Invaluable and funny piece by the indispensable Rod Dreher of the New York Post on the latest hilarities of the Jackson-Sharpton contretemps. Favorite nugget: Jackson refers to his wife as the “First Lady” of Operation-PUSH. The populist rascal.
ON THE CAPE: I’ve been reluctant to write about this in order to head off a universal spasm of envy, but I write this looking out onto the dusk of Cape Cod Bay. Technology now allows me to do much of what I need to do to earn a living anywhere on the planet – as long as there’s a modem. A few years’ back, I bought a tiny little three-room shack and a deck on the end of a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Like any self-respecting homosexual, I renovated, knocked out various supporting walls and put a window where a window ought to be. It’s pretty basic and all of 250 square feet, but it’s right on the water, and at high tide the waves lap about ten feet from my bed. There’s nothing more relaxing than the sound of the sea at night, and few things more inspiring than the Cape sky in the dusk (I don’t do dawns). The beagle is in something short of heaven, viewing the beach as a kind of all-you-can-eat buffet, and watching her bound through the surf, her ears circling gleefully like mini-propellers, is about as satisfying a sight as any I know. Sorry to sound smug, but I’m really not. I’m merely happy to be here. I’ve been coming for twelve years now and each year before I arrive, I forget the place’s ineffable calm. It really does renew the soul.
PTOWN MOMENT: But P-Town is not just calm, of course. It’s also a riot. One of the reasons I love it is its genuine diversity. There are young families day-tripping from Revere, Portuguese fishermen, clusters of amateur painters squinting at their easels on the beach, drag-queens clomping in their pumps down the main street, young drop-out skate-boarders, stoner-waiters forgetting your order, and countless affluent and well-built gay men doing their best to look like the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. On Saturday, the Portuguese community had a big old parade, and the local priest went out in a boat to bless the fleet. The place also has its literary moments. Poets like Marie Howe or Mark Doty, novelists like Michael Cunningham and Norman Mailer, painters like John Dowd, journalists like Sebastian Junger or Adam Moss: they all circle around this place and make it what it is. But the best part are simply the old friends, coming back to something like summer camp year after year: joshing in the coffee shops, chatting on the beaches, cruising and carousing in the bars, growing older together, and now mercifully, not dying from one summer to the next. And then there are simply the moments that happen nowhere else. Last evening, I was walking the beagle on the town beach and saw something close to a vision. A young, stunning woman with a figure that women used to be proud to have – curvy, voluptuous, zaftig – emerged from a house on the beach. She had long auburn hair, lipstick and a tiny, bronze thong. Her considerable cleavage was barely restrained in a tight, short white tee-shirt, covered with a flimsy white bath-robe, and on her feet, she wore knee-length, white rubber boots. She was walking toward the water as if she were on a fashion-show runway. I looked out and saw her lucky boyfriend in a fishing boat – shirtless, young, preparing his tackle for an evening fishing. As she waded into the water and strode toward the boat, he looked up and smiled. And well he might.
The Dish 