Reposted and updated for my 70th (yesterday)…

This is a script I had for a one-off cartoon was going to do when I turned 60. I did a little pencil sketching on it then dropped it. I’m 70 now and still haven’t finished this one, or dozens of others let alone A Coming Out Story…

It riffs off a running gag in Tim Barela’s wonderful gay comic strip Leonard and Larry, which he described once as a kind of gay Our Miss Brooks. Every tenth year Larry had a birthday all his anxieties about getting old surfaced in a dream that he was having his birthday party while laying in a coffin with a birthday cake on it and his friends making catty jokes about his getting old. Picasso said a mediocre artist copies and a great artist steals. So I stole the idea (with proper acknowledgement). But the only thing I managed to finish was the script. Probably for the best…

Here it is, updated to the 70th birthday. As Joe Friday and my own Sergeant Stoneface would say, The names have been changed to protect the innocent. And especially the not so innocent!

The Big Seven-O!
(Slightly Anonymized)

SCENE: My birthday party. a’La Leonard & Larry, I’m in a casket with the lid open and a birthday cake on the bottom half lid that reads Happy 70th. Surrounding me are my three loves. We shall call them CRUSH1, CRUSH2 and CRUSH3.

PANEL 1: (Most of the following panels are as above.)

ME: I really appreciate the party you guys, and this coffin’s a swell gag, but I have to admit the margarita embalming fluid bottles was a brilliant touch.

CRUSH2: I liked the aspirin bottles labeled “For Headaches Due To Lovestruck Bruce”.

CRUSH3: That was 1’s idea.

PANEL 2:

ME: (off panel) Ha, ha… Yes, very funny…

CRUSH1: (to the others) Drove me crazy back in high school watching him try to work up the nerve to tell me he had a crush on me.

CRUSH2: (rolling his eyes) I had to deal with Overly Attached Gayfriend.

CRUSH3: Tell me about it. He actually thought we were boyfriends just because I let him sleep with me a few times.

PANEL 3: Closeup on Crush2 and Crush3

CRUSH2: Sparks didn’t fly eh?

CRUSH3: (Looking morosely down at his drink) Let’s just say I went Ex-Gay for six years.

PANEL 4: Closeup on me and Crush1

CRUSH1: (Smiling, gesturing to me while looking at the others off panel) Quick, tell NARTH! We’ve found the cure for homosexuality!

ME: (Frowning) Ha, Ha. Very Funny.

PANEL 5:

ME: Can I get out now?

CRUSH1: Not on your life. We’re selling you off as a collector’s item.

CRUSH2: (gesturing to the ages) The gay man that never had a boyfriend. Too young to be liberated in 1971, too old to marry anyone in 2023.

CRUSH3: You’re a museum piece.

PANEL 6:

ME: You sold me to a museum?

CRUSH2: Museum? Are you kidding? We sold you to Disney World.

CRUSH3: You’re going to be a prop in the Haunted Mansion queue.

CRUSH1: I’ll stop by every now and then before my shift to dust you off.

PANEL 7:

ME: I’m dreaming all this aren’t I? This is all about my anxieties over getting old isn’t it…and you guys are here representing the three chances for love Vonnegut spoke of…

CRUSH1: We prefer to think of ourselves as your three strikes.

PANEL 8:

ME: This is going to turn into a nightmare now isn’t it?

CRUSH1: You’re not asleep dear, you’re hallucinating.

CRUSH2: You drank half that bottle of tequila all by yourself and when you sober up again you’re going to feel like you’re 170.

Lately I’ve been very worried that my drawing hand is getting arthritis in it, but now I’m pretty sure that it’s just injury to the thumb and forefinger muscles, and it’s the Apple Pencil with Procreate that’s doing it to me.

When I work with traditional media I use a Very light touch. The charcoals and graphite I work with are all very soft and I can get a lot of dynamic range out of them by varying light to just a bit of moderate pressure. Same with my ink pens. I use my dip pens less often now, but when I do I gravitate to the most flexible nibs because I can get the range of lines I like with those. Mostly I use the new pigment based technical pens. I still haven’t the hang of inking with a brush yet, and given how much I’ve come to like Procreate I may never get it. My favorite writing instruments are my fountain pens, especially my Montblanc Diplomat (which I have with me in California) and my Parker Duofold. All I need with either of those is a very light touch.

So my writing/drawing hand is not used to having to bear down much and I’ve been doing a tad more of that with the Apple Pencil and Procreate now that I’m doing more of my artwork digitally. Problem most likely is I just accepted the default sensitivity settings and now I have to spend some time tweaking them.
In the meantime I’m being forced to take a break from drawing for a while until my drawing hand stops complaining.

The diesel emissions recall service I was finally able to get scheduled after a year of trying starts this morning. It’ll take two days to do all the work. I’ve emptied the car of all my stuff, including the Mercedes fitted trunk liner because under that is the DEF tank and probably a bunch of emissions related things they’ll be needing to get at. And just now I disconnected the locking Kayo GPS dongle from the CAN port because for sure they’ll be needing to get at that.

So the car is ready to get this done. Finally. I’ll get a loaner from the dealer.

I’m getting the oil cooler seals replaced while this is happening too, since that’s something you really want to have done while they’ve already got the top of the engine apart. 400 bucks extra, but it’s 5k to do the work as a one-off. So…yeah…get that done too.

I’ll still be hanging out here in Oceano for at least another month. I’ve got my first ever visit to Disneyland scheduled for the 24th. It gives me time to run the car and drive it here and there and make sure nothing was broken during the big two day job, before I drive back home to Baltimore.

The plan is not to go back until the daily temperatures get below 90. This part of the California coast is just lovely during the summer months. I think I’ll stay out here every summer from now on.

I’m going to Disneyland!

I was born in California two years before Disneyland opened, but I grew up on the east coast and never got to visit it when I was a kid. Back in the late 50 and 1960s, travel from coast to coast was expensive, and also slow unless you had the money to fly. You either took the train or the bus, or you drove and driving it across so much vast emptiness past the Ozarks was risky. Cars back then weren’t nearly as reliable as they are today. So little Mouseketeer me could only watch the Mickey Mouse Club on TV and the Walt Disney movies mom took me to. Closest I ever came to a theme park when I was young were the boardwalks at the beach towns mom would vacation us in. Those were lots of fun, but not as much fun as I knew Disneyland would be.

It wasn’t until I was 16 that I even got a chance to visit California again, and then it was mom and me on a road trip to try and reconnect me with dad and his family in Oceano. Anaheim was just far enough away, and the traffic in and out of Los Angeles horrible enough, that everything involved in spending even just a couple days at the park, driving down, getting a hotel and buying tickets, and then the drive back, just wasn’t do-able. And there wasn’t much time until I had to be back in school and mom had to be back at work anyway,

Then, decades later, I got work that came with vacation time and I was able to visit my California family on a semi regular basis. But even then I had to be back for work so there still wasn’t time make the trip to Anaheim. But by then Walt Disney World had opened up, and a trip down to Florida wasn’t all that hard to schedule. Even better, my high school crush worked there, and encouraged me to come down for a visit through by then I was more about the road trip than theme parks.

“Come on man it’s your heritage…baseball, mom, apple pie, and Mickey Mouse…what’s wrong with you?”

I still remember that first visit and walking into Epcot and how my inner Mouseketeer came back to me. Somehow in my adulthood I’d forgotten all that. And it rekindled my faith in the human spirit. That, It’s A Small World After All, and There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Shining At The End Of Every Day thing. I’d forgotten all those days back when I was young and we were going to the moon and I watched the first live television from overseas via Telstar, and sat at the TV Sunday’s after dinner and watched Walter Cronkite’s The Twenty-First Century and Saturday mornings watching Watch Mr. Wizard and evenings before bed watching Star Trek, and reading Arthur C. Clarke and Hal Clement and Ray Bradbury, and those days when I looked forward to whatever the future held. 

I’d forgotten how much I still needed that. And that day in Epcot, watching the monorail glide overhead, and hearing that Disney music at the entrance, and looking up at Spaceship Earth, it all came back to me.

So Walt Disney World became my thing, and I got the annual pass, and then for a few years a DVC membership, and I’ve visited at least twice a year every since, sometimes three times if I could wrangle a long weekend now and then. And since Magic Kingdom was almost a carbon copy of the original Disneyland I could be satisfied that I had my Disneyland experience after all.

But it wasn’t the same of course. And now I’m retired and I have plenty of time to go to Disneyland while I’m here in California. So this time around I set my mind to going. And I’m doing it right with park hopper tickets and a hotel in the park, which gives me easy walking access and maybe some extra magic hours too.

The Halloween after hours event was all sold out though…drat. Maybe next year.

This is almost like a pilgrimage. One of my favorite spots in Hollywood Studios is the Tune-In Lounge and I’ve sat at the bar there watching Walt Disney give the opening speech to his new theme park so many times I know it by heart…

To all who come to this happy place, welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here, age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.

He saw it through to completion, which he never got the chance to in Florida. I really want to see this place at least once.

It’s actually more expensive even though it’s a smaller park, because so many of the perks I get having the Walt Disney World annual pass aren’t available to me at Disneyland, and the selection of in park hotels is nothing like Walt Disney World. So this may be a one shot thing, but we’ll see. Nice thing about Disneyland is it’s not in DeSantisland. The drawback is it’s so much smaller. I looked into making dining reservations and the choices are pretty limited. But then Walt Disney World is Huge. I don’t think there’s anything else like it in the world.

But there will never be another Disneyland, no matter how many copies of it they make all over the world. It’s the first one, where it all began. There was nothing like it before. I love Walt Disney World enough to keep going back no matter how ugly the republicans down there make Florida. But I have to see Disneyland at least once in my life.