November 10, 2000 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
bigtips
Is it okay to break up with someone via e-mail?
by M.T. "the Big Tipper" Martone
I'm in an office supply store, poking through a display of fine-point black pens, picking several up in turn and testing them on a scrap of cardboard.
They're okay, but the ink skips a little. As I scratch at the paper's rough surface, a saleswoman behind the counter comes up to me. Her hair is a huge black matted nest, and her lipstick doesn't have much of a relationship with the shape of her mouth. She leans in to me conspiratorially, then says really loudly, "Your breath is really bad. And your nail polish is chipped. You're a mess."
As I reel back from this voluble announcement, I glance nervously around me for witnesses and try to remember what I'd had for lunch. It is impossible to concentrate because a mweep mweep truck outside is backing up, and the mweep mweep mweep is becoming more and more insistent mweep mweep mweep and I can't mweep mweep mweep Jesus! mweep mweep mweep-
It was my alarm clock. I swept a limp arm at it, and whacked the snooze button. I had a vague feeling that I'd been doing this for a while. I peeked out of the blankets at the time: 6:30.
Six thirty! Crap! M. was supposed to have been up and out at 5:30!
"Sweetie. Wake up. Wake up. I'm so sorry, but it's 6:30." The blankets heaved and then were still, and a muffled voice came from under the covers:
"I've missed practice. We have a race coming up."
"I know. I'm so sorry. I must have been hitting the snooze. I don't know what happened. I never do that."
"Jesus-It's okay. Do you have time to make it to the gym?" I struggled to understand time in relationship to anything concrete like my work schedule, and she groped around the nightstand.
"Mary, my watch says it's 1:30 in the morning.'
""
We pondered that foggily. I must have reset the time on the clock in my sleep, and set off the alarm.
Wilkommen
Cleveland-Welcome to the sexiest production of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret ever to hit the stage. Directed by British wonder boy Sam Mendes (Oscar winner for American Beauty), this show has been receiving deservedly rave reviews and a plethora of awards ever since
it was revived in 1998.
The fluid sexuality of several characters is portrayed
with stark honesty and poi-
"I'm sorry. I lost my mind. Let's just go back to sleep."
I curled back up, and assumed the posture of sleep. Time passed. I stared at the inside of my eyelids, very awake. I knew she was awake, and I knew she knew I was awake because, well, I wasn't snoring like some sort of porcine lovefest.
"I can't sleep."
"Me neither. I'm going down to try the couch. Will you wake me up when you get up to go to practice?"
"You got it."
I dragged two pillows, a quilt, a dog bed, and the first dog who followed me downstairs, and conked out in the living room.
"Good morning."
I opened my eyes to a pair of blue ones. "Are you off to practice?"
"No. It's 7:00." "What?"
"I overslept."
"Hmm. So, is any guilt I may have incurred for waking you up in the middle of the night and freaking you out now cancelled out by you oversleeping on your own and making me miss the gym?" "Absolutely."
Phew. My muscles may atrophy, but it's a rare morning that is suffused with the concrete, childish pleasure of being "even."
Dear Big Tipper,
Is it okay to break up with someone via e-mail? My office-mate just sent a Dear John e-mail to a man he'd been dating, and I told him I thought that that was cruel, and that everyone deserved to be told to their face why they're being dumped. Don't you agree?
Don't Turn Tail on E-mail
Dear Honor Offline,
Yessiree, Bob. If you've seen a person
gnant tenderness. The chaos of the politics of 1920s Germany is coupled with the churnings of sexuality, and the mix is as explosive as anything seen on stage in recent memory. Mendez also has a lot of fun with gender bending and cross-dressing, not only adding a lot of meaningful humor, but also making brilliant commentary about the masks we all have to wear, especially in times as turbulent as Hitler's rise to power.
The emcee in Cabaret (Jon Peterson, in photo) is much more than just a wild boy. He is the magician who makes the play move forward and turns the pages of history as we voyage through Berlin. He is sex personified, and he is both infinitely good and inexorably evil.
Cabaret will be strutting its stuff at the Palace Theatre in Cleveland through November 19. Show times are Tuesday through Friday evening at 8:00 p.m.; Saturday at 2:00 and 8:00 p.m.; and Sunday at 2:00 and 7:30 p.m.
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enough times to warrant “breaking up" when you no longer want to see him or her, then that person deserves a face-to-face.
If you've just had one hideous date, and it's unbearable to consider even looking at that person again, and it wasn't painfully clear enough at the end of the date that mutual attraction had not been experienced, then yes, you may send an e-mail. Send a polite but firm one that leaves no question in the mind of the recipient that they deserve to find all the love this life has to offer, with anyone other than you.
However, if you've been seeing someone over a period of weeks or months, then you need to make a final "date," in a situation that can not be construed to be romantic. (I'm thinking a table in front of Cinnabon in the mall.)
BIG TIPS
It's even more merciful to say, when making this plan, that you need to tell this person something. A wise person will know, heading in, that they're about to get canned, and can save face by being prepared, or by performing the preemptory counter-dump. (If this occurs, be gracious and say you understand. The result is the one you desired.)
It is said, in Wiccan circles, that you get back three times what you put out there. Consider the way you would want to be treated, and do so.
3
My friend Patrick just forwarded me this fascinating article: In "E-Village People" (Washington Post, October 31, 2000), writer
Crown Royal
Steve McCracken reports that “the number one thing that correlates with a region's high-tech success is the concentration of gay people living there."
This connection was discovered by Richard Florida, a professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University. Why were so many people leaving Pittsburgh for tech jobs, when Carnegie Mellon was such a technology powerhouse?
"The eureka moment happened when he saw numbers compiled by one of his doctoral students, Gary J. Gates, on concentrations of gays living in metropolitan areas. Florida took Gates's rankings of areas. He compared them with the Milken Institute's "Tech-Pole" rankings of high-tech presence in metropolitan areas. He discovered to his surprise that the number one thing that correlates with a region's high-tech success is the concentration of gay people living there."
Dig it! You know what I love about this story? It's as if all the kids who got beat up in school have moved to the same neighborhoods as adults, and are doing really well for themselves.
"Perhaps the connection between gays and high technology is as Florida and Gates suspect: We're looking at places comparable to 17th-century Amsterdam at the time of Rembrandt and mercantilism-places that have figured out a way to translate open-mindedness and tolerance into eco-
nomic dominance."
Burning questions? Contact me at the Chronicle, attention Big Tips, P.O. Box 5426, Cleveland 44101, or fax to 216631-1052, or e-mail to martone @drizzle.com.
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