WordInEdgewise

I know it should be “Socarides and I,” but the post title is catchier. Anyway, I will be on NPR’s Radio Times tomorrow at 10 am. (Here’s the link; you can listen then, or later via podcast. On radio it’s 90.9 WHYY in Philadelphia. I think it’s also on satellite radio but I don’t know the time.) We’re discussing DOMA, Prop 8, Obama and marriage equality, maybe civil unions (I hope).

Richard Socarides, if you don’t know, was a high-level Clinton advisor and is currently a hugely important figure in struggle for LGBT legal equality. What you’re even less likely to know is that his father, Charles Socarides, was an infamous homophobe who for years fought back (unsuccessfully) against the decision by the American Psychiatric Association to delist homosexuality as a mental disorder. I’m guessing there were some interesting dinner conversations….(or maybe not!)

I was just plain delighted to have been invited to participate in one of the “Room for Debate” forums with the New York Times. The question we were asked to address:

“If more couples considered monogamy optional, would divorce and cheating be less common, and unmarried cohabitation less attractive?”

Here’s a link to the front page; here, you can find my individual entry, which looks at alternative forms of relationship recognition (such as civil unions) as a way to refresh the debate about expectations within relationships. But the whole debate is fascinating.

As the Australian Open gets underway, my thoughts naturally turn to…the Margaret Court homophobia controversy??

Yes. Would that it were not so, with so many interesting plot lines developing in the actual tennis itself. But a brightly colored group of gay fans (and their straight allies) have made their presence known at Margaret Court Arena, protesting Court’s recent, mean-spirited comments about LGBT people. I wrote about it for The New Civil Rights Movement.

And then the latest British hope (and therefore likely doomed never to win a major tournament), Laura Robson, stepped onto court wearing this:

…Patti Lupone.

So you think they’d have canceled the show when the star couldn’t/wouldn’t take the stage. No. Instead, Mandy Patinkin, taking the maxim “the show must go on” too much to heart, decided to mount a one-man show, moving from behind the piano to center stage. The result couldn’t have been worse had the blue haired dowagers in the audience (that is, most of the audience excluding the gay men) joined in.

But let’s talk about who did join in: Patinkin’s no-name son (well, his name is Gideon, but you get the point), whose slapdash appearance called out “Old Navy, 2007.” Gideon was the “surprise” that Patinkin promised at some point early in the show, doubtless hoping to keep some of us in our seats in the hope that someone more noteworthy (say, Joanne Worley) would bound onto the stage and launch into a show-stopper from “Gypsy!” Gideon was game, but…well, I don’t want to dump on him for trying to help his dad. (But bait me a bit and I will.)

And if there’s one thing this show needed (OK, there were many things), it was stopping. Patinkin routinely forgot lyrics, stopped songs in midstream, and dismissed the audience with statements like “I don’t give a shit.” At least he tried to make up for it with his appearance — an all-black ensemble that called to mind a central-casting cat burglar who’d just straggled in after an unsuccessful night.

After about an hour of this crap (which included a reading of the Gettysburg Address, punctured and deflated by musical interludes at several points), we’d had enough and demanded a refund. The theater manager, besieged by three fur-clad women on one side and my withering diatribe on the other, only offered token resistance. Less the Ticketron and other ridiculous charges, we got our money back.

But the show should just have been canceled. By the time we found out what was going on, it was curtain time and too late to seek a substitute. The theater obviously decided that they’d try to hold on to at least some of the audience with this Patinkin stunt, which amounted to little more than a sloppy rehearsal for a show you’d pay not to see. For this, we gave up a chance to see “The Book of Mormon.”

In this piece just posted to The New Civil Rights Movement, I use a superficially silly comparison to the Showtime hit “Shameless” to make a broader point: Santorum’s positions are loco.

My latest piece for Slate, just posted, is called “No to Nuptials” (I actually came up with the headline; blame me if you don’t love it. But of course you will.)

I interviewed some folks in Illinois who have just taken advantage of the nation’s first-ever civil union for opposite-sex couples law; their reasons for choosing civil unions over marriage are fascinating.

Please read, like, and…comment over at Slate.

I have a new piece over at The New Civil Rights Movement, where I explore several recent confrontations between right-wing Republicans and “ordinary Americans.” The very fact of these meetings presages the decline of the far right’s position on LGBT equality issues, but that doesn’t mean the death throes will be smooth. No. Expect continued thrashing, and bashing. Perry and Gingrich lead the way, and they’re so clueless they don’t even realize that their extreme positions are dooming their candidacy.

Too  bad, because a campaign season’s worth of this buffoonery would at least have had comic value. Expect instead a dreary slog, inching painfully toward next November.

You would have thought the National Transportation Safety Board had launched an all-out attack on motherhood: Last night, we got word that NTSB is recommending a total ban on cell phone use in cars. The radical part of the proposal is that it would include hands-free phoning; no state has gone that far.

I can’t see these recommendations being enacted, but at least NTSB has provoked the right conversation. Because it turns out that the hands holding the phone aren’t the problem, it’s the chit-chat itself. But if in-car yakking is the problem, why not muzzle the passengers and turn off the radio? And, for the love of God, will someone please make the kids in the back seat shut up?

But not all conversation is the same. Radios can, I’m told, be turned off. Passengers can be asked, at first politely and eventually escalating to a scream, to clam up — indeed, most will instinctively do so when they see that the driver’s full attention is needed for some task (for instance, driving). Caution: not effective with children. The person on the other end of a phone, though, doesn’t know what’s going on in the car and drivers are often reluctant to tell them. They get caught up.

So will limiting cell phone use to hands-free models do any good at all? Yes, because it will also stop texting. As it is now, texting bans are useless without a ban on hand-held cell phones — because unless the cop is peering directly into the window (and what’s he doing there?), the driver can always claim to have been dialing, not texting.

And texting is the thing we really need to stop. Here’s a strategy I tried on my niece: When she told me she sometimes texted while driving, even though she knew she shouldn’t, I told her that I had an idea for safer driving:

Stop texting and consume a fifth of whiskey. You’ll be better off, statistically speaking. Given that her generation has been drilled — constantly and to some good effect — about the perils of drinking and driving, this message might click.

Please text the link to this post. But pull over first.

The strategy for winning the Prop 8 litigation should have been apparent all along — let the proponents self-destruct. I discuss their counsel’s latest concession at this past Thursday’s hearing over at The New Civil Rights Movement. Not even Wile E. Coyote was this self-destructive.

You read it here first:

Rafa Nadal, the greatest clay court tennis player in history — and one of the greatest ever, period — will retire from tennis sometime during 2012.

Here’s what he said, just today, in discussing his preparation for Davis Cup (which at this point seems like an experiment on the players’ bodies, a torturous coda to a season that will never end):

“[M]ore than a lack of passion, it is a weariness from many years of playing at this level, week after week.”

Just tired because it’s the end of the year? No. Here’s what he said earlier this year, right in the middle of the French Open, which he’d then won five times:

“It’s my ninth year on the tour, and its completely the same feeling every year. You don’t have the chance to stop, never. I think for that situation we have a shorter career. So having a different model of ranking, of competition, I think we can have longer career, no? I [am] almost 25, but seems like I am playing for 100 years here on the tour. I didn’t spend a weekend at home since the week of Davis Cup before Indian Wells. That’s too much. Tennis is a very demanding sport mentally and physically. I won Roland Garros five times, but next Monday I am practicing on Queen’s. So that’s makes the career shorter for everybody.”

“We have four Grand Slams, we have nine Masters 1000, and the year is 12 months. I know that they’re gonna reduce two week but, seriously, is not enough. [We are not ] gonna have these changes for my generation, but hopefully for the next generations to have a better sports life. Because I think you need two months, two months and a half of rest at the end of the season. You have to practice. I never able to practice and to try to improve the things during the off-season, and that’s something I think terrible. Sometimes it’s like work. And, in my opinion, tennis is not work. It’s passion.”

Does this sound like someone who’s going to be around for long?

Borg, another player who had prodigious success at an early age, walked away at age 26 when he lost his single-minded focus, and, coincidentally, when he could no longer defeat John McEnroe. Now Nadal, age 25, has been thoroughly thrashed by Novak Djokovic all year (0-6, all in finals) and just got hammered at the WTF (World Tour Finals; get your mind out of the gutter) — 6-3, 6-0 — by that other guy in the top three. Federer was as up, and relentless, as Nadal was down, and despondent. With the possible exception of Serena Williams (who has taken some long breaks from the tour), I’ve never seen anyone so hard-working or passionate about tennis as Nadal. And that can’t last forever.

Rafa’s light is blinking red. He’ll be gone within a year. It’s easy to blame the length of the season (let’s!), but I just think that his style of play isn’t suited to a long career. I’m hope I’m wrong, but I doubt that I am.