God, this guy's life must be sheer hell. Sibling rivalry is bad enough normally, but imagine if you had some super-famous brother running around who looked just like you, and every day of your life people were coming up to you and saying, "Excuse me, are you your brother?" And then they acted all disappointed when it turned out you were just you. Every day, when you went off to your pokey job at the real estate office or whatever, people would come in and say, "Hey, it's Nicholas Brendon, Xander from TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer! What are you doing working in a real estate office, Nicholas?" And you'd have to explain over and over again that you weren't the fun Brendon, you were just his boring old lookalike brother. God, it gives me chills just thinking about it.
On the other hand... if he has the good sense to milk it, Kelly must really score with the babes.

8/11/99
Well, we went to Makeup this last Saturday, but I'm afraid it was just sorta so-so. I'm not sure what was wrong. All the elements were there for a great evening, but I just had this low-level funk that I never completely shook. I think I'm getting jaded. A year ago being out in drag at all would have been an utterly thrilling event, but nowadays I find myself wondering what I'm doing hanging out in some noisy, dark, crowded club. I just feel very angsty and fidgety these days, and it's hard to find happiness in much of anything. Wherever I am, I want to be someplace else.

I haven't felt very pretty lately, and maybe my attitude is seeping out through my pores and actually making me less attractive, because it's been months since a stranger came up and told me I look nice. I know it's ridiculous to bitch about not getting compliments from strangers, but I USED to get compliments, and now they've just stopped cold, so it's got me worried something's wrong. Christ, I'm not even thirty, yet... are my looks fading already?

Jesus, listen to me whine. What can I say? I'm honestly trying to make the best of things, but right now it just feels like everything is wrong. I'm probably just funky about all this health stuff, I'll snap out of it.
There was some fun stuff at Makeup, like there was one performer who was so fucking awful that she was pretty hilarious. She was called Mama, and she was this big round queen all done up in this inter-galactic Devine outfit. She performed an utterly wretched version of Pretty Vacant that started like this:

There's no point in asking, you'll get no reply
I just remembered, that I don't care...
Blah blah, blah, blah, yargle, it's all too much
You'll always find me... out to lunch!

And then she repeated that one, mangled verse again... and again... and again!

I was rootin' for this poor girl, but she really did break through to some previously uncharted realm of badness, it was just amazing. I swear, I giggled myself to sleep that night.

8/12/99
Went to an opthamologist today, and it turns out that I am not in fact dying of a hideous brain tumor after all. The doc said the floaters will probably go through periods of getting better or worse as the years go by, so I'd best get used to 'em. It's not exactly good news, but I suppose it beats a slow, lingering death.

I realized that you can usually tell if a doctor is any good by how ritzy his office is. Seriously, if a doctor has an office in a poor part of town, and when you get there the floor is sticky and there are all these bad paintings of seagulls on the walls and his waiting room has nothing but copies of Jack and Jill from 1978, odds are that when you get in to see him, he'll be some greasy little shlub who don't know shit from shinola. On the other hand, if his office is on Park Avenue and it's plushly appointed with Picasso prints and fresh copies of Time and The New Yorker, odds are he'll be a spiffy gent with about fifty diplomas in his exam room. He could still be a shlub who don't know shit from shinola, but the odds are obviously a lot better with a ritzy guy. The selection of waiting room magazines tell you a lot about a doctor's personality, too. If he's got a bunch of money or sports magazines, watch out, he's probably some Republican slimeball looking to perform an emergency cash-ectomy on you. But if he's got a bunch of fruity art or psychology magazines, he's probably an actual human being who will give a damn about whatever the hell is the matter with you... So hold on to him for dear life!

8/13/99
We were driving through Hollywood, and we saw Kelly Brendon AGAIN! Or maybe it was Nicholas... For a while after our first encounter I wondered if maybe Nicholas didn't really have a twin, if maybe he just says that to get rid of fans who are bothering him, but I looked on the Internet Movie Database and it turns out that there are indeed twin Brendon Bros.

K had just bought a Buffy comic book (I know; we're geeks) and I tried to convince her to run over and get Kelly to sign it. It's probably for the best that she didn't. I mean, imagine it: "Excuse me... Could you sign this comic book adaptation of the TV show your brother is on?" That sort of thing could push anybody over the edge. 

8/14/99
Now, this was more like it. We went to Dragstrip tonight, and had a great time. I know I've been slagging Dragstrip a lot lately and building up Makeup, but we actually had a much better time at tonight's Dragstrip than we did at the last Makeup. The theme was Rock n' Roll, so K dressed up like a '50s rockabilly boy with jeans and a t-shirt and a leather vest, and I wore my leopard print minidress AGAIN. I wanted to wear something else, but K made me wear it because it matched her outfit best, and of course I have to defer to the wishes of the man of the house. We had a bunch of fake tattoos we drew on each other with markers: I had a burning skull on one shoulder, and a love heart that said URSULA + K on the other shoulder. All together now: Awww. I'd love to show you some pix, but unfortunately my digital camera seems to have died. Grumble, mumble...

I was sure I'd get hit on tonight, what with my being  dressed in that super-slutty outfit. I figured maybe I haven't been hit on lately because my outfits haven't been wacky enough... folks DO expect drag queens to be completely over-the-top, after all. Well, tonight's outfit was one of the trashiest things I've ever worn, and I STILL didn't hear one word from anybody all night... but K did get hit on! Sigh. Even in man drag, K is still prettier than me. We'd just come in the door of the club, and this little trendoid dork-boy got one look at K & started swooning: "Oh, will you marry me? Come on, what do you need him for? Get yourself a real man!" K deftly brushed off his clumsy advances, but I was so shocked by this guy's behavior that I went into a dork-coma and didn't say anything. Now I really, really wish I'd had one of those sassy drag queen lines ready, you know, "Listen honey, why should she want YOUR sorry ass, when she's got the best o' both worlds, right here?" I wish I knew why nobody's hit on me lately. Of course I'm not looking to get picked up, but everybody likes feedback. Maybe everybody WANTED to hit on me, but K was scaring 'em off. She had that '50s greaser-hood look going on... People probably figured that if they so much as looked at me, my juvie boyfriend would give 'em a shiv in the ribs.

We had a long, fascinating conversation with a local queen we know who'd just had a whole bunch of cosmetic surgery. I'd say her name, but I don't know if she wants to keep her surgeries a secret or not. She had the works done: the doctors basically peeled off her face, stretched it out, and then stapled it back on, it was a real Face/Off job. She had a brow lift, her jawbone was shaved down, her adam's apple was taken off, she had a nose job, etc., etc. She still has a screw protruding from her skull, hidden beneath her hair (I resisted the impulse to make a joke about her being a "screwhead".) It sounds like she went through an unspeakable ordeal. She coughed up blood for hours, and she still has trouble keeping her eyes closed all the way... but damn, she looks great! She had this gumball tucked in her cheek the whole time we were talking, and at first I thought her face was just hugely swollen up on that side, and I was really puzzled when this cheek-lump suddenly popped over to the other side of her face. It was kinda like that scene in Young Frankenstein when Marty Feldman's hump jumps from one shoulder to the other.

Me & K danced the night away even though the music was mostly crap. Kiss (ARGH!) followed by Ratt (puke, vomit, spew) followed by a bunch of wretched R&B. Yeah, it was supposed to be rock n' roll night, but the clone gay boys just couldn't do without their R&B. That place IS turning into The Soul Train. At one point the DJ came on the PA and said something like, "Jeez, I gotta say that I actually impressed MYSELF with that last mix," and it was such an embarassing remark that I had to bite my lip to hold back the tears. It's amazing what a difference the music makes: when they played all those  fifteen-minute-long TLC/Genuwine/Jennifer Lopez remixes I felt tense and twitchy and I wanted to start knocking people's heads together, but when they actually played a song I liked I suddenly felt happy & horny & all was right with the world. I even gave K a lap dance! Well, it wasn't really a lap dance, because if I ever sat on K's little lap for real I'd probably crush the life out of her (I am about two feet taller than she is, after all), but I sat K down on a couch and gave her as much of a lap dance as I could  from down on the floor between her knees. I was such a bad girl that K said she was going to give me a spanking when we got home. I assumed she was kidding, but later that evening, she made good on her threat. Oh, the shame. 

8/16/99
Had a doggy adventure the other night. I was over at an ATM at about 4 in the morning, when this big white mutt came out of the darkness and shambled up to me. I tried to ignore him, but the poor beast looked so scraggly and lonesome, he brought out all my maternal instincts. When I bent down to pet him, he stood up on his hind legs, put his paws over my shoulders, and hugged me. That did it, I knew I couldn't just let him wander away and get run over or something. He had a couple of tags, but they were all so faded I could barely read them, and none of them had any addresses, only phone #'s. I looked around a bit to make sure his owner wasn't lurking somewhere nearby, then I dragged the mutt over to a nearby payphone & started calling the numbers on his tags. Every number I tried was disconnected, but after about ten tries I finally got one that answered. It was a local animal hospital, and the guy that answered sounded really sleepy and out of it, but he told me if I brought the dog over there they'd see what they could for him. They were way on the other side of town, but it still sounded preferable to just dropping the dog off at the pound or something.

I tried to drag the dog over to my car, but he really didn't want to get in, he fought me all the way. Finally I managed to haul his fuzzy butt inside, and we took off. He had a powerful dog-reek, this nasty doggy fog that filled the whole car, and he was really freaking out, literally bouncing off the walls and jumping around so much I could hardly work the gear shift. I tried singing to him a little bit (they say that music hath charms,) but nothing helped, not even my touching rendition of Pennies From Heaven. I love that song, but it's the song I always sing to dying or very frightened animals to calm them down, so it's beginning to have some pretty unpleasant associations for me. The animals I sing it to usually aren't very soothed by it anyhow, they just look at me like I'm nuts. Oh well, at least if they're busy thinking I'm insane it gives them something to think about other than whatever's wrong with them.

Finally we got to the doggy hospital, this bland little beige box in a bad part of town. It looked like a donut shop or something. The hospital's front door was wide open (in the middle of the night?) and as soon as I got near a guy came out and took the dog from me. We barely spoke, I just handed the dog over and that was that.
The next day I called to find out what had happened to the dog, and the girl who answered said that since they had no record of a stray being brought in they must have been able to find the dog's owner. I sure hope so, but for all I know the dog hospital people just gassed him the minute I drove away. Animal shelter people deal with so many strays every day, they gas cats and dogs without a second thought. Part of me wonders if the dog would have been better off if I'd just left him on the streets.  At least on the streets, he would have had a fighting chance.

Did I do the right thing, or did I condemn this poor animal to death? I'll never know. The only thing I have to remember him by is that cloud of dog reek in my car that five cans of Pinesol still haven't touched. 
I was really tempted to take the dog back to our place, but our rental agreement doesn't allow dogs. It sucks. I adore dogs, I want a dog more than anything, but circumstances keep preventing me from owning one. I haven't been able to own a dog for seven years. I'm so desperate to own a dog that me and K have adopted a couple of stuffed pups, Nopey and Yeppie. I got them as gifts for K, but now they definitely belong to both of us. If anything I'm a little more nutty about these dogs than K is, although she might argue that point. They're two fat little bulldogs, and they're the cutest things you ever saw. In some ways Nopey and Yeppie are better than real dogs. For one thing, Nopey and Yeppie can dance! You just have to hold on to their paws, and give 'em a good wiggle. Nopey and Yeppie can talk, too! Well, to be honest, all Nopey says is, "Nope," and all Yeppie says is "Yep," but that's better than most dogs can do! Naturally, these two rarely see eye to eye, and many's the night we've had to step in to break up a heated debate ("Nope!" "Yep!" "Nope!" "Yep!") Thankfully, in the end Nopey and Yeppie usually agree to disagree.
Nopey and Yeppie are very low-maintenance pets. They don't pee all over the place. They don't need to go for walks all the time. They don't even need to be fed. I still long to have a real, live dog sometimes, but real dogs just don't live long enough. You've only got a real dog for like ten or twelve years before he goes blind and his teeth fall out and his tail falls off and he dies from some horrible disease. I was an only child, and Hubba, the dog I got when I was about ten, was like a brother to me. When he died a few years ago, it was one of the hardest things I'd ever been through. I don't know if I could take that kind of pain again.

I haven't had a stuffed animal since I was a little kid, and I never even knew I wanted one until Nopey and Yeppie came along. There's a part in The Velveteen Rabbit that says that if you love a stuffed animal enough, it becomes real. That never really made sense to me before I got these two little pups. When I see them sitting together on our bed, they're so cute that I laugh out loud. When I'm sad, I give these pups a squeeze and it really does make me feel a little better, just like real doggies would. Nopey and Yeppie might not be real in the sense that they chew up socks and bark all night, but they're plenty real enough for me... and I'll never have to sing Pennies from Heaven to them. 

8/17/99
K's just wrapping up a week-long vacation. Sigh. I sure am going to miss having her around all the time. We've been all over the place this week. We went to the new Getty Center and saw all of their boring art and the pretty garden (hummingbirds!), we went to a sculpture store and bought a couple of giant Buddahs (cheap!) to put out in our backyard as part of the International Bazarr theme we got going on out there, we went to TWO drag clubs, saw The Iron Giant (way better than anything Disney's done since Nightmare Before Xmas) bought some new outfits, met Xander Harris' twin brother... it's been a full week! Unfortunately there were some yucky things that happened, and we had a couple of fights. Neither fight was really ABOUT much of anything, they were just those weird, dopey fights that happen sometimes, the kind of fight where you both feel stupid arguing, but the fight just has a momentum of its own. I really wanted K's vacation to be perfect, but even though it wasn't, we did have a pretty good time overall. Today we polished things off by going up to Hollywood for the Fairfax High swap meet and dropping by a couple of clothing stores we'd missed the other day. K was still pretty tired from last night (she'd only slept about five hours,) so we only stuck around for an hour or two and we didn't end up buying any clothes. I did pick up the last issue of Ben is Dead, the zine I've been writing for since I was just a wee l'il kitten. Darby, the zine's editrix, has been saying she was gonna kill the thing off for years, but now she's finally done it. Ben is Dead has had a huge effect on my life. There were times when that rag was just about the only thing that kept me alive. In the early '90s I was such a miserable, alienated kid, and when I discovered Ben is Dead, it was like meeting the best friend I'd been waiting for my whole life. It was a place where bitter punks, drag queens, geeks,  girly-girls, dykes, freaks, and angry loners of all stripes were all free to sing the songs of themselves. It was funny, it was sexy, it was disgusting, and it was raw and personal and practically perfect in every way. Every arty geek kid has that special thing, that book or movie or record or whatever, that first sets them on fire, the thing that makes them cry out, Yes! I'm not alone! Maybe it's Beat poetry or The Velvet Underground or The Catcher in the Rye or the Sex Pistols or Marilyn Manson, but every budding freak and freakette has their thing. Ben is Dead was my thing, and I was lucky to be a small part of it. I've had some crazy times in my years with the mag: I got to chat with Johnny Rotten for a half hour without passing out once, not even when he got mad at me after I asked him if he wears a toupee. I spent an entire day with Malcolm Maclaren, listening to him talk and talk about everything under the sun, and loving every minute of it. I got stoned with Cousin Oliver. Perhaps, best of all, I got to know Darby, and for a few days and nights through the years, I got to share in the endless, noisy, exhausting, sometimes tragic thrill-ride that is her existence. Darby has pissed me off and let me down more times than I can count. I owe her the world.

Ben is Dead is dead, but I'm not. After all those years of wondering how I'd make it through the night, I'm still here, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that if Ben is Dead had never been, I'm not sure I would have made it this far. There will be dark nights ahead, but at least now I know that I'm not the only lost freakette in the world, and the dark isn't quite so lonesome anymore.
RIP, BID.

8/20/99
I don't think I've gone on record before with just how unhappy I am with the Monty Python gang for allowing their shows to be censored, chopped up & shown with commercials on A&E. In the early '70s the Pythons fought a nasty lawsuit with ABC to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening, but I guess that was a long, long time ago. What, John Cleese wasn't raking in enough dough doing all those commercials? Eric Idle wasn't making ends meet with those bad cartoon voice-overs? Those original Python shows are sacred, and these versions that are airing on A&E are just the most horrid abominations. I saw one where they did the entire build up to the famous Lumberjack Song (you know, "I'm a lumberjack, and I'm OK...") but right when the song was starting, the show ended. There's no excuse for that sort of thing. Python sketches were never about punchlines, and half the fun was in the nutty ways one bit blended into the next. When they're all hacked up like this, it defeats the whole purpose of the show. They even have the nerve to use Graham Chapman's old General character to cut the shows off in the middle. Sure, on the original show he was always butting in to stop sketches, but he was an organic part of the proceedings, he wasn't just shoved in there to stop sketches so there'd be more room for Lexus commercials. Hell's bells, people sure are irritating.

We've had to pack away all of my dresses and shoes and stuff because our landlord, Ken, dropped by today to inspect for termites, and he looked in all of our cabinets and everything. He found some little balls of wooden termite poo in our backyard, but we seem to be in pretty good shape. Ken is a character actor who's been in a zillion super-popular movies and TV shows that I've never seen. I looked him up on The Internet Movie Database, and it's kinda funny how many things he's been in that I almost went to see (but didn't,) or saw half of (but not the half he was in). A few months ago he almost played one of the sinister cabal guys on The X Files (you know, those old white guys who sit around in smoke-filled rooms and secretly run the world,) but at the last minute the part he was going to play ended up being played by one of their regular cabal guys. It's probably just as well; I don't know how I'd feel renting an apartment from one of Cancer Man's pals.

While the landlord was snooping around we also had to hide all signs of Scratchy the possum. We put a board up over Scratchy's little door under the house, and we cleared away all the apple cores & stuff that Scratchy's left out there. My heart was racing the whole time the landlord was here, I was terrified he'd discover Scratchy and send him off to possum Auschwitz. It was like we had Anne Frank stashed in the basement or something.

Goodness, what would great-uncle Adolf say?

8/29/99
Went shopping this weekend, and we got a bunch of tikis for our kitchen and a cute, pleated black skirt for Dragstrip's next theme, Back-to-School. I was being silly, I really should be pinching my pennies just now. I found out that I owe the IRS $178 by Sept 15. This month was gonna be tight anyhow, but I have no idea how I'm gonna raise this extra douip's next theme, Back-to-School. I was being silly, I really should be pinching my pennies just now. I found out that I owe the IRS $178 by Sept 15. This month was gonna be tight anyhow, but I have no idea how I'm gonna raise this extra dough. I really hate paying the government protection money (that's really what it is, too; give us your money, to spend however we see fit, or we'll send you to jail.) I just wish I could have some say in how it's spent. Hey, instead of building ANOTHER prison to lock up all the crackheads, howzabout feeding the poor, or doing something actually useful? Just a thought.

8/31/99
My Hotmail email account is kaput. I can now be reached HERE. It seems some joker was hacking into my Hotmail account and using it to send spam emails, so the Hotmail folks killed it. They won't let me start it up again, either. This is massively annoying, as I'm having to send out dozens and dozens of change-of-address emails to people, and I've spent the last hour changing my email address all over this site. What's more, there are plenty of addresses that I only had in my Hotmail archives. Now that those archives are gone, I have no idea how to get in touch with a bunch of my old email penpals. The only advantage to this mess is that now I've got a clean slate, and it should be a few weeks at least before all of the fresh spam starts filling up my box. Towards the end of my Hotmail account, I was routinely getting ten junk emails a day. One day, I had NINETEEN identical messages from the same sleazy outfit! How in the hell could they have thought that was effective advertising? People are such dopes! I yam disgustipated.

9/1/99
I was cursing that idiot who sent those spam emails that got my Hotmail account cancelled... until I realized that that idiot could very well have been ME! I get so many emails that are like, "hey ursullah lov the websight tell me moor lov to lov yu babee sighned bob," and since I can't very well write out my life story for every one of these charmers, I have a little form letter that I send them that basically says, "Thanks, keeping coming back, here's the url... "

Well, I'm wondering if somebody got one of these emails, didn't care for it, and ratted on me for "spamming" them. God, could anybody be THAT sleazy? That's some seventh circle of sleaziness is what that is.

9/2/99
I was getting a lot of fanmail at the Hotmail address, but since I switched over to Yahoo it's slowed way, way down. It was really abrupt. This doesn't make any sense. I have the same "send me an email" link all over this site... Why would the address the email goes to affect how much email I get?

I got a letter the other day from a sad tranny who told me how envious she was that I have somebody like K, a girl who is really accepting of all my gender quirks and who goes shopping with me and everything. I get a lot of letters like that, and I always tell these people the same thing; if you want a girlfriend who likes  cross-dressers, go find yourself one! Go out to a drag club and strike up a conversation with a cute girl, or put an ad in the personals, or do SOMETHING, but don't  sit around thinking that just because you like to wear dresses you'll never find a girl who can love you!
I'll never understand why people are so squeamish about the personals. I met K through the personals, and obviously it worked out pretty well for me! I was coming out of yet another lousy relationship, and the personals sounded like a dream-come-true: I could just say exactly who I was and what kind of person I was looking for, and the girls would come to me. That's exactly how it worked, too! I dated four or five of these girls before K called, and all of them were really nice, and gorgeous. There was no down-side to this arrangement! When K called, I knew right away that she was somethin' special, and when we met I fell hard and never stopped falling. Placing that ad was the best damn thing I ever did. When people bitch to me about how they can never meet anybody nice, I tell them to try the personals, and they just roll their eyes. Where did this nutty stigma come from? For Pete's sake, you don't have to be a lonesome tranny! Believe me, if my great-uncle could find a girlfriend, so can you!
This has been a public service announcement.

9/5/99
Whew! Just got back from Club Makeup a couple of hours ago, and I'm still all warm and tingly.

We had a rough start, with lots of fussin' and a-fightin' before we left. I got a late start getting ready, and my look just wasn't coming together. This was definitely one of those nights when I looked like a big dorky boy in a dress. K was going crazy waiting while I tried and tried to pull myself together, and it got pretty tense, but once we finally got to the club we ended up having a nifty time.

The club was having a big shindig in honor of Iggy Pop, and no, Mr. Pop wasn't there. I wanna get so famous that people throw big parties in my honor, and I don't have to show up! I've never been a huge Iggy fan, but the queens that were covering his songs tonight all did a really good job. Probably the best of the bunch was Brenda Brat, that queen I wrote about before with the weird little Marilyn Manson boobs. She did a version of China Girl (well, it's sort of an Iggy song,) and it was really sweet. She was wearing a bikini this time, and it helped; when she's naked she looks like a big viking woman, but throw a bikini on her and she could almost be some giant blond out of a David Lee Roth video. Torment, the club's MC, seemed to be wearing nothing but glitter. We were pretty far back, so it was hard to tell, but he SAID he was naked, and I believe him. I'm always amazed by how much flesh people show at these things. We saw one girl who was wearing a top made out of some weird screendoor/chainmail mesh, and it left NOTHING to the imagination! Her body was OK, but you see people with really bad bodies showing everything off too, and that's so wonderful. There was one big fat fellow who got up on the go-go platform and shook his mile-wide booty like there was no tomorrow! Yay!

Talked with Rev. Dan and the Nimrods gang for a while tonight, and I was so boring I almost put myself to sleep. I had absolutely nothing to say, it was torture. It's crazy, because lately me & Dan have been chatting on the phone and it's gone pretty well, but when we get together in person I have one of my little groupie freak-outs and I clam up. I swear, people either bore me, or they scare me to death. I'm just not made right.

9/6/99
To close this unusually glamorous and Hollywoody volume of my diary on an appropriately glamorous and Hollywoody note, I'd like to make a little announcement about an upcoming project I'm very excited about. In the near future (I'm talking about sometime before the century ends), I'm going to start my own TV show! No, I haven't been signed by CAA, this is just a public access thingie. I've been saying I was going to start my own public access show since I was about twelve years old, so it seems like the time is pretty goddamn ripe. The thing that's always stopped me before was that my plans were way too ambitious, and I got bogged down. I wanted to do some big epic drama with a cast of thousands, and I just don't have those kinds of resources. This new show will require nothing but some puppets, spray paint, Elmers' glue, and mine own sweet self, plus whatever friends and friends of friends I can drag on the air with me. It will be kind of like a kid's show, only with genitals and angst. It'll have interviews, short films, animation, bands, readings, bad model rocket ships... and puppets! It will, of course, be a masterpiece. 

The one major drawback I can see is the very real possibility that word of this thing will get back to my family. If somebody who knows my folks should happen to see the show, well, that's that, Ursula won't be a secret no mo'. I could still chicken out... but I don't think I will. If anybody out there is interested in getting involved, drop me a line, and we'll talk. Don't be shy! Play your cards right, and a few years from now you could be one of the "little people" I thank when I give my big acceptance speech at the Emmys!