Here are a couple more samples that I think look great on a coffee mug — or an apron, as it turns out!! (Valerie’s idea)

And all of these have the “Marilyn’s Room” blog logo on the other side (see last night’s post).

And it occurred to me yesterday, while Val and I were working on these, that I’ve had the Marilyn’s Room blog continuously for 25 years now. That is a hell of a lot of posting to the blog, isn’t it? I’ve used different servers, different platforms over the decades — and I’ve been here on WordPress the longest: 9 years already. I have no clue where the time went.

And also, yesterday, while we were getting the cover art together and choosing which of my books I wanted to include — narrowing it down to 20 (twenty!!??!!) — when the hell did that happen?? 20 books??

To be fair, I’m including the cover art for Girl in The Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse, which isn’t finished yet. But there were 5 other titles that I left off because the covers were either absolutely boring or just did not look great. (And this doesn’t include any of the many books I contributed work to — that number would just get ridiculous.)

Anyway. I do not remember all of this life happening, gang. I mean, I kind of do, but I kind of don’t — I don’t understand how all this time unfolded and happened.

Okay, well, here’s Valerie’s great apron idea!! I find this strangely perfect but really funny (I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind buying this, but we’re selling it!):

It would look like this if you wore it– just in time for Father’s Day!!

Anyway, so that’s been fun…

Okay.

Yes, I realize we have an indictment thingie going on over here, and that Truthers are ready for this to be the thing that triggers everything else. I sure hope so, gang. We’ll have to see. (I still think it’s extremely odd that Phil’s on his honeymoon right now and looking really happy. I always try to factor that into everything I’m seeing.) (And just fyi, everything out there contradicts everything else out there, so I’m just sitting tight and watching it all.)

Meanwhile, no notes yet from Sandra about her meeting with the director of the play, so I have another wide open day in front of me. Now that the exciting coffee mugs are, basically, finished — just awaiting some finishing touches from Valerie — maybe I can really get down to some actual writing today.

That’s really it for now. In the event something significant actually happens regarding the indictment, I’ll jump back on here.

Meanwhile, thanks for visiting,

I love you guys. See ya!

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James Tabor — Did the Essenes Write the Dead Sea Scrolls–What Can We Say After 75 Years? (1 hr 11 mins):

Another one for that one I love, just for the thrill of it all! Enjoy, gang!!

Bob Dylan, “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love)” 1985.

Well, the Simon Parkes update from yesterday did not cause me to make any additional enormous changes to my life. Yay.

He did say that he was tired of everyone just not telling the truth (meaning other truthers, but also White Hats and all the optics….)

And I have to say, heartily, that I concur!! I am so ready for the lies, the optics and the subterfuge to be over.

But in the meantime…

I can’t help but notice the dozens and dozens of happy honeymoon photos from Phil & Keri in Italy, so I’m thinking there is not much to worry about right now. And so on we go!

Quickly to the topic of my new TV!

I could not believe how easy it was to set up. In under 5 minutes, it had even recognized my firestick and set all that up, too. I was sort of flabbergasted by how quick it was. It sort of did it in spite of me, sitting there.

However, setting up Cue Streaming on the TV is not going so well. It works like a charm on the laptop — enough for me to see that there is simply way more stuff than I would ever want to watch in a lifetime, let alone in a day or a week or a month. So I don’t know if I will keep the service or not. I really do not like TV, but I’ll wait and see what I think once I actually get the streaming to work down there in the kitchen.

I’m totally 100% happy with just having Amazon Prime, so we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m still on a little hiatus from rewrites on “The Guide to Being Fabulous” because Sandra just finished a quick film shoot up in Toronto and wants a break. And once again, I concur!

But even though I would like to take this little break-time to work on some writing of my own, I also have a ton of stuff to keep on top of regarding the James Tabor research group.

I’m halfway through re-reading The Jesus Discovery (which is just fascinating, gang. Wow. Even the second time around.) But I still have some papers to read before the next zoom meeting, too —

One is “The Geochemistry of Intrusive Sediment Sampled from the 1^st Century CE Inscribed Ossuaries of James and the Talpiot Tomb, Jerusalem” — 22 pages.

Another is “The Talpiot ‘Jesus’ Tomb: A Historical Analysis” — 28 pages.

The third is 15 pages of notes on “Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palestinae, Volume I: Jerusalem. Part 1:1-704 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010)”.

And between now and the next zoom meeting is, of course, Father’s Day, which means I’ll be doing a lot of driving again and spending some time being exhausted on several levels.

Plus, I have that pesky part-time job to squeeze in there, too. But for now, it’s only 3 evenings a week.

So we’ll see, gang. It just gets stressful, finding enough time and brain-space for all this stuff (and people) I love!

All right. That’s kind of it. I want to get started here before I look at the clock and see that I suddenly have to dash off to work… (that happens a lot).

Enjoy your weekend! I likely won’t be posting tomorrow. We’ll see.

Thanks for visiting.

I love you guys. See ya!

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Yes, I’m on a serious Ultra Lounge kick these days! I have so many of their CDs from the 90s (back when I also had many cocktails and smoked many wonderful Chesterfield unfiltered cigarettes!). Here’s one of my all-time favorites —

From Ultra Lounge: Bottoms Up!, a double-header: “Big Noise from Winnetka/Midnight Swim” by Al Caiola. Play it loud and just go on and try to have a bad day!! Or night! Okay. See ya!

It’s just one of those mornings, gang.

While I did get to spend some time talking on the phone with Peitor when we were both finally in the same time zone, it was stressful, anxious, sad.

As soon as he left France, his mother, who has been very ill for a very long time and is now in a full-time care facility in Nice, took a very bad turn for the worse. They did not think she would survive the night last night, but she did. And now he is heading right back to France.

We spoke a couple times last evening and, as you can guess, he was unbelievably stressed out.

Tomorrow is his birthday. It is conceivable at this point that she could die on his birthday…

Either way, this is one of my favorite photos of him from last summer. He is in France, with a Swedish friend who is likely going to be involved in our micro-short film, Lita måste gå! (Lita’s Got to Go!).

And while I was hunting for a different photograph altogether, I found this recent photo of my best friend, Valerie in Brooklyn! (far right) This was right before her mother died (her mom is on the far left) (and yes, Valerie is very tall!!):

I was only planning to post about my dear friend, Paul Martin, whose birthday is today.

He would have been 64. He has been gone now for 24 years. So he has officially been dead now longer than I knew him. (We were friends for 23 years, before he died of AIDS at age 40.)

I wanted to write about him today because I connected some spiritual dots this morning, at 6am, while thinking of him on his birthday and getting the many cats fed and getting my own breakfast together, putting the coffee on…

It finally dawned on me that he would be so thrilled with this play I’m doing with Sandra right now, and our progress with it after so many years, because he was in the theater professionally — he was a set designer. At several different theaters, but most notably, he was the set designer at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co in Washington DC. And this led to him becoming a set designer for motion pictures and moving down to Wilmington, North Carolina, to work at what was then Carolco Studios:

But anyway. I sometimes forget that he loved theater so much. As much as I did. We met in the high school theater department, in fact. He did some acting (he was incredibly funny), but mostly he designed our sets.

By the time we graduated high school, we were incredibly close friends. And not just because of the theater connection, but he was openly gay and I was openly bisexual, which weren’t popular things to be, so we had a sort of “safe zone” when we were together.

He had this wonderful vintage 1965 VW camper van — just like this one:

And we would hang out together between classes out in the school parking lot, in the camper. Usually he smoked weed, but I was never a fan of smoking marijuana. But, anyway, we always had a blast together. We loved the same music, the same Broadway shows, the same movies (and he turned me on to softcore gay-guy porn magazines, which really blew my 17 year-old mind!) (Until then, I was a big fan of my older brother’s Hustler magazine collection. So, suddenly, my porn horizons greatly expanded…)

Paul’s dad restored classic cars as a hobby, and had this awesome 1955 Chevy Bel Air that looked exactly like this (and sometimes his dad would let us drive it but we weren’t allowed to go very far):

These recollections about Paul led me to realize that Saturday is the 45th anniversary of us graduating from high school! Jesus. When the heck did all this time fly away, right?

At graduation, I was the Valedictorian (there were two of us — one guy, one girl). I was one of the kids graduating at the top of my class, but to be selected as one of the Valedictorians, you had to write a speech and then audition it for the heads of the school. (And I could write like a motherfucka, even back then.)

Anyway — so I was smart. And that is the sole reason I went away to college — because everyone basically forced me to go. They said I was too smart to not go to college. but all I wanted was to go to NYC and be a singer/songwriter. Instead, I went to college and studied theater — to be an actress, because I’d had the female leads in all the school plays.

I lasted 3 whole months because I hated college. And I hated acting. While taking my theater courses (at age 18), I realized that I would much rather be writing the words that went into the actors mouths, then just being some sort of talking puppet…

Well, you know, I did go to NYC and did become a popular singer/songwriter for a while (until I got tired of writing songs and just wanted to write erotic fiction). But the entire time I was doing all that, I was still seeing every play I could, whether it was on Broadway, Off Broadway, or Off-Off Broadway, or way down in the darkest, deepest, farthest and lowest bowels of some dank basement theater in lower Manhattan…

I have always loved theater. And I always adored Paul, with all my heart. My life has never been the same after he died. And regardless of all the other things I feel about “The Guide to Being Fabulous,” I realized just this morning that Paul would LOVE this show, and he would love Sandra — and is probably somewhere right this minute, loving that I am doing this.

And the definition of “DOING THIS” — according to Sandra: “Marilyn, you write like a motherfucka, you know that?!“

Well, anyway…. Here is one of my favorite photos of Paul. It was taken in 1981, the year Foun Kee and I got married. Paul was visiting us from Washington DC, where he was the set designer for Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co.

In this photo, he is impersonating me, which is why I love it. He’s sitting at my IBM Selectric electric typewriter, that I’d bought in a pawn shop on 8th Avenue. And he’s sitting at the desk that Foun Kee had bought me as a wedding gift (the desk I still have, at which I have written absolutely everything I have written in my entire career, and am sitting at, typing this blog post right now, in fact).

My guitar, in its case, is leaning in the corner. The window overlooks a gay hustler bar on 8th Avenue at W. 45th Street.

I guess everything comes full circle, in its own way. Happy heavenly birthday, dearest Paul.

And in other quick news…

From Johnny Depp on Instagram just now:

Have a great Thursday, wherever you are in the world, gang!

Thanks for visiting.

I love you guys. See ya!

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As luck would have it, this is the music I was listening to this morning, when all these thoughts suddenly occurred to me about the theater and Paul– the theme from the 1959 groundbreaking film from Brazil, Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro): “Samba De Orfeu” by Ray Anthony, from the Ultra-Lounge collection, Bossa Nova Ville.

(Isn’t the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice all about death and love and that place beyond??? Hmmm.…)

Well, enjoy, gang!!