Well, I found out yesteday before boarding my plane back to NYC from LA that the New York Times Book Review review of my book that will be published March 4th is a very bad one. An utter pan. It didn’t throw my back out any further. But, I do have to admit I broke the promise I made in the last line of the previous post: I did weep a bit. Not for me exactly - though some of the salty tears were certainly selfish ones - but for my brother and sister. How can I put this without sounding squishy and too emotional? I have always wanted them to be proud of me and I had a fantasy of getting a great review in the New York Times and celebrating it with them - they are flying up from Mississippi for the dinner that Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller are so graciously giving me - and looking into their eyes and seeing pride in their big brother. I have always had guilt about leaving home at 16 to go to college and then at 19 to move to New York and never really being there for them. I coped with our tragic family history by walking into my bedroom and shutting the door - both figuratively and literally. One thing a sissy must always deal with as he grows up is seeing disappointment and embarrassment in the eyes of those who love him anyway but are still unable to hide that tincture of those two emotions that colors their looks his way. It is a tincture I’m going to have to deal with for a few weeks now after others read the review. But I’ve survived worse - the book attests to that - and I’ll survive this. It is finally only two columns of type in a newspaper supplement. As I was waking up this morning, I turned on the television and watched a segment on the Today Show about a woman who had lost her beautiful husband in Iraq. That put it in perspective for me. I’ve prayed a lot about this in the last 24 hours - yes, I am prayful believe or not - and I think pushing the remote control from my bed and watching that segment as I started the day, as tragic as it was for the woman and her husband and her kids, was an answered prayer for me. The woman’s quiet dignity was a balm. Indeed, for those of you who’ve read the book already - and for those of you who will - I heard Epiphany’s voice this morning, “Chiiiild, I’m proud of you. Who cares what no Norah Vincent thinks of us two.”

Norah Vincent is the writer the New York Times assigned to review the book. She wrote her own book last year about living life in masculine guise. In her guise as critic, she took it upon herself - as if she were still posing as a butch guy - to beat up, predictably so, on a sissy. Her own book is part of the literature of empathy, I guess is a way to put it, a kind of Keatsian “negative capability,” though I think it would be a better description of her oeuvre to say she is a less humorous, less, yes, ballsy George Plimpton. (Okay, that’s my one obligatory swipe back at her.) Vincent is entitled to her opinions of me. I wish they weren’t published in the Times. But I had no control over that. I Googled her and discovered that she is a rightwing-leaning lesbian who writes polemically, not lyrically, and has no affinity at all, according to those who know her, for Southern gothic literature. So I don’t think the Times could have chosen anyone further afield from my target audience. The only thing that finally will always upset me about her review is that she totally ignored the African American aspects of the book. She doesn’t even acknowledge that there are African Amercians in the book. Indeed, three of the most important people in my life were African Americans - even though one was my imaginary friend growing up. Mississippi Sissy is a story about race as much as anything else. The fact that she is so myopically Caucasian to ignore that part of the book hurt more than anything and, I feel, is racist by implication. But perhaps it was edited out for space reasons. I wish the whole review had been.

But it wasn’t. So I have to deal with it. I just hope it spurs all you people out there who are reading this blog to buy extra copies and and tell your friends about the book if it touches you in any way. With your help and support, I’ll get past this. Indeed, it is the emotional support of friends and strangers throughout my life that has enabled an orphaned Mississippi sissy to get to this point in his life, a point at which he can write on his blog about a review of his book in the New York Times.

Sorry, I haven’t posted much in recent days but I’ve had a rough week emotionally and physically - amazing how those two adverbs are so tied together. It all started two Saturdays ago now - I’m posting this on Sunday 2/25 - when I realized I was spending another weekend completely alone - going to dinner by myself, going to movies by myself - Factory Girl, which is a bad movie with an interesting lead performance and which reminded me only slightly of my own days at Warhol’s Factory when I was the executive editor of Interview, and Breach, which I liked for its storytelling acumen. I decided to force myself to go out to a bar on that Saturday night since I don’t go out much anymore. In the old days I hated going out because I’d come home reeking of cigarette smoke. Now that I’m older and cigarette smoke is no longer a problem in a bar, I just hate standing around and dealing with a drunken crowd. But instead of sitting home and feeling sorry for myself, I headed out to the Eagle. I met an attractive guy who sat in the corner with me for an hour or two. We actually held hands and talked about lots of interesting things. At one point he even allowed me to kiss him. But when the time came to either hook up or make a date for some other night, I told him that I was HIV positive and that’s when the hand holding ceased and he told me he had “concerns” and could never have sex with me. I left angry - at myself for being HIV postive, at him for being afraid of me because of my honesty. But when I walked through the door of my apartment at 2:37 a.m. I just sat down on the bed and … well … wept. Maybe it’s from all the low-grade stress I’ve been experiencing about this book coming out, but I’ve been feeling extremely vulnerable lately. I guess I needed the emotional release so perhaps I should thank the beautiful stranger at the Eagle for pushing a button that needed to be pushed. I cuddled up with my dog, Archie, and fell fast asleep.

The next day I awoke and thought - fuck it - I’ll sign onto Manhunt. I’ve been off that site for a long time. It always leads to drug use or some sort of STD, if I’m not careful. But I was past feeling lonely when I woke up. I was feeling a bit desperate. A beautiful kid began to contact me from the site. He dances at different clubs in the city while getting his graduate degree in social work in Jersey. He likes older men. He was okay with my HIV status. And, when he arrived at my doorstep, he had one of the most beautiful butts I’d ever seen in my life. He also had a pocket full of Xtasy and, I admit, I let him convince me to take half a tab, which always just leads to conversation more than sex where I’m concerned, though there was a sweetness to the latter. We had a good time but the next morning I awoke with massive lower back pain - either from the X or from a few of the positions in which we ended up.

In fact, the pain was so bad I was unable to sleep for a couple of nights - it especially hurt when I lay down - but I sucked it up and made my road test appointment that Wednesday to get my driver’s license since it had been cancelled the Wednesday before because of a snowstorm. I made it, sleep deprived and in immense pain, to the driving school where I was to meet one of its instructors who would then drive me up to Yonkers in order for me to take my test in one of the school’s cars. It took 90 minutes in awful traffic - while the instructor ate smelly Chinese food - to get there. Once in Yonkers, we had to queue up in a line of cars that took another hour and a half. When we did make it to the front of the queue, the person who was there to give me my road test from the DMV told the instructor that she had told him before that he had to get that car fixed - the inside door handle on the driver’s side had been snapped off - so that she said the car was “defective” and I would not be able to take my test. I would have to reschedule yet again. Suffice to say, I was ready to kill. I had to ride back to Manhattan for another two hours stuck in traffic inside a car reeking of empty Chinese food containers and my back was increasingly in pain with every literal bump we took in the road.

When I got home I called St. Martins and told them I had gone the extra mile and tried to get this license for my book tour but that I was now finished. They would have to hire me a car and driver, which they agreed to do.

My back continued to be in pain and I had a big weekend trip planned out to LA for Oscar weekend, where, in fact, I am now typing this blog entry. Each time a niece or nephew graduates from high school I bring them out here to LA during Oscar weekend as a graduation present and escort them around to some fabulous parties filled with famous people. But this time Auntie Mame was feeling like Rosalind Russell had been dug up from her grave. More than the gray hair on my chest was making me feel old. The lower back pain, after my six hour flight out here, was almost making me long for my own grave. Almost. But I sucked it up and have stories to tell about Price, my nephew, who has met many different stars who could not have been nicer to him - Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Penelope Cruise, Jerry Seinfeld, Tom Hanks, etc. etc. etc. Even Maria Shriver, the state’s First Lady, facetiously - at least I think so - tried to matchmake him with one of her beautiful teenage daughters who were with her at one of the swell soirees we attended. And this morning my back was actually feeling better. We went to Bryan Lourd’s house on Friday night to his private party. Bryan is the CAA honcho and one of the sweetest guys in Hollywood. Yesterday we went to the picnic that Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller give at their Bevery Hills house for Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair. We’re going to watch the Oscars tonight at Max Mutchnick’s house - Max was one of the creators of Will and Grace. And then we’ll head back to our hotel to get dressed for the Vanity Fair Oscar party at Mortons. Maybe I’ll have more specific stories - Maria Shriver was the exception but she’s always been exceptional - to tell from that party. I don’t feel right posting the things that happened at Bryan’s and Barry’s and DVF’s since those were private affairs. Let’s just say there are not many stars left in Hollywood that 18-year-old Price hasn’t now schmoozed, a new word in his own Mississippi vocabulary.

Price and I will wake up tomorrow on Monday morning and head back to the airport - the carriage will have then turned into a pumpkin during my nephew’s glimpse into my Cinderella existence, other than these kinds of weekends from time to time my life is full of solitary dinners and movies alone and curling up with my dog after crying myself to sleep - but we’ll have some great memories to share with each other, Price and I, as we grow older. I’ll also maybe know what the review says in the upcoming New York Times Book Review before I board my plane back to New York tomorrow morning since the upcoming Sunday’s book review is usually made available the Monday before. That’s right. I found out that the Times is running its review of Mississippi Sissy on March 4th, two days before the book’s pub date. So at least attention is being paid in the Holy Grail of book reviews. I just pray it’s the right kind of attention and the review is a good one. If not, my back just might go out again. But I promise not to weep.

I went to the Bailey House Auction last night at the Puck Building. It was a benefit for homeless people living with HIV/AIDS and was hosted by Tim Gunn and Jonathan Adler and Jeffrey Schneider. Jeffrey is the head of PR for ABC News so there were a lot of famous newsfolk wandering around. The worlds of design and fashion were also represented because of Tim and Jonathan. Ran into lots of old friends. There was a surprisingly nice array of photographs and art at the silent auction and I got into a bidding war with my buddy, Dan Scheffey, who is now the head of PR for GQ magazine, for a small Seth McBride piece that looked like a young Sidney Poitier photographed off a late-night television airing of “The Defiant Ones” which McBride somehow transferred to a canvas and then colorized. Poitier plays a big part in my book and I wanted to hang it here next to my desk as a reminder of the last couple of years I spent getting Mississippi Sissy in shape. I just had an email from Dan that said he left after his last bid, which I had topped. So we’ll see if someone came in over me. I left too after putting in my last bid. Though I did stay long enough to marvel that a couple at the live auction paid $21,000 to have lunch with Anderson Cooper. Anderson is down in the Amazon right now doing some amazing reports for his 360 show on CNN. I emailed him when I got home - I’ve known Anderson since before he was ANDERSON, but he’s still a sweet, sweet soul even with all his deserved success - to let him know how much he was worth on a February night in NYC. I didn’t recognize the man and woman making the bid for Anderson’s company. There’s a joke in here somewhere about guess-who’s-coming-to-dinner, but even my pun-addled brain refuses to make it.

I had planned to go see Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” last night at the Metropolitan Opera (the best deal in town is the $20 rush-ticket orchestra seat one can buy two hours before a Monday-Thursday performance this season at the Met), but Tim Tompkins called to say he had an extra ticket to the New York City Ballet. We saw Russian Seasons, choreographed for the 2006 spring/summer season, by Alexei Ratmansky. It was second on the bill but was a bit gimmicky for my tastes. The program opened with Christopher Wheedlon’s Klavier which he choreographed last year to the Adagio movement in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Piano Sonato in B-flat Major. Balanchine, New York City Ballet’s founder, once remarked that one should shy away from Beethoven when creating dance, and as always he had a point. It is difficult to inhabit Beethoven in a physical way. Listening to Beethoven is quite literally a heady experience. Though exquisite, Klavier finally seemed more like an idea for a dance than a fully realized piece of choreography. Sometimes beauty is not enough. In dance it must be accompanied by an almost mathematical genius as well. That was what Balanchine - one of the great geniuses of any sort who strode through the 20th Century - possessed. It was as if Wheedlon were attempting his own take on the first movement - Melancholic - of Balanchine’s 1940 masterpiece, The Four Temperments, which was the final offering of the program and seemed a bit under-rehearsed.

I had planned again tonight, on Valentine’s Day, to go alone to the Metropolitan Opera to see Janacek’s “Jenufa.” But I ran into an old buddy, Harlan Bratcher, the president of Armani Exchange, Monday and he said he and his boyfriend were having a Valentine’s Day dinner tonight for all their single friends - about 20 of us in all - who seem always to be complaining that they can’t find anyone interesting to date. I couldn’t turn down that invitation since yet another February 14th has rolled around to remind me of my solitary existence. It’s time to escape my own Melancholic movement. If there’s a cute guy there maybe I’ll decide that beauty is enough after all.

Well, the saga of my attempting to get a driver’s license so I can drive myself on my upcoming book tour continues. I was supposed to take my road test today up in Yonkers but inclement weather caused the DMV to postpone it till next Wednesday. At every turn, so to speak, the attempt to get this license has been a difficult one. I needed a Social Security Card - not just a number - in order to be able to take my written test to get a Learner’s Permit. But when I went to get a replacement card at the Social Security office here in NYC on Halloween day I discovered that the computer system wouldn’t take my information off my application. Behind the glass at the office, all the employees, who were dressed as Dr. Spock and Klingons and prostitutes and cowboys, etc., for Halloween, began to crowd around the computer trying to decipher the problem. After almost an hour they decided that my birthdate in the system was two years off my real one so the Social Security Adminstration had to write to the state of Mississippi to clear up the discrepancy. Therefore, instead of two weeks to get the replacement card, it took six weeks. When I finally got the card I went in to take the test and only missed one question so that part was easy. The day I had to sit inside a safety class for five hours - a week later - I discovered that my permit had already been suspended because, as it turns out, I failed to pay a $35 fine for running a red light ON MY BICYCLE nine years ago. I had to go back downtown and find the right office to pay the fine so my permit would be activated again and then head back to the safety school so, for an extra 200 dollars, it could expedite setting up a date for my road test. It was supposed to take place today. Perfect. I hope St. Martins appreciates all this tsuris I’m going through to save them the few dollars it would cost them to hire a cute grad student from Ole Miss to drive me around Mississippi and Alabama and Lousisana for a week.

By the way, the title of this post is from Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut in 1971. Extra points for knowing that. But it’s not about learning to drive a car. It’s about a basketball player - the “drive” in the title is a command to take the ball to the basket, not a writer to a bookstore.

Last night I went down to Joe’s Pub on Lafayette Street and caught Justin Bond - Kiki of Kiki and Herb fame - premiere his “talk show” concept at the club. I met Justin a few years ago when I went to see our mutual friend, Parker Posey (my fellow Mississippian who was in the first “Tales of the City” with me) in Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July” at the Signature Theatre on 42nd Street. Parker and Justin and few of the cast members from that revival of Wilson’s touching play went to some seedy bar on Ninth Avenue and drank away a few hours. It’s a nice, hazy memory. Anyway, Justin opened the show last night with a rousing number called “Weimar New York,” which summed up brilliantly this moment in time in this still most timeless of cities. His later numbers included a great cover version of the internet hit, “God Hates Fags,” which had all of us singing along and waving our arms in unison. (I even caught myself humming the song on my way home later. Talk about ironic dissonance.) He closed the show with a rocking “The River” that brought down the house. Justin - out of his Kiki mode - is a Lotte Lenya with a little Tallulah thrown in. Add more than a smidgen of Tom Waites and you begin to understand the heady conconction that goes into his voice and stage personna. “He was on fire tonight,” as one of his talk show guests, Michael Musto, told me afterwards. Michael, as usual, was hilarious and topical and subversively smart. At one point, instead of reading from his own new book, he pulled out an old collection of Suzanne Somers poems, titled “Touch Me,” and read a few selections. Every poem was about how Somers was really a little girl who wanted to be touched. Aren’t we all?

Justin’s other guests were Jane Adams - the obtusely attractive actress who won a Tony Award a few years ago for “An Inspector Calls” and most recently was Jackie Earle Haley’s blind date in the film “Little Children” - and the adorably sexy Jay Brannan, the actor/singer from “Shortbus.” He sang a lovely ballad called “Half Boyfriend” that you can hear if you sign onto his myspace page. Jay’s YouTube page got thousands and thousands of hits. On it, he’s sitting on the pot and singing “Soda Shop” from “Shortbus.” He’s a doll. I have a crush.

Next Monday night, Justin’s guests will be John Cameron Mitchell, Debbie Harry, and Daniela Sea (of “The L Word”). I’ll be back. It’s only $15 dollars and a great night in the city.

Well, my editor at St. Martins - the estimable Michael Flamini - could not have disagreed with me more re: my take on the Encores! production of “Follies.” (Of course, he loved “Notes on a Scandal” too and I hated every eye-rolling unsexy moment of the film. It reminded me of some latter-day Bette Davis/Olivia Haviland piece of cinematic junk circa 1969.) Michael told me he much preferred his “Follies” chilly and cerebral. “To my mind,” he emailed me, “it’s the most fascinating piece of musical theatre created in the 20th Century because it is the one that got away.” He went on to cite his buddy Ethan Mordden, the theatre historian, who “thinks the reason the script and show seem so disjointed is that the party is not actually happening. Ethan thinks that ‘Follies’ is what is happening inside an empty, closed-up theatre as you walk by, all the memories, fantasies, etc. colliding An interesting concept. And maybe the reason we’ll never see ‘the ultimate’ production.” He went on to critique the performances - he loved Donna Murphy and Michael McGrath and especially Lucine Amara’s rendition of “One More Kiss.” He did NOT appreciate Victoria Clark’s version of “Losing My Mind” or Christine Baranski’s “I’m Still Here.” As for Baranski, I still think she was giving us an acting lesson. Instead of singing the song as an anthem of survival she showed us that surviving is not a campy nightclub act, but instead an angry act of will. But I’ll leave the last word about “Follies” to Eudora Welty. Yes, Eudora Welty. She went to see the show when it was on Broadway with my great friend, the late Frank Hains, who plays a big part in my book. Her take? As she says in Mississippi Sissy, “… the production, finally, was neither this nor that. But perhaps that was its underlying allure for me.”