The Gin Mingle

I decided to attend this year's "Gin Mingle" at Housing Works with my unconsummated life partner Johnathan. I don't like gin, and my mingling strategy has lately been aggressive and borderline toxic, but something darkly comic always happens at these events, so I went. Johnathan brought me a box of "Nips." Nips and older people like me don't mix ... it pulls out our fillings and then we have to go to dentists who prey on us, who insist that we get a total mouth plate, which costs thousand of dollars that Medicare won't cover. While I sensibly didn't eat many of the nips, I did spend most of the evening walking up to hot, waifish studs of the publishing industry, asking them if they were "into nips." Most of the publishing studs indicated that they were as a matter of fact not into nips, or at least not nips that were mine to offer, but that is not important to the story. Imagine that, though - if these stories of mine, these lines, had a happy ending one day? (Don't worry, I wouldn't let that happen).

At one point, Vanity Fair writer Henry Alford came up to introduce himself to me. I know Henry from Facebook (he sometimes comments on my blog, although he has been mum of late. I was first introduced to his work when I interviewed for a position at Twelve Books, and wrote up a publicity plan for a book he wrote about old people. A book about old people, you are thinking ... Why didn't they ask YOU to blurb it, Gee Henry? I then watched with interest as I did not get that job and the book became a bestseller). I told Henry that I would like to feature him on my outfit blog, and he immediately turned around and exposed his pert buttocks, to "show me his pants." Always playing hard to get, eh, Henry? ;) Still, his buttocks were indeed delightful, and I leaned over to congratulate his boyfriend, Greg, on having possession of the buttocks. His boyfriend sort of looked at me funny. (Greg & Henry were talking to Greg Henry, as it happened, at the Gin Mingle!)

Henry often puts fun status updates on his Facebook page, and I always want to comment on them. But Henry's friends are all very funny and very fast, and sometimes when I notice an update, it already has reams of comments already, from the likes of comic writer Merrill Markoe and such, and it's too intimidating. Sometimes, when I think that I must be the funniest person in the world, I read one of Henry's updates and the comments that come in so swiftly afterwards, and then I know that I am only one of many, many funny people. The thought is usually so horrific to me that I have to take a Neurontin. I left the Gin Mingle in sort of a bad mood, but I was thankful, at least, that I didn't get wasted, and that I was heading home to "work on my nips," a joke you'd only fully get if you have a Manhunt account.