Some months ago I succumbed to the guilt trip put on me by the Middlebury Alumni Association. Some anonymous donor gave a million dollar grant to Middlebury on the condition that 50% of Middlebury alums also contribute. Not matching funds, this time, but getting alums involved. It worked. I sent them a small amount of money so my head would be counted. Today I get a letter telling me 62 percent of alums contributed, which makes Middlebury the number-one school in the nation for alumni support.
Well hot dog. Middlebury got the million dollars from anonymous and all that money from alums and this is a real success story. I’m not actually sorry I gave the money and I’m real glad to see what has become of Middlebury since I graduated from there almost a half century ago. But the fifty bucks, or whatever it was, could have gone to Equality California. Or Lambda. Or GLAAD. Or Médecins Sans Frontières. Or the ACLU. Or Amnesty International. Or the kid at the front door selling magazines so he can summer on the Riviera with everyone in his sixth grade class who’s going but him.
I don’t know whether it’s that I’m old and sedentary and answer the phone too often, or whether solicitations have skyrocketed in these financially tough times, but I seem to be bombarded by fundraisers on all sides.
I’ve never been particularly generous. I rarely give money to street people, have no trouble saying no at the door and I think twice and then think again before writing a check even when I know the money will do much more for hungry children than if I used it to add sugar to my gut. Which I would, most likely.
I don’t resent the solicitations. After working for the No on Prop. 8 campaign and seeing how hard volunteers work to make good things happen for themselves and others, I appreciate the work of good-cause volunteers. I now make a point of thanking them for the work they do.
And I volunteer more myself. Last night I worked three hours at Equality California Headquarters entering data on contributions. It’s hard work. Joe Blow from Lincoln, Nebraska is visiting his sister in San Diego, gets asked for a donation to bring back the right of same-sex couples to marry in California, reaches in his pocket and gives five dollars, and ten days later I pay BART and MUNI fare to get my butt from Berkeley to the Castro in San Francisco to enter that fact in a data bank, complete with his zip code, telephone number and e-mail address, so he can be solicited for more money in the future. Absurd as it sounds, I found the experience uplifting. I came back grumbling that they ought to have ergonomic chairs and fewer idle conversations distracting the data entry workers, but still savoring the sausage on the pizza and the conversation with the kid who told me that kids of lesbians and gays were now calling themselves “queer spawn.”
I’m going back Monday for more. And I think I’ll keep going back until all those thousands of five or ten or eighty-seven dollar contributions are duly recorded.
“We’re having a rally in Oakland on Saturday,” the voice in the other room booms out. The guy is on the phone drumming up support. “Can we count on you being there? … Oh, bummer. Well, we will be doing this regularly. Can we count on you coming next week? … Oh, sorry about that. Well, we’re trying also to raise funds to counter the lies put out by the other side on the campaign for marriage equality in California. 187 days have passed since …. Can we count on your giving $187 to the campaign to help us win? … Oh, sorry to hear that. How about $36, which represents the 36 … OK? I have trouble giving that much, too. How about $18, one for every thousand gay and lesbian couples who married before they took the right away? … You can? Fantastic! Just let me get some information…”
At the end of the evening, they had collected a bunch of money. Not a lot, but enough to get applause from the twenty or thirty folks sitting around being debriefed. Whereupon the same guy who got $18 out of that phone call then turned to the volunteers and thanked us profusely for our efforts and put the make on us to contribute ourselves. I handed over forty dollars.
Not so much when you consider that delicious sausage pizza.
In the news this morning was an item about how people in Maine are fighting an uphill battle against the Catholic Church who want to overturn the right of same-sex couples to marry. I know somewhere in Portland or Augusta, Maine, there is somebody like me registering five dollar contributions and looking at the million dollars coming from the Knights of Columbus on the other side and feeling a sense of despair.
There seems to be no alternative. We should not be giving money to Middlebury College. They’re one of the richest schools in the nation. We should be giving money to build schools in Guatemala, maybe. Or hospitals in the Congo, maybe. But here I am giving money to my alma mater because they have more successful fundraising tricks. And I’m giving money to organizations fighting for gay dignity against organized religion because letting that bunch continue to walk all over us without a fight would be bad for my soul.
How do you decide whether to give, how much to give, why to give to this guy and not that guy? Probably the way most people do, on impulse. You respond to where the shoe on your foot pinches and move on.
I thought I was being clever once in saying to a telephone fundraiser, “If I give twenty bucks to your cause would you give twenty bucks to mine?” But no sooner was that out of my mouth when I realized it wasn’t clever at all. Nobody with a good cause should have that cause denigrated or their priorities challenged because there are other worthy causes.
But the operant word is worthy and the challenge is to define and use that word appropriately. You, Catholic Church, have a cause. You want money to take away rights of same-sex couples to marry in California, in Maine and elsewhere. That forces me to give money to people to fight you on that, money I would have to give to a life and death cause. Criticize me if you will for not letting you have your way and helping children climb out of a lousy situation. If you want, you can guilt me on that.
But then you’d have to consider yourself why you are spending money on taking civil rights from the citizens of Maine and California instead of relieving some of the suffering of the children of Guatemala, wouldn’t you.
Wouldn’t you?
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Revisiting Boys in the Band
In the late 1960s, playwright Mart Crowley was seriously depressed and broke when his friend, actress Diana Lynn, asked him to housesit. Suddenly surrounded by beauty and quiet, he poured himself into writing Boys in the Band, the play that stands as the iconic study of gays as a people who want to kill themselves.
OK, so that’s exaggerated. They don’t all want to kill themselves. They are just so filled with self-loathing that they talk as if they do.
Crowley became not only Michael, the main character (sharing the features of being a Southerner and a Catholic and a man who can’t control his finances) but a bit of all the other eight characters of his play. The story is about a birthday party Michael (Kenneth Nelson) throws for his friend Harold (Leonard Frey). Michael and Harold share self-loathing in common, as well as intimate knowledge of each other’s darkest secrets, which they reveal bit by bit in a slow-burn exercise in mutual psychological destruction as the evening goes on. Michael has another best friend, Donald (Frederick Combs), who shows up regularly once a week. Michael rides Donald mercilessly over his need for psychotherapy, revealing a kind of crabpot relationship, with Michael pulling Donald back down in the stew he presumes gays are meant to live in. In a healthier time for gays, you can imagine Michael and Donald as best friends/lovers growing old together.
The action begins when the first guests show up: Hank (Laurence Luckinbill) and Larry (Keith Prentice) are a mismatched couple. Larry needs the freedom to roam and Hank is killing their partnership with jealousy. They arrive with Emory (Cliff Gorman), a swishy limp-wristed interior decorator and classic stereotype, and Bernard (Reuben Greene), another self-loather who takes Emory’s outrageously racist remarks as a way of being his friend – Bernard is black, all the other characters are white. And then comes “Cowboy,” (Robert La Tourneaux) a feast-for-the-eyes street hustler Emory has rented for the evening as Harold’s birthday present. Cowboy is too clueless to be vicious, and the bitch queens laugh hard at his expense.
The lengthy introduction of characters, reminiscent of the opening of Murder on the Orient Express, ends with one of the great movie entrances of all time. Harold arrives at the door in a way that makes you believe you’re watching a queen descending a staircase to a hushed gathering of adoring subjects. Harold is in residence. Let the bitch fights begin.
The plot then thickens with the unexpected arrival of Michael’s college roommate, Alan (Peter White). Because Alan is allegedly straight, Michael insists everybody play it straight as well, even though Alan is actually a party crasher. As the evening wears on, we begin to suspect Alan is a closet queen, a view that appears to be confirmed when Alan physically attacks Emory for being such a flamer, flamers being a serious threat to closetedness.
One last plot device drives home the degree to which Michael’s self-loathing makes him dangerous to be around. Michael insists they play a game in which they each have to telephone “the one person they truly loved” and tell him so. As with Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, you wonder why people just don’t refuse to play or go home. The answer seems to be they don’t know how, and that puts the cap on the notion these are people caught in a web of destruction of their own making.
For a more thorough summary and commentary, see http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/boysintheband.php
If, by now, you’re not convinced this is a play to be avoided at all costs if you are susceptible to depression, you haven’t been paying attention. I saw it in 1970 when the film first came out. Thanks to Crowley, it was made with the same actors who put it on as a stage play for three years first. Hard as this may be to believe, I all but missed the self-destruction, intent as I was on celebrating seeing gays actually portrayed on screen. It was, after all, the first gay-centered gay-themed film in American cinema history, more than a decade before Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean’s first serious gay onscreen kiss in Making Love, a decade before Harvey Milk, and pre-Stonewall. Only later did it sink in that the image of gays was so dark that associating with the characters would cost one dearly.
But associate gays did. By the thousands. For about a decade until the tide turned and gay pride made Boys in the Band politically incorrect. Then, from the days of Stonewall and Harvey Milk, until Boys was revived in 1996, gays spoke of it with disdain and embarrassment. I participated in countless discussions where Boys came up. Inevitably the film was dismissed out of hand as furthering stereotypes and extending the view expressed in the line, “I thought people like that always killed themselves.” Once pride kicked in, who wanted to watch gay self-loathing.
If you are of the school of thought – I am – that self-loathing is gone and pride is here to stay, you are free at last to watch the film (or see the play) as a “landmark and cultural touchstone." Students of gay history and culture should see it as probably the best depiction available of internalized homophobia, the “before” picture, before consciousness raising. It does take effort to watch hysterical screamers having nervous breakdowns and couples torturing each other psychologically.
Just before I put the DVD on, Fiddler on the Roof was on television. I marvelled at the coincidence that Leonard Frey, who plays Harold in Boys, also plays the character Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler. But there is another parallel. Watching the Jews of Anatevka driven from their homes, if you are inclined to dwell on the past, will make you grieve. If you focus on the lot of most Jews in America today, however, you need not fear being a pollyanna. You can simply be looking at the glass as half full, and embrace and celebrate progress.
There is no other way to look at Boys in the Band, it seems to me. If you are looking for a gay story to enjoy, this clearly isn’t it. If you are looking for gay history, however, this is a must-see. As one reviewer put it, “I recovered from it grateful I don’t hate myself (at least not for being gay).”
I steeled myself to watch it, waited till I was in the right head space. Wanted to be well rested and not distracted, figuring I was going to go into a funk. Instead, I was delighted. The bitch fights between Harold and Michael, cruel as they are, made me nostalgic for the 60s when putdowns were avidly cultivated by many people I knew. Emory’s habit of using women’s names in alliteration in a running commentary on what’s happening – “Connie Casserole” as he brings in the lasagne dish – made me remember discussions I had in linguistics classes on "the syntax of the native tongue, faggotese." And I was reminded of a complaint one politically astute gay student at my university levelled in the mid 90s at the other students in the organization. Instead of fighting to get each other out of the closet, they were content just to sit around, he said, and give each other girls’ names. “It’s all very Boys in the Band,” he said.
My reaction to the film involved all these heady thoughts, in other words, and few if any emotional reactions.
I was fascinated and amused by the nostalgic bits. The Bert Bacharach albums and the music by Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett, Sergio Mendes and others, the cartons of Kent cigarettes provided with the food, the size of the stereo speakers, the ring of the telephones all carry you back. I was astonished to discover how brilliantly the play was constructed and the subsequent film was paced and lit and staged. (See http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/boysintheband.php for details.) I wondered at first why the straight-acting characters Donald, Larry and Hank were not more like Alan in being put off by Emory’s over-the-top mincing, given this is a play about internalized homophobia, until I realized Crowley had captured the phenomenon in its complex gradations. There is more nuance than initially meets the eye. And you become aware just how good the script actually is.
Apparently, I’m in good company. Rotten Tomatoes gives it its very rare 100% rating.
Even if you can’t bear to watch (and shame on you if you don’t try), rent the 2008 DVD for the historical background. You will learn how Crowley got Edward Albee to help him get the play produced. Many have claimed that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was actually a bitch-fight in hetero drag. Now we see how Crowley took it home, bitch fighting skills being one way the gay world has of making lemonade out of lemons. A skill one can mourn as one mourns the passing of the camaraderie of the ghetto while celebrating one’s escape from it. You’ll also learn that Emory is played by straight actor Cliff Gorman and that he and his wife later took care of Cowboy when his career tanked and he ended up in Rikers Island. And (sinking now into seriously trivial trivia) that Laurence Luckinbill, who plays Hank, is married to Lucie Arnaz and that the film was filmed in Tammy Grimes’ New York apartment.
An update on the actors in Boys is a sobering experience. Of the nine actors in the play, seven are dead. Of the six gay actors in the play, five died of AIDS, and one, Reuben Greene, has dropped out of sight.
At least one footnote is an upper, the origin of the title. Judy Garland once was given the advice, “You’re singing for yourself and the boys in the band.” Since gays were so much Judy’s boys, the double entendre resonates with a very warm tone indeed.
But mostly it’s about a time gone by. “If we could just learn not to hate ourselves,” Michael says to Donald after the party is over, shortly before going out to midnight mass, leaving us to watch him, in quiet irony after all that has passed that evening, return to the trough of his self-loathing to feed some more.
“You show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
We had no place to go but up.
OK, so that’s exaggerated. They don’t all want to kill themselves. They are just so filled with self-loathing that they talk as if they do.
Crowley became not only Michael, the main character (sharing the features of being a Southerner and a Catholic and a man who can’t control his finances) but a bit of all the other eight characters of his play. The story is about a birthday party Michael (Kenneth Nelson) throws for his friend Harold (Leonard Frey). Michael and Harold share self-loathing in common, as well as intimate knowledge of each other’s darkest secrets, which they reveal bit by bit in a slow-burn exercise in mutual psychological destruction as the evening goes on. Michael has another best friend, Donald (Frederick Combs), who shows up regularly once a week. Michael rides Donald mercilessly over his need for psychotherapy, revealing a kind of crabpot relationship, with Michael pulling Donald back down in the stew he presumes gays are meant to live in. In a healthier time for gays, you can imagine Michael and Donald as best friends/lovers growing old together.
The action begins when the first guests show up: Hank (Laurence Luckinbill) and Larry (Keith Prentice) are a mismatched couple. Larry needs the freedom to roam and Hank is killing their partnership with jealousy. They arrive with Emory (Cliff Gorman), a swishy limp-wristed interior decorator and classic stereotype, and Bernard (Reuben Greene), another self-loather who takes Emory’s outrageously racist remarks as a way of being his friend – Bernard is black, all the other characters are white. And then comes “Cowboy,” (Robert La Tourneaux) a feast-for-the-eyes street hustler Emory has rented for the evening as Harold’s birthday present. Cowboy is too clueless to be vicious, and the bitch queens laugh hard at his expense.
The lengthy introduction of characters, reminiscent of the opening of Murder on the Orient Express, ends with one of the great movie entrances of all time. Harold arrives at the door in a way that makes you believe you’re watching a queen descending a staircase to a hushed gathering of adoring subjects. Harold is in residence. Let the bitch fights begin.
The plot then thickens with the unexpected arrival of Michael’s college roommate, Alan (Peter White). Because Alan is allegedly straight, Michael insists everybody play it straight as well, even though Alan is actually a party crasher. As the evening wears on, we begin to suspect Alan is a closet queen, a view that appears to be confirmed when Alan physically attacks Emory for being such a flamer, flamers being a serious threat to closetedness.
One last plot device drives home the degree to which Michael’s self-loathing makes him dangerous to be around. Michael insists they play a game in which they each have to telephone “the one person they truly loved” and tell him so. As with Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, you wonder why people just don’t refuse to play or go home. The answer seems to be they don’t know how, and that puts the cap on the notion these are people caught in a web of destruction of their own making.
For a more thorough summary and commentary, see http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/boysintheband.php
If, by now, you’re not convinced this is a play to be avoided at all costs if you are susceptible to depression, you haven’t been paying attention. I saw it in 1970 when the film first came out. Thanks to Crowley, it was made with the same actors who put it on as a stage play for three years first. Hard as this may be to believe, I all but missed the self-destruction, intent as I was on celebrating seeing gays actually portrayed on screen. It was, after all, the first gay-centered gay-themed film in American cinema history, more than a decade before Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean’s first serious gay onscreen kiss in Making Love, a decade before Harvey Milk, and pre-Stonewall. Only later did it sink in that the image of gays was so dark that associating with the characters would cost one dearly.
But associate gays did. By the thousands. For about a decade until the tide turned and gay pride made Boys in the Band politically incorrect. Then, from the days of Stonewall and Harvey Milk, until Boys was revived in 1996, gays spoke of it with disdain and embarrassment. I participated in countless discussions where Boys came up. Inevitably the film was dismissed out of hand as furthering stereotypes and extending the view expressed in the line, “I thought people like that always killed themselves.” Once pride kicked in, who wanted to watch gay self-loathing.
If you are of the school of thought – I am – that self-loathing is gone and pride is here to stay, you are free at last to watch the film (or see the play) as a “landmark and cultural touchstone." Students of gay history and culture should see it as probably the best depiction available of internalized homophobia, the “before” picture, before consciousness raising. It does take effort to watch hysterical screamers having nervous breakdowns and couples torturing each other psychologically.
Just before I put the DVD on, Fiddler on the Roof was on television. I marvelled at the coincidence that Leonard Frey, who plays Harold in Boys, also plays the character Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler. But there is another parallel. Watching the Jews of Anatevka driven from their homes, if you are inclined to dwell on the past, will make you grieve. If you focus on the lot of most Jews in America today, however, you need not fear being a pollyanna. You can simply be looking at the glass as half full, and embrace and celebrate progress.
There is no other way to look at Boys in the Band, it seems to me. If you are looking for a gay story to enjoy, this clearly isn’t it. If you are looking for gay history, however, this is a must-see. As one reviewer put it, “I recovered from it grateful I don’t hate myself (at least not for being gay).”
I steeled myself to watch it, waited till I was in the right head space. Wanted to be well rested and not distracted, figuring I was going to go into a funk. Instead, I was delighted. The bitch fights between Harold and Michael, cruel as they are, made me nostalgic for the 60s when putdowns were avidly cultivated by many people I knew. Emory’s habit of using women’s names in alliteration in a running commentary on what’s happening – “Connie Casserole” as he brings in the lasagne dish – made me remember discussions I had in linguistics classes on "the syntax of the native tongue, faggotese." And I was reminded of a complaint one politically astute gay student at my university levelled in the mid 90s at the other students in the organization. Instead of fighting to get each other out of the closet, they were content just to sit around, he said, and give each other girls’ names. “It’s all very Boys in the Band,” he said.
My reaction to the film involved all these heady thoughts, in other words, and few if any emotional reactions.
I was fascinated and amused by the nostalgic bits. The Bert Bacharach albums and the music by Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett, Sergio Mendes and others, the cartons of Kent cigarettes provided with the food, the size of the stereo speakers, the ring of the telephones all carry you back. I was astonished to discover how brilliantly the play was constructed and the subsequent film was paced and lit and staged. (See http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/boysintheband.php for details.) I wondered at first why the straight-acting characters Donald, Larry and Hank were not more like Alan in being put off by Emory’s over-the-top mincing, given this is a play about internalized homophobia, until I realized Crowley had captured the phenomenon in its complex gradations. There is more nuance than initially meets the eye. And you become aware just how good the script actually is.
Apparently, I’m in good company. Rotten Tomatoes gives it its very rare 100% rating.
Even if you can’t bear to watch (and shame on you if you don’t try), rent the 2008 DVD for the historical background. You will learn how Crowley got Edward Albee to help him get the play produced. Many have claimed that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was actually a bitch-fight in hetero drag. Now we see how Crowley took it home, bitch fighting skills being one way the gay world has of making lemonade out of lemons. A skill one can mourn as one mourns the passing of the camaraderie of the ghetto while celebrating one’s escape from it. You’ll also learn that Emory is played by straight actor Cliff Gorman and that he and his wife later took care of Cowboy when his career tanked and he ended up in Rikers Island. And (sinking now into seriously trivial trivia) that Laurence Luckinbill, who plays Hank, is married to Lucie Arnaz and that the film was filmed in Tammy Grimes’ New York apartment.
An update on the actors in Boys is a sobering experience. Of the nine actors in the play, seven are dead. Of the six gay actors in the play, five died of AIDS, and one, Reuben Greene, has dropped out of sight.
At least one footnote is an upper, the origin of the title. Judy Garland once was given the advice, “You’re singing for yourself and the boys in the band.” Since gays were so much Judy’s boys, the double entendre resonates with a very warm tone indeed.
But mostly it’s about a time gone by. “If we could just learn not to hate ourselves,” Michael says to Donald after the party is over, shortly before going out to midnight mass, leaving us to watch him, in quiet irony after all that has passed that evening, return to the trough of his self-loathing to feed some more.
“You show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
We had no place to go but up.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Eight Proofs the FSM exists
I met a man the other day who had the gall to tell me there was no Flying Spaghetti Monster. I was speechless. I didn’t know what to say, so I’ve spent the last several days planning what I will say to this man if I ever see him again.
Those of us who know he exists in our hearts need no further help with our faith, I will tell him. But I understand some people are persuaded only by what goes on in their heads.
It’s not as if there were no proof. Check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL7FcvEydqg
But if you aren’t willing to believe your eyes and still want reasoned argument, consider:
Fact 1: I live on 2734 Ellsworth Street in Berkeley, and Ellsworth is the 2734th most popular family name in Indiana.
http://names.whitepages.com/Indiana/last/Ellsworth
Imagine, telling me there is no spaghetti monster in the sky who knows when every little sparrow falls and dashes his brains on the rocks.
Fact 2: Ms. Amy Ellsworth of Seattle has a zip code which turns out to be 98144-2734
http://www.spoke.com/info/p93iGEV/AmyEllsworth
And if you think the zip code is mere coincidence, Smarty Pants, why is it that
Fact 3: The Downeast Refinishing Company of Ellsworth, Maine’s zip code is 04605-2734
http://www.gtangle.com/United_States/Maine/Ellsworth/Downeast_Refinishing
Amy Ellsworth of Seattle 98144-2734
Downeast Refinishing of Ellsworth, Main, 04065-2734
Must I cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s for you? Will nothing persuade you?
I imagine him still resisting. I am undaunted.
Fact 4: The Big Apple Store on 115 S Main St in Brewer, Maine, has the phone number (207) 989-2734, and Brewer, ME is less than twenty miles from Ellsworth, ME!!!
For that matter, if only divine evidence will persuade you, Mr. Smarty Pants know it all,
Fact 5: The Alton Methodist Church is less than fifty miles from Ellsworth. And what is their number? (207) 394-2734. Go ahead, look it up, oh you stranger person of little faith.
You want more?
Fact 6: Jamesco Tradeshow Displays of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, which is only 52.7 miles from Ellsworth, OH has the phone number 330-929-2734. (You’ll have to google Jamesco and the check Google Maps to verify this, but trust me, it’s God’s honest truth.)
Maybe not all that convincing in and of itself, but when you put it together with
Fact 7: Ellsworth Trucking Long Haul company of Wisconsin has an office on 13699 W Thannum Fire Ln in Hayward, WI 54843 and their phone number is (715) 634-2734, http://www.automotive.com/yellow-pages/107/2602/trucking-long-haul/wisconsin/ellsworth/page13.html
you’ll have to admit reason and logic has not been left out when defending our faith in the FSM.
And finally, for now,
Fact 8: If you go to the internet dialup service “Please Assist” http://www.pleaseassist.com/access, and click on usanumbers, then click on Me.html (for Maine), you’ll see that the access number for Ellsworth, Maine, is (are you ready?)
The Spaghetti Monster exists.
Sometimes I get so impatient with doubters.
Wish I’d gotten his name.
Those of us who know he exists in our hearts need no further help with our faith, I will tell him. But I understand some people are persuaded only by what goes on in their heads.
It’s not as if there were no proof. Check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL7FcvEydqg
But if you aren’t willing to believe your eyes and still want reasoned argument, consider:
Fact 1: I live on 2734 Ellsworth Street in Berkeley, and Ellsworth is the 2734th most popular family name in Indiana.
http://names.whitepages.com/Indiana/last/Ellsworth
Imagine, telling me there is no spaghetti monster in the sky who knows when every little sparrow falls and dashes his brains on the rocks.
Fact 2: Ms. Amy Ellsworth of Seattle has a zip code which turns out to be 98144-2734
http://www.spoke.com/info/p93iGEV/AmyEllsworth
And if you think the zip code is mere coincidence, Smarty Pants, why is it that
Fact 3: The Downeast Refinishing Company of Ellsworth, Maine’s zip code is 04605-2734
http://www.gtangle.com/United_States/Maine/Ellsworth/Downeast_Refinishing
Amy Ellsworth of Seattle 98144-2734
Downeast Refinishing of Ellsworth, Main, 04065-2734
Must I cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s for you? Will nothing persuade you?
I imagine him still resisting. I am undaunted.
Fact 4: The Big Apple Store on 115 S Main St in Brewer, Maine, has the phone number (207) 989-2734, and Brewer, ME is less than twenty miles from Ellsworth, ME!!!
For that matter, if only divine evidence will persuade you, Mr. Smarty Pants know it all,
Fact 5: The Alton Methodist Church is less than fifty miles from Ellsworth. And what is their number? (207) 394-2734. Go ahead, look it up, oh you stranger person of little faith.
You want more?
Fact 6: Jamesco Tradeshow Displays of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, which is only 52.7 miles from Ellsworth, OH has the phone number 330-929-2734. (You’ll have to google Jamesco and the check Google Maps to verify this, but trust me, it’s God’s honest truth.)
Maybe not all that convincing in and of itself, but when you put it together with
Fact 7: Ellsworth Trucking Long Haul company of Wisconsin has an office on 13699 W Thannum Fire Ln in Hayward, WI 54843 and their phone number is (715) 634-2734, http://www.automotive.com/yellow-pages/107/2602/trucking-long-haul/wisconsin/ellsworth/page13.html
you’ll have to admit reason and logic has not been left out when defending our faith in the FSM.
And finally, for now,
Fact 8: If you go to the internet dialup service “Please Assist” http://www.pleaseassist.com/access, and click on usanumbers, then click on Me.html (for Maine), you’ll see that the access number for Ellsworth, Maine, is (are you ready?)
(207) 664-2734I could go on and on, of course, but I trust you’ll agree I’ve made my case.
The Spaghetti Monster exists.
Sometimes I get so impatient with doubters.
Wish I’d gotten his name.
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