Everybody loves bacon

I’m in Superior, WI after playing a show last night with Venus de Mars and All The Pretty Horses at R. T. Quinlan’s in Duluth, MN, Venus’ home town. We spent the night at her sisters house. I thought I would take a minute to try and write something while the homeowners are off checking out an estate sale and my band mates are still sleeping.

While Duluth is only a few hours from Minneapolis and even though it’s just one overnight gig, it still feels great to be on the road with the band. There is something very liberating about getting out of your element. There is also something exciting about being the foreign element injected into another community. It doesn’t much matter where we go, when the band shows up, it’s pretty obvious that we are not from around here.

As soon as we arrived at the club we were greated by a friendly and rather drunk couple who had no problem expressing their interest and fascination with Venus.

And then comes the question, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

To which Venus replies, “I’m transgender. I’m both.”

For some reason this doesn’t seem to satisfy a lot of people. We talked with them again after we got all our gear loaded in and set up. The guy actually seemed to be quite into the whole idea but Melissa was still confused. I told her that Venus was born male but always felt female so she has been taking hormones to be her true self.

Melissa seemed to find peace in that explanation as she exclaimed, “Oh, so you’re a girl!” In Venus I sensed both reluctance and relief as she accepted this label.

We don’t all fit into the neat little boxes we are given or even the ones we have adopted for ourselves. That’s one of the reasons I love Halloween. It gives people a chance to tryout being someone else or to express their true self. I guess that’s why I decided to order bacon at the diner after the show. I just wanted to do something different.

As I said to the guy in the hunting jacket outside Perkin’s, “The one thing we all have in common is that we are all different.”

“I can’t argue with that”, he replied.

By the way, I still don’t get the big deal about bacon.