TRAU KEINEM, DEM DU NICHT TRAUST

Was taken to dinner for my birthday to a cute little Austrian boite off the Ku-Damn by the young and very handsome Justin Patterson who is a relative to the very famous wealthy and powerful Mellon Family Dynasty of America.  Despite popular belief I do not have a complete disdain for all rich people, just the icky ones.  In my dealings over the years with the Mellon clan they are true blue.  How does a black drag queen from the ghettos of Los Angeles get mixed up with the mega rich you ask.  Well its a bit of a long story but it all started back in the 1970s when I received a scholarship to attend the prep school Choate Rosemary in Wallingford Connecticut.  Through this scholarship I got to meet the late Paul Mellon and his wife Bunny Mellon who died last year at the age of 103.  Mrs. Mellon loved black people and my insane eccentricities caught her eye many years ago and its through her that I met the sincere charmer that is Justin Patterson. 

Back in the 1990s I had a flirty relationship with the late John-John Kennedy before he was married.  He was somewhat of a dinge queen, and Bunny Mellon was best friends with his mother Jackie O.  Anyway at dinner Justin and I got talking about falling out with friends, a subject I could build a mansion upon and I told him that any relationship in which one party feels even the slightest sense of diminishment from the other for me that relationship is not worth enduring.  I also never regret my decisions to pull away from people with an ultimately corrosive aura.  Those faithful readers of my blogina will know just who I am talking about as well as the person in questions who reads this blog regularly.

SAUGEIL

Fearless Leader Susanne Sachsse and I had a wonderous Skype conference call with our Magic Flute crack team of Jackie Shemish lighting designer from London, Jonathan Berger & Kate Beach handling production design in New York.  There is still so much to do with this project before it premieres in the Fall 2015 during the Performa Biennale. So excited working with indie pop god Jamie Stewart, Roger Mathew Grant the Musicalogist and all the others who will bring this event to fruition.

Susi and Marcuse Siegelstein took me to a delicious birthday fische dinner at the Portuguese restaurant that is on their East Berlin street.  Yes I turned 369 on Feb 20^th which makes me a very old chrystaline entity.  Thank you one and all  for the lovely cards, emugs, texts and juicy presents including the endowment of a very frisky young American born male ingénue . . .

I haven’t watched the telecast of the Oscar ceremony since the late 1970s with my family.  It was boring then and I gather its even duller now, but I was made aware by friends that my old pal Patricia Arquette of the Arquette acting dynasty won an award for best supporting actress for her role in the film Boyhood.  The movie was shown at the Berlinale International Film Festival last year, but I didn’t get a chance to see it but was able to hang out with Patty and she stopped by the Forum Party at the Volksbuhne where I was DJaning last year.  She had heard that I moved to Berlin but didn’t know I had been living here for almost a decade.  Well now the lady is an Oscar winning actress and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer gal.  Also Julianne Moore won for best actress and I met her years ago through director Todd Haynes.  Julianne won for a film called Still Alice that I haven’t seen,  directed by the gay couple Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland.  It was sad to find out that  Richard Glatzer is suffering from a debilitating illness, but I’m glad that his husband Wash has stuck by him and they are continuing to direct films together.  They are both very ambitious so helming an Academy Award winning film I am sure has brought them much happiness and comfort.

On my way to a formal dinner party at the Kreuzburg compound of Nanna Heidenreich of Forum Expanded I was transferring to the U7 UBahn line at Yorkstrasse and saw a meltdown by this Black American busker who usually is parked on this platform hallway singing very badly tedious pop tunes and playing his keyboard in an equally horrid manner.  On this occasion he flipped out because no one was tipping him and threatened everyone walking by that he would kill them.  That’s the downside of living in Berlin, so many performers from the States come here thinking that because there is less competition that they will become huge stars here.  I call it the Gayle Tufts complex.  Not every mediocre American performer can become a success abroad like the talentless Ms. Tufts who I am told is quite popular on German television for her Dinglish routine and also performing in the bland upscale cabaret scene in Berlin.

Frau Heidenreich’s fabulous supper was filled with lots of young perky Berlin youth and with a menu that included chestnut galettes with radicchio & dried apricots and scamorza, a grapefruit avocado salad, a salad from roasted cauliflower with hazelnuts and pomegranate a bouillabaisse with a Tunesian twist, a chestnut fennel celery soup, a mushroom bourguignong stew, roasted chicken with fennel, clementine and pernod and for desert a pavlova homemade baklava, candied orange peel dipped in dark chocolate pate’ de fruit from blood oranges.  The celebutants at the soiree:  Salome Gershe, Nora Melitor, the Forum Expanded Set-up team:  DJane Olga Damnitz aka Angela Anderson, Noam, Seamus, Richard, Laura, Dafne, Mark, Thais, Evan, Mascha who was on the Teddy Jury this year, Katrin, Adam who helped with the final crazy stages of cooking along with Anouschka.

Ran into the stunning young Berlin born and raised artist Kerstin Honeit and her partner at Nollendorky Platz.  Ms. Honeit looks like a young version of the famous lesbian writer Mary McCarthy and is featured  in a group Exhibition at N.B.K. Gallery called History is a Warm Gun that opens Friday Feb 27^th at 7pm at Chausseestrasse 128/129 that also features the sexy Pola Sieverding.  If you are in town looking for some fun Berlin flavoured event this is the place to be.