anything, even a 24oz can of Corona. It’s cold and bubbly and I remember why people drink beer again.

A few more floats pass, a few more beads are thrown. Sweat dripping from foreheads, we head to the icy cool of The Hangar, a gay bar on the west side of 7th Avenue festooned with Pride flags and televisions playing the parade. We sip tequila and soda and dance, alcohol slowly beginning to pulse through our veins along with blood. I leave to shove a Philly Cheesesteak down my gullet while sitting outside of a bodega, because I’ve only eaten half a grapefruit thus far that day. A group of teens sit next to me shouting “Happy Pride” at anyone they find attractive which, given the West Village during Pride, is a lot of people. “Y’all look fierce!” I say to the boy on my left, mid-sandwich. His hair is platinum blonde and he has the words ‘Die Alone’ tattooed on his right leg. “Thank you!” he says, as his girlfriends in rainbow stripes and short shorts dance to Cardi B’s “Bickenhead” pumping out of the speaker someone is rolling past in a red laundry cart. Soon other strangers join in on the sidewalk and there’s an impromptu dance party, with everyone shouting the lyrics in front of the bodega. “Don't matter if you fuck with me, I get money regardless.”

I go back to The Hangar, past people with a cooler selling “Diet Water,” and J buys us a shot of Fireball. I wince, because the last time I was supposed to have that was 8 years ago in college when I didn’t know better and just wanted to be drunk. But five of us shoot it just the same.

From there, we totter our way up to Chelsea gay bar Barracuda, a tiny space in what looks like it may have once been a brownstone or a clandestine front of some kind or parking garage or all of the above. Aaron Jackson from The Opposition dances next to us and I don’t say hi even though I’ve photographed him several times (he was in Broadgay, the live retelling of Sex and the City I love featuring all gay men, before he was on television/all of them got famous). We sit on a covered pool table and shimmy while we rest our feet as Prince and RuPaul and Lady Gaga play over the speakers, light so sparse it could be nighttime inside save for flashing beams of color overhead. The bar is packed to the gills with men of all stripes, some with long beards, some with the smoothest faces you’ll ever see on a living human, some wearing wigs so brightly colored you can see them even in the dark.

“Today is like Christmas and New Year’s and Halloween all rolled into one,” M says, his shirt swinging from his pants pocket. “But gay!”

Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Suzy T. Cat

The “T” in Suzy T. Cat stands for “Trouble,” her mother Alissa tells me. Though Suzy’s father, Ian, has made the excellent point that it could, in fact, just stand for “The.”

Suzy lives in San Francisco and was adopted last June by her parents Alissa and Ian. She’s approximately two years old, an especially floofy orange tabby with perfectly lined, bright yellow-green eyes that would make makeup artists jealous. Despite all of her floof, however, Suzy is not much for cuddles. A few seconds’ embrace is all she will allow, and will begin to bat at your face (no claws) with a fluffy little paw should her clock run out.

Once upon a time, Alissa and Ian tell me, Suzy was a teen mom, having birthed a litter of kittens when she was possibly just six months old. They made a backstory for her, that she was living on the docks, a rough and tumble girl who’s now queen of the castle. Almost like Brandy of “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” fame, the 1972 hit by Looking Glass but, you know, a cat.

Suzy is curious, full of “meeps” instead of “meows,” little gurgles in her throat that Alissa and Ian imagine ask questions like, who is this stranger and what is her bright pink rolling box? (Answers: me; my suitcase) What’s inside the small black box she holds in her human paws, and why does it she keep pointing it at me? (My camera, to take pictures of you, darling!) In the time I spend with Suzy, she bats not just my face but my camera and the fringe falling from the edges of my cutoffs.

Suzy’s home is littered with toys like a furry black mouse, a treat maze she gets to play with every morning, and a bobble toy that will give her treats if she knocks them out just the right way. Alissa has also taught Suzy to touch her nose against a target and to high-five, which she now does with expert precision. Yet with all of her curiosity, Suzy is mostly interested in the snacks that accompany such tasks. That, and naps. She lounges in her cat tree or on the table, all the effort she can muster placed into a single, teeth-baring yawn.

Sometimes Suzy gets “zoomy,” as Alissa says, darting around the apartment in bursts. This has happened on more than one occasion when she and Ian are out, leaving them to come home to something knocked over that hadn’t been before. Knowing full well this could happen at any time, they have resolved to leave the apartment saying “Okay Suzy, be neutral!” knowing full well that asking her to be good is just too much to ask. Perhaps accordingly, when I wake up that morning a pair of my underwear has mysteriously been removed from my suitcase, my water glass a little emptier than it had been, droplets flung about the coffee table. A fluffy orange culprit sits innocently nearby.

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Days Off

I did a marvelous thing recently. Rather, I did two marvelous things recently: I took two days off. Yes, I, freelancing workaholic robot woman of the Western Hemisphere, scheduled myself time to tell the rest of the world to fuck off. And, if I do say so myself, I did so to great effect.

I went out to San Francisco over Memorial Day weekend to photograph a wedding and stayed with AS for a few days. Tuesday she returned to work and I resolved to do nothing but sit in Golden Gate Park and read my new book: John Waters’s Role Models, purchased at the city’s beloved independent bookseller Green Apple Books. I didn’t know the last time I took a day off, and it started to take a toll on my work. I didn’t care about anything anymore and I felt like I was just going through the motions. I hoped even one day away from the computer would make me care again.

Waking up and answering a few emails (old habits die hard), I took myself out to an early lunch at Nopalito, the little sister restaurant to the impossible-to-get-into Nopa. Nopalito’s dinner rush is a similar experience, I was told, but I figured for a lunch right after they open the doors, it might be a little easier to get into. I was not wrong, and was immediately seated outside at one of their long green tables. The food, of the gourmet Mexican variety, was delicious but not filling--I spoiled myself by spending more than I normally would on two plates because, fuck it, it’s my day off and I’m (sort of, kind of) on vacation. The Mole Enchiladas are deliciously creamy, spiced but not spicy, and I practically lick the plate. The Calabacitas quesadilla is made of a hand-rolled blue corn tortilla with summer squash and jack cheese that gets interestingly chewy but not melty. Everything looks and tastes clean and fresh.

And then I walk to the park and read my book for hours and hours, sitting in the grass of two unused ball fields. The sun is bright and the sky is clear blue but there’s just enough of a chill in the air to keep my leopard cardigan on. I go back and forth to the park all day, eating up Waters’s words and then a coffee; more of his words and then an avocado sandwich from the local health food store. I almost want to go to the vegan restaurant in the neighborhood AS says is run by a cult, but I don’t feel like getting wrapped up in anyone’s dogma but my own today. As I sit and read of John Waters’s love for Rei Kawakubo and local Baltimore burlesque dancers, I wonder when the last time I sat and read a book anywhere that wasn’t the subway. I don’t know if I have an answer.

By the time I return to New York, my wherewithal to power ahead is significantly revived. The battery percentage that was once dwindling in the single digits has increased, enough that I know when I take my next day off in a few weeks, I may even be fully recharged.

*

Initially the plan was to go to Brighton Beach and sit in the sun reading all the copies of New York Magazine that had been piling up on my desk, begging to be read. I proceeded accordingly, but arrived on the beach in 68-degree weather to swirling, whipping winds that made what should have been a delightful temperature feel like something perhaps 20 degrees lower. I tried to brave it for a while--this was my day off! I wanted to go to the beach!--but I realized it was perhaps futile. I needed to go someplace that had some kind of enclosure around it, so I would be warm but not wind-slapped. Prospect Park was the next best thing, I resolved, and I boarded the Q train accordingly.

Cool enough for a hot coffee, I procured myself a cafe au lait at Hungry Ghost and walked to the park, through the faux Arc de Triomphe at Grand Army Plaza (it always tickles me to think about arriving in Paris last year and seeing the real one, joking to myself, “Hey, we got one of those in Brooklyn!”). I stop and pet a small floofy Pomeranian named Coco who doesn’t so much walk but toddle, and I stare at him much more than I should as I cross into the park. The sun is still shining brightly with a cool, this time refreshing, breeze as I set up camp in the middle of the park, encircled in a giant field by endless trees and green grass. There is something even more wonderful about taking a day off in New York when everyone else is working, knowing that you’ve carved out a space for yourself in this bustling city at a time when comparatively few others have. In a place that’s usually significantly more crowded, no less. I read issue after issue after issue of New York Magazine until I just can’t read anymore and start looking for places nearby to eat.

Puerto Viejo is a Dominican restaurant in Prospect Heights, and I sidle up to the restaurant and sit at what perhaps was once a student’s desk and has been transformed into a two-seated table. I order Pernil (roast pork) with yuca and maduros (sweet plantains). Complimentary banana chips with a delicious garlic dipping sauce arrive first and I make my way through them--I didn’t realize how hungry I was, but admittedly at one point I’m just using the chips as a vehicle for the creamy, savory, heavenly garlic sauce. But then my food arrives and dear sweet Jesus I have not had a meal that good in a very, very, very long time. The juiciest pork is utterly decadent, dripping with flavor. The yuca is boiled and soft, almost cake-like, topped with pickled onions that pop. And the maduros are practically caramel, melting soft in my mouth. I almost sit there agape for five minutes afterward. It’s lucky I live so far away otherwise I’d be there all the time and gain 9,000 pounds.

I leave Puerto Viejo in a perfect haze of sun-soaked warm skin and full tummy, trotting myself back to the subway, batteries recharged.

Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Velvetina Taylor

When I arrive at Velvetina Taylor’s apartment building, she is already decked out in her burlesque makeup, sparkly silver eyes accented with black shadow and black eyelashes that curl upward in a perfect C-shape. Both match her jet black hair. Earlier today she performed at a brunch in the Financial District, and tonight she’ll be at The Slipper Room on the Lower East Side.

Also decked out in black is her Harley-Davidson. It’s named Rita, after iconic 1940s film actress Rita Hayworth. Velvetina will be riding Rita all the way to San Francisco this summer, doing a cross-country burlesque tour of her own design. It’s her third “Pistons and Pasties” tour like this, though the others were from New York to New Orleans. On the way, she’ll stop in her native Indiana for the state fair she never misses. Rita is Velvetina’s second motorcycle but first Harley. It makes a massive, throaty vrroooooooooooom when she moves it across the street. A group of women walks by offering snaps and applause.

During the weekday, Velvetina works at the Conjuring Arts Library, dedicated to all things magic. She received her master’s degree in Library and Information Studies from University College Dublin and previously worked as a freelance social media specialist and ballroom dance instructor.

Velvetina began doing burlesque about three years ago after taking classes at the New York School of Burlesque with her sister. At first it was just for laughs, but Velvetina really loved it and just kept going. She started hosting her own shows, and now has Velvetina’s Vixens at Beauty Bar on the second Monday of every month and Mistress Velvetina’s Variety Hour in the Red Room at KGB Bar on the second Friday of every month.

As Velvetina prepares her suitcase for the night--she can’t think of a burlesque performer who isn’t constantly trailing one behind them--she looks through a clothing rack bursting with costumes like an orangutan suit and the sparkly pink confection she’ll wear tonight to perform her “La Vie En Rose” number. She’s also assembling her costume for a number she does to “What’s Inside a Girl?” by The Cramps, stripping out of a skeleton suit and then a light-up muscle suit, down to tasseled rhinestone pasties made to look like especially sparkly nipples.

We arrive at The Slipper Room and Velvetina begins to change. There’s a tattoo on her right thigh of a moose playing a banjo. “It’s my favorite animal,” she says, putting on a curly blonde wig and earrings, then fastening herself into the “La Vie En Rose” gown. During the performance, she’ll toss pink petals from ruffled pink bloomers to great applause. Later, she’ll go-go dance between shows in a bright red leotard and thigh-highs. Sitting on the stage with a bouncy black ponytail attached to her dark hair, she looks like a maraschino cherry on top of a sundae. The audience slides all denominations of bills to her or tucks them into her stockings as she teases and twirls.

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