Letter From The Editor: 8 Years & Still Kicking!
Hello Champagne Dreamers! I can’t believe that this is the 8th anniversary of this site! Eight is my favorite number, and in some ways this has been my favorite year at the World of Champagne. I know, I know: the world is on fire and we have had some real growing pains to go through as a society. Things just keep getting darker and darker politically (hopefully with a sunrise coming this November!) and at the time that I’m writing this there are more than 173,000 people dead from COVID-19. There are protests around the country...
read moreWe Are The Weirdos, Mister
Is it any wonder that queer folks love Halloween? Of course it isn’t everyone. Just like any other group, queer people have all kinds of likes and dislikes, family traditions and personal quirks that make them a unique and complex group of people. But for a lot of queer people, Halloween is the “gay high holy day,” a day to celebrate the spooky, the different, the weird. It’s a day to celebrate being a weirdo, and like Fairuza Balk says in The Craft: “We are the weirdos, mister.” When I was a kid, I was...
read moreGhosting, or Actually, Brandon, You *ARE* “The Bad Guy”
Why can’t we all just say what we mean? Of all the new cultural things my old brain is being forced to comprehend by Millennials and these strange new Generation Z creatures, the one I find most distasteful is “ghosting.” It basically just means disappearing: not returning calls or texts, leaving someone “on read” (another newfangled term that means clicking into a message that shows it was read, but not replying), and ending communication without any sort of explanation. I’m here to tell you: it’s...
read moreLetter From The Editor: 7 Years & Still A Beautiful Disaster!
Dear Champagne Dreamers, Well, August came and went without my annual letter to the editor, talking about what the last year had been like and what I was looking forward to in the year to come. It was actually pretty representative of the last year that I’ve had running the World of Champagne as well as all of my other side projects – hectic and behind schedule! I’m fairly certain that last year’s letter talked about the launch of the YouTube channel, and here we are again at another anniversary and the channel is...
read moreWell, Actually…
I want to tell you a joke. It’s one of my favorites. It’s about mansplaining, and I like that it’s funny and clever, but also has a certain social awareness. Here it is: Q: Where does a man get his water? A: From the, “Well, actually…” That’s good, right? Anyone who has experienced mansplaining can laugh at it, and the “Not all men!” crowd can smirk smugly at their assumed superiority over the rest of their gender. But it still has a punch to it. It resonates because of the truth...
read moreCandy Hearts
Another year, another Valentine’s Day, another 24 hours to pass waiting for all of that amazing chocolate to go on clearance… I’m a strange creature: I’m driven by emotions, but emotional displays make me queasy. I watch movies and get choked up over declarations of love that would make me cringe if they happened in my living room. I turn my nose up at the type of big romantic gestures that I secretly hope for. I’m the queen of mixed signals. Valentine’s Day can be a loaded time for anyone, but when your...
read moreSwimming
This is a post about body positivity. I am not an expert; I’m just someone who has been wrasslin’ around with body image and self-worth issues in a lot of different ways for most of my years on this planet. I’m also not done yet. There are still days where I stand in front of a mirror and I can’t look myself in the eyes or when I avoid physical contact because this body feels like a cage. But those days are fewer than they used to be and I have better ways of dealing with them than I used to, so I wanted to share...
read moreHave Yourself A Married Little Christmas
The world of dating and relationships is always full of surprises (and, if your interested in dating men, more than a few unsolicited dick pics), but I still never cease to be confused and bewildered by the mating and dating rituals going on out there in the wild. I’ve been on a blind date where the guy picked me up for dinner, but I had to sit in the back seat…because his boyfriend was in the front. I went on a date with someone who artificially lowered his age by about 25 years, and when I told him I didn’t feel...
read moreBaby, It’s Woke Outside
Tis the season for arguing mindlessly about consent on Facebook? Doesn’t have that typical Bing Crosby “White Christmas” ring to it, does it? But since the discussion of some radio stations refusing to play the holiday classic “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is the controversy du jour, I figured I’d open my big mouth about it too. While most of the discussions I’ve seen devolve pretty quickly into nothing useful at all (like most discussion on Facebook), I think that this does have the potential to...
read moreThe Geography of Forgiveness: Fire Hall’s THE AMISH PROJECT Presents Powerful Meditation
Forgiveness is hard. We live in a world that encourages people to nurse their wounds and their grudges, both slight and monumental, with regular airings of grievances on all available social media platforms. So how can we understand a people who embrace forgiveness so fully that within hours of several of their children being murdered, they extend forgiveness to the shooter and condolences to his widow and children? Those are the sorts of questions raised in The Amish Project, a new show running for only one week of performances at the Fire...
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