any one person around the home. So if husband and wife are working, yet have no full-time maid, there's only one answer: it takes two to tango.

Sipping the last of my beer, I wondered if I had exaggerated the facts. Possibly. I wondered too if the constant erosion of principles that once gave separate identities to the sexes was quite as meaningful as I suspected. Perhaps not. Still, few could deny a continuing trend toward equalization. And if the trend persists, there's little likelihood that recipe-swapping men will retain all of the individualism of their former masculinity. Such terms as "better half" and "weaker sex," already considered quaint, will disappear, while the words "masculine" and "feminine" become obsolete for sheer lack of meaning. Meanwhile, homosexual males, in rehearsing the masculine role, will almost certainly overplay it, achieving a tough effect that is already a receding characteristic of the male majority.

My eyes suddenly focused on columns of black type at my elbow. It was The Star-Ledger, folded and lying on the bar. The customer who had been seated on my right was gone, his place taken by the man with the newspaper. "I'm through with the paper if you'd like to read it," he said.

I declined with thanks, but the friendly offer led to conversation. It happened that he was in television work, and he was able to tell me many informative and interesting things about studio production. In the enjoyment of our discussion I lost track of the hour, surprised when he offered to buy me a beer that some 30 minutes had passed since we first began talking. "No thanks," I said. "I have to be leaving."

We exchanged so-longs and I walked to the vestibule. Just before stepping into the street, I paused to take a deep breath of welcome fresh air and glance up at the early stars that were blinking undecipherable messages. I thought of my Star-Ledger companion and wondered about him. A rapport-the kind that comes quickly to strangers who discover common interests over their cups --had definitely been established; and for its duration he had been my friend and I, his. Meaning exactly nothing. After a half-hour of nearness to his voice, his appearance, his movements and manners, I was unable to make the slightest deduction. There had been nothing in his personality to tip the scales in either direction.

Me an authority on masculine deportment?

Stepping into the night I ruefully answered my own question: "Nuts! I know nothing about it."

BERN PORTER

eleven years of the significant contemporary

GRAFFITI by Gogo Nesbit

CRAZY BIRD by Christopher Maclaine THE RIGHT TO GREET by James Schevill C-SHARP MAJOR by Kenneth L. Beaudoin THE GAIN OF AFT by Lee Mullican FIRST POEMS AND OTHERS by Gerd Stern

priced at five dollars each, postpaid

10 issues of Berkeley: Journal of Modern Culture $10.00

Collector's copies of BROADSIDE five dollars each

BERN PORTER 1480 LARKIN STREET SAN FRANCISCO 3 CALIF. U.S.A.

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