Around one year ago, I had a chance to attend a wedding, a gay wedding. As is often the case, one half of the couple seemed to have the "louder" personality; he was working on voting rights, so he designed the "order of activities" to resemble a voting pamphlet. Small stick figures illustrated the text. The font came from the NYC subway signs; each activity involved numbered " how-to- style" instructions. The louder spouse was a world traveler--so the food stations were from far-flung corners of the Earth; each station represented an actual, bizarre trip that the spouse had taken (and laminated photos drove the point home). All well and good--but I trained my eye on the quieter spouse. Still waters can run deep. Not shockingly, the quieter spouse stole the show. He did this in his vows. He spoke about struggling to come to terms with his sexual orientation--feeling, for a long time, that he had to be guarded and "perfect" to compensate for his ...
My family has a tradition of benign polyps. Polyps in the colon! They're benign sometimes, but they could morph. They could become vindictive--at any moment. What this means for me is that I get to "jump the colonoscopy line." For a long while, I've been thinking about my 45th birthday--that special time when I will drink a potion, spend hours in the bathroom, and then get probed. I'll always recall how gracefully my spouse handled this event in his own timeline. He even seemed to enjoy himself. He was loopy after the procedure--and we headed home to Brooklyn to watch "Curb Your Enthusiasm." (It was the one where Larry David steals flowers from an impromptu roadside memorial.) From certain angles, an early colonoscopy is not a twist to be celebrated. But I'm sort of pleased--because this will generate new material. And so I know how Julia Wertz feels. Wertz is my favorite cartoonist. I'm including her new work here.