I was absolutely fried at the Republican Convention Saturday night in the Garden Groveor Anaheim Hyatt Regency—the town changed depending on whether the person mentioning it was more afraid of the Vietnamese or Mexicans. I had just jetted in from a six-hour stay in Oklahoma City, where my cousin Allan wed his suitably terrific bride, Ladonna, who I was surprised to note is not black. Did I mention that my Aunt Annemarie—formerly Uncle Johnny—and Commie Mom are considering buying property together in Oklahoma, where, I have assured them, they will be hung for witches?
At the wedding (a beautiful but non-alcoholic event in the OKC botanical gardens, complete with a very moving sermon about the Garden of Eden and how Eve was taken from Adam's rib to be close to his heart and sheltered under his arm), my recently out cousin Jared and I gossiped about the family foibles. It seems my Oklahoma relations are just as gay and crazy and addicted as the West Coast branch of the fam—they just don't discuss it as much to one another's faces. Meanwhile, my lovely cousin Caroline (she looks a lot like me) was accompanied by her boyfriend, a Latino ACLU lawyer with whom Commie Mom was predictably smitten. Latino and American Civil Liberties Union! She couldn't have been more jealous of Aunt Lynn's prospective son-in-law if he were Che Guevarahimself (but not dead), especially since she's had to patiently swallow the bitter pill of me dating a right-wing gun nut who works for Bill Simonand his concomitant forces of darkness. And yet if I had to guess, I'd say Aunt Lynn—who is from Oklahoma, after all—would positively ooze with joy if pretty Caroline hooked up with a right-wing gun nut working to destroy all that's good and just and right in the name of “family values” and “the economy” and “Satan.” Poor Commie Mom and Aunt Lynn. Sometimes life is so unfair.
Right. So I was at the Republican Convention, and I had been flying all day (I left LAX for Oklahoma at 12:30 a.m. Saturday and was back by 7:30 p.m. the same day because I am a jet-setter—and also because I had to, you know, work, which I realize is very un-jet-set, but can a girl not have her dreams?). And I was exhausted, the sort of rambling tired in which you are very, very boring, but you simply cannot stop talking at people who wish nothing so much as that you'd just go away. In this case, I'm afraid I was delivering a dissertation on why I love the name Daisy (it had to do with literary Daisies Miller and Buchanan, of whom I'm sure the people I was talking to had never heard, seeing as how the people I was talking to were YAFers and all) and how I feel about the flower, which is, I'm for it, but here's why. . . . In other words, I was a merciless bag of wind, and the YAFers were trapped and miserable and unable to focus on the glee they should have been feeling about drinking up all the liquor the gay-Republican Log Cabin hospitality suite could offer. Yes, the Young Americans for Freedom are odious little sneaks, but they're surprisingly forbearing odious little sneaks. Did I ever tell you about the convention at which I passed out on their floor after making them watch Warren Beatty's Socialism 101 Bulworth on the hotel TV? Eh. Doesn't matter. Also, former YAF chairman Brian Park slunk up behind the kilted bagpiper to lift up his dress. This amusing stunt was met with deafening indifference.
Since I have been dating gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon's political director on and off and off again for a year and a half, my editor has decided I mayn't write about the campaign. This judgment strikes me as terribly fair and appropriate, and I don't understand it at all. Journalistic ethics? But why? Since when? Okay, so the good folks on Romenesko's Media Gossip would go apeshit, but they are boring, so who cares?
Anyway, since I am not permitted to editorialize on Simon's perplexing views on the eight-hour workday as the harbinger of doom for the California economy, his stunning opinion that we need further deregulation to fix California's energy woes, and his imponderable suggestion that we hand over the state's highways to private enterprises that will then sue us for billions when they don't make enough filthy lucre on the tolls we're paying them, I got drunk instead. The hospitality suites were a delight, but my on-again beau Jimmy Camp made me leave after I walked into a wall.
Some of my favorite Republicans were dancing attendance on folks like bad, bad Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), who's half the man he used to be since he up and got his stomach stapled. Weekly hoaxers Jim N Kellie Bieber were there, as were county Treasurer John Moorlach and a lot of women who looked like dykes—but very nice, middle-aged, Republican dykes. These women were all “married” to “men.” On the ground floor, a Mexican-themed “Back to the Base” party (no, I don't think they thought about the al-Qaidaconnection) was offering the services of a friendly black bartender whose table of margarita makin's was dripping with bowls of ripe strawberries and bottles of Grand Marnier, while the only tequila in sight was Patron. Republicans really know how to cater, though they're not so skilled at tipping.
Supe Todd Spitzer's suite (he's running for Assembly) was quiet, as all the action was where the gays (and the ass-obsessed YAFers, who kept talking about how the Log Cabin suite was offering fudge) were. But in his suite, along with some excellent California rolls, were some Long Beach cats such as Norm Ryan, who lost his City Council race but is now running for water board—with, he says, Snoop Dogg's endorsement, yo. Sadly, there was no offer of gin N juice.
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