Judy, Judy, Judy

Yes, her birthday was yesterday, but I was too busy getting wasted with gay boys which is exactly what she would have done to really give a thought to the magnitude of the date until late in the day when I was at Three Fers at the leather bar, the Minneapolis Eagle, my head woozy with the pungent aromas of cigar smoke and swampy armpits, that my mind soared, above all the gays, and it was like I was channeling her last moments (that date will come later this month, on June 22). I could feel the cold porcelain of the toilet, massaging my back, taste the sharp bitter barbituates, and hear Mickey Devinko's frantic searching for her throughout their Cadogan Mews cottage.

According to legend, they had been watching the documentary The Royal Family on television, when they had an argument. We can only imagine what it was about--who would get to be queen if they were ever to become royalty, perhaps. All we know is that by the time Mickey found her sitting upright on the pot, rigor mortis had already set in. (Also known as Mickey Deans, Devinko died in 2003 of congestive heart failure. For hounding her with his latent homosexual desires, perhaps contributing to her death, he deserved to die much earlier, of something related to the genitals).

Now she was a true self-destructive entertainer. The gals today got shit on her, except maybe Whitney. These lame-ass bitches with their anorexias and their bubblegum pop and their stupid reality tv shows? They ain't got shit on her. Call me when your baby has FAS, Britney.

I would now like to share with my readers something I am only too willing to share with my friends, over and over again, much to their annoyance. And that is the special connections I have to the incomparable Judy Garland.

• We both had inauspicious beginnings in the Northern Minnesota woods.
• We both were driven from our bucolic upbringings due to maverick sexual tendencies.
• We have both suffered through a string of debilitating relationships with homosexual men.
• We both have had to deal with the cruel fate of having a promising life entertaining people replaced with an existence filled with despair and prescription drugs.
• My great uncle was the lion in The Wizard of Oz.
• Our trajectories took us both to London, only she died and I survived.
• My great great cousin is in a nursing home next door to the house in Grand Rapids where Judy was born.

Based on these uncanny connections and eerie similarities, I've often thought of myself as Judy's avatar, if you will....her messenger, sent forth from the North Woods to carry forward her message of booze, singing, and loving homos.

To commemorate the date of her death, Minnesota Public Radio aired a special documentary on the life of Judy Garland, called Beyond the Rainbow. You can list to it here. It's FABULOUS. God, I'm starting to get really nostalgic here, even though I was born about thirty years after her death. But I think I can hear her, honestly. I think I'm going to drink gin in the bathtub now, folks.

Frances Ethel Gumm (aka Judy Garland): b. June 10, 1922. d. June 22, 1969. Rest in peace, Auntie Judy.

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