summer sweet

After endlessly, sweatily hauling my stuff--including jars and jars of Arkansas jam-- home from Newark Airport (which takes, if it's late on a Friday night and the downtown A train is running on the local track instead of the express, and you have to trudge through Penn Station like a pack mule trying to find the elevators because your numerous bags are too bulky to schlep up the stairs, something upwards of 3 hours), I'm finally back in Brooklyn, cocooning in my apt for the day, unpacking all the stuff I'd hidden in boxes to oblige the subletters.

The house was really minimalist, in a soothing way, when I walked in--nothing on the table, no photos on the bookcase, no underwear in the dresser, no stuff anywhere--but it's slowly returning to its more cluttered but liveable state. A girl's got to have easy access to her nail-polish remover and Afghanistan postcards, after all. My mother, bless her heart, showed up the afternoon before I arrived to hobnob with the subletters (who were vacuuming, bless their preppy little hearts) and fill my fridge with homemade meatloaf, roasted zucchini and rye bread. Not to mention yet more toothpaste, toilet paper, and laundry soap. It's a little embarrassing that my mother still treats me like a negligent college student, but then again, having 24 rolls of TP in the hall closet is reassuring. And she'll get plenty of jam--and pickles--from the jam closet in thanks.

Lots of fun things going on this week--the fireworks, of course, but also the start of the lovely Brooklyn Bridge Park outdoor movies, beginning with the Wizard of Oz this Thursday night. I'm already into the al fresco-movie swing, thanks to Princess Charlotte's outdoor cinema in Eureka Springs--in fact, I'm a little sad that I'm not in my best Pink Lady finery for the costume contest happening right now before tonight's showing of Grease (if only to enjoy seeing all the butches in town decked out in greaserwear)--but the BBP events are cheery, down-home ones, complete with take-out pizzas from Grimaldi's, kids in PJs, and hokey pre-show shorts shot by local filmmakers. Another way to beat the heat: the free, and HUGE (if hard to get to) Red Hook municipal pool, which is the size of a Wal-Mart parking lot. Just don't forget to bring a lock for your locker (you aren't allowed to bring anything out to pool except a towel, and they don't sell locks onsite), and remember that the pool, weirdly, closes down between 3pm and 4pm daily.

And I've got Bill Withers' song Lovely Day on constant rotation in my brain right now, thanks to the Body & Soul reunion in the courtyard at PS1, inaugurating the summer-long series of WarmUp parties out there in LIC. Instead of tweaker electro, the music was old-school funk and soul, with 20-minute mixes of Thelma Huston's Don't Leave Me This Way that put me in mind of Sunday mornings at the EndUp in SF, back in my Peachy Puff days selling twizzlers and Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra Light Menthols to the so-late-it's-early queer crowd, and the sweaty, swaying, hands-in-the-air street parties at the Folsom St Fair and Pink Saturday. Leaning over the railing at Julie P's second-floor rooftop patio (which handily overlooks the PS1 courtyard), I wanted to be dancing with K., to have my hands around her waist kissing her in the crowd surrounded by all that disco love.