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Date Posted: 02:01:45 08/04/01 Sat
Author: spoot
Subject: This American Life

I listen to a radio program called This American Life on public radio. It's a collection of essays, or audio documentaries by various people, usually profiles or memoirs of different people in all sorts of situations in America.

Tonight it was a two part show. The first was on Teenage Transgender boys hanging at a drag club on Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood, a city in the LA area which is a haven for gays. The reporter, a woman who is writing a book about the TG scene in LA, followed a couple on femme boys as they lived and played on the streets, often hustling sex for money, getting hormones on the black market and dosing themselves to get breasts and curves. She profiled two especially, Foxxjazel, who at 21 is sort of the elder matron of the club, and Ariel, a slight teenager who is just now beginning to explore her TS feelings. She interviewed them with great skill and delicacy and it was a beautiful show.

The other was a journal written by a man who was a fan of Bruce Campbell, the great actor in the Sam Raimi Night of the Living Dead series. The writer, a not very successful literary agent, told about loving Bruce, logging on to the internet and finding all these fans and fansites of the actor, but one of the sites was created by Bruce himself and he often contributed pieces and wrote bulletins for the fans, and incredibly, also had his email address on the site. The writer hesitated for a long time, but finally broke down and wrote an email to Bruce, offering his services as an agent in case he ever wanted to write a book. He never expected to hear anything but the actor wrote him back and after some four years, he finally got Bruce's autobiography published. In those four years he ended up spending a lot of time with Bruce, lots of meetings, lots of hanging out. And the whole time, he never lost his sense of being a geeky fan that had the miraculous fortune of helping his idol fulfull his dream and of just plain hanging out with him as well. Every fan's wish come true.

Both stories so acutely reminded me of Eddie, the whole hour should have been called Rhapsody in the Key of Iz. Seemed like magic, but they never mentioned Eddie's name, not once.

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