One such speech was Orley’s emotional plea to his wayward brother-in-law Toland on page 88 in which he enumerates the many unpleasant aspects of spending one’s afterlife in Hell.

Both of these SRB speeches of mine have found their way into 60 Seconds To Shine: 221 One-Minute Monologues for Men, a collection of short dramatic monologues (edited by John Capecci and Irene Ziegler Aston) excerpted from both classical and contemporary literary sources.

The compilers of this just-published book did not limit themselves to monologues that were originally composed for the stage, which is why the door was open for words first spoken in the pages of my humble comic book story. Such openness to unorthodox avenues of expression is to be applauded, of course, particularly when it ushers my immortal creations onto unaccustomed shelves at classy bookstores.

I choose to believe, naturally, that the Stuck Rubber Baby passages in this volume will by virtue of their passion and eloquence propel some earnest fledgling actor into the role of his dreams. How could it be otherwise?

Hopefully the actor will be handsome. Hopefully he will seek guidance from me over dinner at some quiet restaurant (Eddie will be along, of course) about the subtle nuances of my characters’ inner lives. And hopefully, once he has ascended to stardom and critical acclaim, he will give Eddie and me a grateful — perhaps even flirtatious — wink from the stage as he steps up to receive his Tony.

Eddie and I aren’t in New York City today so the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered throng, accompanied by the parents, cousins, friends, soulmates, and companions in civil rights activism who feel that the statement made by mass queer visibility every year remains an important statement to make, will have to fill up scores of blocks of Fifth Avenue without our physical assistance.

I have no doubt that New Yorkers will be up to the task.

But frustratingly, I have no time available to compose any of these today.

So I will have to let the photograph above, taken in June of 1979, serve as my symbolic Happy Gay Day greeting as well as a placeholder for commentaries I hope life lets me write in the future about the place of LGBT Americans in George W. Bush’s America — no to mention the place occupied by our LGBT cousins in various countries around the world.

The snapshot above, snapped by our friend David Hutchison at the Gay Pride Parade that took place a mere couple of months after Eddie and I first met, brings back a host of memories. Of youth. Of righteous zeal. Of excitement and camaraderie. And of the scores of friends not seen in this photograph but who were also marching on Fifth Avenue that day.

Many of them we hadn’t met yet on the day Hutch snapped this photo. Too many subsequently died in the AIDS epidemic. Hutch has died too — although it was pancreatic cancer that got him before his HIV had time to.

But many more of our friends from both that era and eras since remain alive today — to the consternation no doubt of the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, "Rev." Fred Phelps and his less obviously vicious fellow homophobes.

Those surviving friends who are still in New York and those in any number of other cities large enough to host demonstrations of this kind are likely to be participating today in the fleeting creation of temporary cities within cities in which, if only for a few exciting hours, it will be the heterosexuals who are in the minority and the gays who fill the straight folks’ fields of vision.

And we will be saying loudly once again what we seem to have to say over and over again no matter how tiring it gets to have to repeat the obvious decade after decade: We’re here. Qe’re queer. Get Used to it.

Engineered as it is to accommodate consensual iChat conversers and occasional curious infants, Photo Booth cannot cope well with a recalcitrant canine who has no intention of relaxing for a portrait session while being hauled into view against her will.

But as of this week Eddie and I have at last secured an appropriate replacement camera (a Canon PowerShot A540, for the buffs among you) with which to document Lulu’s soulfulness at will.

Whew.

Last October Kevin Newcomb of ClickZ News described Squidoo.com, the brainchild of "author and online marketing guru" Seth Godin, as a cross between "About.com, Wikipedia, blogs and social networks."

Join thousands of people making their own "lenses" on their favorite stuff and ideas, sez the site’s home page. It’s fast, fun and free. (And you could even get paid).

Well, I’m still waiting for the part where I get paid; I think it has something to do with somebody’s expected advertising revenue but I’ll leave the marketing fun to Guru Scott. It’s not all about money, though. Squidoo’s ambitions are loftier than that: we Squidoo lensmasters are invited to donate part or all of our earnings to our favorite charities with management’s assistance. Me, I think I’ll wait until the bucks start rolling in before launching my philanthropy career, but that hasn’t stopped me from making my presence felt in Squidoo Country.

And I seem to be doing pretty well so far: I see that four people have already accessed my lens and they’ve collectively given it a five-star rating. That’s one-and-a-quarter stars per person! I feel positively jet-propelled!

Actually, the stated purpose of Squidoo is to foster knowledge by allowing participants to share whatever they know about the assorted topics that engage their intellects or push their fannish buttons. That’s the Wikipedia part.

But I’ve got this blog to wax wise in, so I’ve devoted my own Squidoo space to sheer mercantilism. Go there for one-stop shopping at the Howard Cruse store, folks: I’ve listed every branch of my life that’s potentially income-producing along with links to the three branches of my main site and a couple of interviews with me that are still lingering online.

I first learned about Squidoo because I maintain Cruse Goodies, a CafePress online shop from which I peddle cool merchandise decorated with my cool cartoon drawings. CafePress seems to have formed a marketing alliance with Godin’s brainchild and is encouraging us shopkeepers to use Squidoo to promote our wares.

Now, I often ask myself why I bother giving a damn whether anybody buys my print-on-demand mugs, mousepads, clocks or t-shirts. There’s probably no other branch of my professional life where I make less profit when somebody coughs up bucks for my art.

I can’t defend my shopkeeping inpulses rationally. I just enjoy the thought of people contemplating my drawings while sipping java in the morning or while feeding baby food to a beloved drooling tot who’s wearing a Howard Cruse bib. Eddie’s sister has a clock on her wall in Florida that sports my "Manic Howie" drawing on its face. Seeing that silly clock brightened my day while we were visiting Eddie’s folks last weekend.

It’s fun to spread my pictures around. That’s what it boils down to. And if I make an occasional penny in the process, it’s frosting on the cake.

We have actually been a couple for more than 27 years, of course. But 2004 is the year that’s inked on our marriage license, which means that, for people of a certain institution-cherishing mindset, two years ago is when our couplehood really got rolling.

Still, Eddie and I are the greenest of newlyweds compared to Hesh and Ev Sedarbaum, the folks shown in the photo below, who this weekend will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary down in Florida.

Hesh was preparing to turn 95 that very weekend and Ev was 91. At those advanced ages they could have been forgiven for simply afixing themselves to the nearest Floridian rocking chairs and sending a card. But instead they made the trip. Without thinking twice. Our marriage was an important family occasion.

As spring chickens each edging into his sixth decade of life, neither Eddie nor I can claim to be "returning the favor" by heading to West Palm Beach to help the old folks party in honor of their seventy years of couplehood. The rigors of our trip won’t compare with the rigors of theirs. Still, we will be away from home for a few days, and I figure I should mention it to you so you’ll know why this blog has gone silent.

I can’t resist noting that — by virtue of Ev and Hesh’s heterosexuality — they were not for even an instant transformed into unmarried singles when they crossed state lines two years ago to attend their son’s wedding. Eddie and I, on the other hand, will stop being married while we are down south.

Our marriage vows notwithstanding, we will involuntarily become "single" again — although we will certainly not have divorced and will be no less devoted to each other while in the Sunshine State than we are here in Massachusetts.

As paradoxes go, it would be nice if the foregoing were a stranger one. But our weekend of quiet marital whiplash is commonplace for lesbian and gay married Bay Staters. While in Florida Eddie and I will simply be experiencing the everyday reality of life as it’s lived by second-class citizens in today’s America.

One thing that may have been confusing to my friend is that, since he was reading my post on its primary home page rather than on the page provided to RSS subscribers, clicking the link would itself produce no effect, since the point of that link was to make sure that the act of resubscribing was being untaken from the correct starting point. If you want to see what I mean, click here.

Y’see? If you’re not already accessing this page via an RSS feed, nothing will change, because you’re already standing where I need you to stand.

But beyond that curiosity, my friend may be encountering a speed bump that was discussed here back in March, which seemed to be related to platform and browser issues. Specifically, readers who have used Microsoft Explorer to arrive at this blog may encounter resistance if they try to subscribe.

This can be overcome! Or at least, I assume it can, since I’ve received no further complaints since the following two entries were posted.

First read the post from March 24.

Then read the followup from March 27.

If neither of these proves helpful, please let me know. I want my loyal readers to be able to subscribe to my timeless ramblings if they wish to.

P.S. When I’m reading RSS-enabled blogs on my Mac using Safari, there’s a little blue RSS icon at the top of the page (see my illustrations yesterday and today) that will start the subscription ball rolling if you click on it. If you’re a Windows user and you don’t spot such an icon, scroll down the page and look for a sidebar link that reads something along the lines of "Subscribe to this weblog."

(A) Hearty thanks. Your loyalty warms my hearts; and

(B) Now please pay attention!!! I am re-routing my RSS feeds today so that I will have a better way of monitoring my blog’s popularity.

Now I know that you could care less whether I feel popular or not, but bear with me. I have deep emotional scars going back to my junior high school social-inadequacy traumas that make me disgustingly needy when it comes to knowing if anybody is bothering to read my little Cruseland chronicle. (ARE YOU STILL PAYING ATTENTION???)

Good. Here’s what I need for you to do so that your RSS subscription will not abruptly vanish and leave you stranded in a Cruse-deprived wasteland.

(1) Please return to my weblog’s home page by clicking on this link.

(2) Subscribe all over again as if you hadn’t done so before. (Remember: subscribing doesn’t cost you anything!)

That’s it! That’s all you need to do. If you follow these simple instructions your new RSS subscription will take over where your old one left off.

But if you don’t do as I ask, you’ll never hear from my blog again and will mistakenly believe that I am no longer adding new entries. Others will continue to bask in my amusing words and pictures regularly while your life becomes sadder, emptier, and more isolated by the day. Eventually you’ll have to increase your daily dosage of anti-depressants just to fend off thoughts of suicide. That could be costly.

So don’t let such a sad fate befall you.

Re-subscribe!

TODAY!!!

Bill and I lost touch with each other after graduation, but through ISS alumni newsletters I learned as years passed that he was devoting his working life to service as a Presbyterian minister in Tennessee. Having retired from that noble endeavor now, he has moved on to a second calling as a teller of tales on the storytelling circuit.

Recently (thanks to the good offices of Google) Bill reestablished contact with me and I learned that he has produced an array of CD recordings of his accounts of life experiences that are regularly performed live before audiences around the country.

Which brings me to today’s topic. There is a bit player named "Howard" who is cited in passing in his tale of a long and long ago canoe trip Bill undertook with fellow ISS students in Quetico Provincial Park, a wondrous Canadian wilderness preserve north of Minnesota. That "Howard" in Bill’s story would be me.

Listening to Bill’s CD put me in a nostalgic mood, in the throes of which I have dug out the diary I myself kept during the same summer adventure described by my storytelling friend (who carried a more high-tech memory aid than I did into the woods: a trusty 8mm movie camera). I share with you today one of my journal’s anecdotes about our trek through the roadless lake country up north.

July 12, 1961

On about the second day out, Jay Holekamp got a little too close to the water while drinking and fell in. I didn’t see this; but it was described as a very dramatic immersion, with Jay fighting for balance while slowly slipping in; and everyone regretted that Bill Jones had not been nearby to capture the scene with his movie camera. Ever since, the action of accidentally falling partially or wholly into the water has been dubbed as “pulling a Holekamp," and Jay has pulled at least two more of them since.

Somehow out of this grew a game which several of the campers are continually playing. Any unfortunate and embarrassing accident wins a number of "points” for the victim, the value of points being obscure yet the collection of points being a matter of pride. The value of "pulling a Holekamp" varies with the degree of the mishap — slipping and wetting a foot is worth a paltry 5-or-so points, while a grand total of from 50 to 100 goes to the lucky fellow who plunges headfirst into the lake with a kettle of chicken soup. (Yesterday it was unanimously agreed that anyone dying on the trip would win the game. In the event of multiple deaths, the most points would go to the one who suffered the most!)

At the moment, to my knowledge, Jay himself is in the lead, but John Terry is not far behind. John got a big boost in points when he stepped in a cherry pie this morning.

I both treasure the memory and would never dream of asking my body to do that much paddling, portaging, and aching again!

But that doesn’t mean that the cry of a loon or an unexpected moose sighting won’t always get my wilderness-loving juices flowing.

Hands off ANWR, Mr. Prez!

So with the gods of original-art commerce smiling today, maybe it’s a good time to mention to longtime Wendel-lovers out there that my cover painting for Wendel On The Rebound, the long-out-of-print collection published back in 1989 by St. Martin’s Press, would dearly love to have a nice wall to hang on.

This is a favorite painting of mine and I’ll probably frame it for one of my own walls here at home. But since making new money from old art is my main hope for economic survival, I thought I would mention it here before I do.

If you check my web site’s Art For Sale page you’ll see that the normal price for this piece is $750. But to reward the loyal fans who take time to look in on this blog, I’ll lower the price to $700 and throw in the matte for free if you’ll step up to the plate before I come to my senses.

First come, first served. Mention this blog entry or I won’t know to give you the special deal.