So, I understand there’s a wedding this weekend. I’ve heard this line delivered several times in the past month, always ironically. Gail Collins:

Finally, I am happy to report that Chelsea Clinton is getting married on Saturday. Perhaps you hadn’t heard.

I gather this means the wedding has received redonkulous press attention in the media-saturated east, where the bride and groom live. But honestly, even media-saturated me hasn’t been paying all that much attention, and I probably wouldn’t have paid any at all if it weren’t for the fact the wedding is allegedly taking place in Rhinebeck, N.Y. It so happens we went to a wedding in Rhinebeck, when was it? Seven years ago. A fine time it was, taking place on the grounds of a country inn. This was the wedding I think I’ve mentioned before — the theme was “candy,” and was integrated into everything from the invitation (which arrived in an edible white-chocolate box) to cocktail hour (which featured sticky-sweet drinks) to table assignments (on all-day suckers) to the party favors, which included a custom CD of romantic music labeled to look like a peppermint twist. Scott, I still have it, and listened to it just the other day. It holds up. Track 1: Gene Wilder singing “Pure Imagination,” from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” One of the band members flirted with me, and I’m glad I remember, because I think that’s the last time that’s going to happen, ever.

I don’t know what the theme of Chelsea’s wedding is, if there even is one. I hope it goes swimmingly, and it almost certainly will. New York magazine offers an FAQ full of links, if you’re interested. I’m not, particularly, but I did learn one thing I hadn’t known before: Chelsea is a vegan.

I always hated this sort of “journalism,” i.e., a) covering people who didn’t want to be covered; and b) hadn’t done anything to deserve unwelcome coverage. Shout a rude question at a dirty politician doing a perp walk? Not my thing, but there’s no shame in that. Put up a “slideshow” of nine frames, showing the bride-to-be covering a distance of about three feet, her face and head covered by a floppy straw hat? That’s WWD’s thing, I guess, but it would make me feel dirty. I don’t even like reading it:

Asked on the street what she found most challenging about planning a wedding, Chelsea Clinton looked up briefly but remained silent and lowered her head again.

You don’t say.

If we want to cover political weddings, surely there are more publicity-hungry candidates out there. Oh, wow:

“Bristol (Palin) definitely has some interesting ideas for her wedding,” Us Weekly executive editor Caroline Schaefer told NBC News in a story that aired Thursday morning on TODAY. “She wants to wear a Carolina Herrera gown … in white. She would like Levi and little Tripp to wear camo vests.”

Now this is interesting. The camo-at-the-wedding idea isn’t unique to Bristol, you should know. About a year ago, in that endless week between Christmas and New Year’s, we stumbled upon a marathon of something called “My Big Redneck Wedding” on Country Music Television. As entertainment, I could take it or leave it, but as anthropology? Fascinating. From the “about” link:

Each episode, hosted by Tom Arnold, will feature a different redneck wedding, each with its own rustic eccentricities, whether it is a four-legged best man, a romantic beer can canopy, a celebratory shotgun salute or a reception filled with mattress surfing and mud wrestling.

Honestly, the standard camo detail is so commonplace at these things it wasn’t even worth mentioning, unless it was done in truly interesting fashion: One bride wore one of those headpieces that comes down on your forehead, with the attached veil? Camo. Another had a camo train. The grooms wore camo so often that more conventional black tie was the exception, rather than the rule. It sounds as though Levi and Bristol’s wedding will be all of a piece. And that thing will deserve a slideshow. I really can’t wait.

OK, I’m outta here. We have comp’ny coming tomorrow night, which means I have to clean the house and start assembling the beer-can canopy. Any suggestions for the menu? I thought I’d go to the Eastern Market tomorrow and see what looks good, but if anyone knows of something new and interesting to do with sweet corn and tomatoes (most likely to be found in abundance tomorrow), I’m all ears. (Ha ha. Ears.)

A great weekend to you and yours. I’m gone.

Paul Fussell’s great book on American social class stratification — titled, duh, “Class” — is pretty out of date in the details by now. Written at the dawn of the go-go ’80s, it missed how much that decade changed the relationship between class and money, never mind the ’90s and ’00s, which blew it out of the water.

But a lot of the details are timeless, including my biggest takeaway, which is probably not unique to him, but he gets credit for being the first writer to point it out to me: The hallmark of the middle class is fear. Fear of slipping a rung, either in reality or just in the eyes of others. It explains so much about how middle-class Americans dress, talk and otherwise comport themselves.

Middles love euphemism (“Excuse me, but where is your powder room?”). They like their labels on the outside of their clothes, so everyone knows they bought the right designer purse or necktie. They fret over the condition of their lawns and the shine on their cars. Etcetera. And so it was that I picked up my Detroit News today and immediately identified the area’s biggest residential foreclosure as a distinctly middle-class house. Hell, it might even be proletarian. Who else would build an $18 million, 13,777-square-foot house in a subdivision, complete with bowling alley and “custom wine tasting and cigar rooms?”

“It’s like going to Disney World,” said real estate agent Chris Knight, who has sold the home twice. “It’s a phenomenal, one-of-a-kind special property. Waterfalls, ponds all over the place, streams. Lots of Venetian plaster walls. Imported this, imported that …”

Venetian plaster, you say? It’s so much…classier than regular plaster.

The story reminds us this pile of Venetian plaster — inevitably described as “a mansion” — is not alone in its sad little subdivision, Turnberry Estates:

A third of the subdivision’s homeowners have either faced foreclosure in the past two years or had mortgage problems, public records indicate.

Since March 2008, one house was lost to foreclosure; three were scheduled for sales but avoided them; and two foreclosure sales are pending — including (former Detroit Lion) Charles Rogers, according to the Legal News. The former No. 2 NFL draft pick faces a sale Aug. 31 after defaulting and owing $1.17 million, according to a Wednesday notice in the Legal News.

Turnberry Estates has to stand for something bigger; the writer in me demands it. Nowhere do you see so much evidence of how disconnected wealth and responsibility got in the last 25 or so years than you do in housing — not just in these vulgar money pits but even in more modest upscale homes (always homes, never houses), with their media rooms and enormous closets and wine cellars and poker rooms and all the rest of it. I knew a guy who built a 10,000-square-foot house when he married a woman who had two daughters. They needed the space, he said; they would have a live-in housekeeper to watch the girls when they wanted to do impulsive newlywed things like go out to dinner or fly to New York for the weekend or whatever.

They’re divorced now. But you knew that.

My house is 2,000 square feet. The people who built it raised seven children here, in three bedrooms. My last house was about the same size. The previous owners had five kids — and one bathroom. My friend with the 10K house had separate bathrooms for each daughter. The first thing they did after moving in was convert a dead-air space into a deluxe closet.

Do I sound resentful? I’m not. Enjoy your money, rich people. But when my house is foreclosed upon, I bet it’ll be easier to unload than the $18 million Venetian plaster showplace. Even with a cigar room.

So, some bloggage? Probably we can rustle up some:

The New York Post falls for a wrong-o. Did an accused killer who swallowed rat poison get an emergency liver transplant, as the paper crowed? Um, no. But that is one great headline: Thug’s op is liver worst. Congrats to the greatest copy desk in tab-dom.

Thanks to Rana (I think) for reacquainting me with Tom and Lorenzo, the Project Rungay bloggers who dabble in “Mad Men” on the side. I can take or leave them on the episode guides, but their commentary on the clothes is first-rate. I loved their latest, on Betty Draper last season, including her slammin’ Roman holiday getup. They’ve got great things to say about all the madwomen, though, so warning: You can get lost in that site. But in a good way.

The Michigan oil spill now stretches for 35 miles of the Kalamazoo River, and yes, pals, it looks like we have another BP on our hands. Who could have predicted? And so on.

Kate’s going to the Warped Tour show with her dad tomorrow, and I promised her I’d get her a new guitar strap to collect autographs on. So time to hop to it.

A couple weeks ago, scanning the police reports, I came across one that didn’t make the final cut. It didn’t really have much of a local angle. A doctor at one of the local hospitals had his prescription pad stolen, and there had been a number of attempts to pass phony scripts since, most of them deep in the inner city, where my guess is pharmacists see this every day.

The report detailed what drugs the perps had tried to get. Most were obvious abuse candidates — the opiate pain meds so popular with Hollywood starlets and the like. But I was struck by the rest of the list, which included cholesterol regulators, asthma meds and even folic acid — iron pills. A day or two later, I came across a story in my news-farming about the difficulty of administering AIDS drugs in desperately poor countries (and neighborhoods, for that matter). Patients who are feeling well find it too tempting to sell their meds on the black market. A full bottle can bring hundreds of dollars on the street — an enormous amount for people living in poverty, especially in Africa, or even New York.

Just connecting dots casually, I wonder if the people trying to pass the fraudulent scripts aren’t trying to get high so much as get by. When your kid is wheezing, an albuterol inhaler is probably worth more than all the Lindsay Lohan fruit salad in the world. Ghetto economies are as complex, in their way, as more aboveboard systems.

Of course, poor people, especially poor children, have other options to get their drugs legally. Maybe you can get high with albuterol. Maybe I’m just talking out my ass here. It has happened before.

Alex once told me about a drag queen of his acquaintance who could wad up a cocktail dress into a mass smaller than a softball and practically palm the thing, all while seeming to look through another rack of dresses. Me, I’ve never been able to steal more than a ballpoint pen from my office without breaking out in hives. Born middle class, and I’ll stay there the rest of my life.

So. I saw this thing yesterday while dropping in and out of Weingarten’s chat. It’s about the upcoming nuptials of Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston, and it’s not nice, and she loses me entirely when she gets into the religion part, but then, the column is called “The Spirited Atheist,” after all. In some ways, the anger Susan Jacoby exhibits here reminds me of that period between Labor Day and Election Day, 2008, in which the world met $.P. for the first time, and a large chunk of the population was left scratching our heads and asking, what the–? And then we got angry, and stayed angry, and have only sublimated it, barely, since. Jacoby:

Although the children of politicians are generally off-limits, Bristol is an exception for two reasons. First, she has made herself into a public figure not only by sharing her personal life with the world but by her loopy performance as a spokesperson against teen pregnancy. (I wonder how it promotes the message that teen pregnancy is a bad idea when a young woman is financially rewarded and glamorized by the media precisely because she was a pregnant teen lucky enough to be the daughter of a famous mom.) Second, Bristol was used by her mother as an asset to placate the religious right-wing base of the Republican Party during the 2008 campaign. She was a living demonstration of Sarah Palin’s opposition to abortion: Look at my teenage daughter, she made a mistake and did the right thing by having the baby. The only more shameless aspect of Sarah’s campaign was her constant exhibition of her Down Syndrome son. Look at me, I didn’t have an abortion like those terrible elitist women who make fun of me for not reading books.

… Sarah Palin pushed her pregnant 17-year-old daughter on stage, displayed her next to her boyfriend, and fed the fantasies of every deluded teenage girl in America by suggesting that the two were “engaged.” Now, since Levi left the Alaskan oil flelds to make an easier living by posing for Playgirl, Sarah has apparently had second thoughts about the high school dropout as her daughter’s knight-in-shining armor. You can be sure of one thing: if Sarah should become the Republican nominee: She’ll have cleaned up the Bristol-Levi-baby trio into something more suitable for middle-class consumption. Because the truth is that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are most middle-class American parents’ worst nightmare, but they are a nightmare that arises directly from the daily dream world propagated by politicians like Sarah Palin and her supporters.

Whenever I hear liberal-to-centrist pundits saying that even if Sarah gets the Republican nomination, she will only ensure Obama’s re-election, I shudder. That this representative of pure ignorance, retrograde religion, and class envy is being taken seriously at all speaks volumes about the dumbing down of America. The Bristol-Levi story, promoted by dumbed-down media, is what you get when you put Sarah Palin’s values into action. Will Americans refudiate this stupidity, or will they, in 2012, show that no ignorance is too ignorant if it is cloaked in reflexive anti-elitism and dubious family values? That is a question the pundits should be taking seriously.

I don’t recommend reading the comments on that piece. It’s a beautiful day, and you don’t want to consider sticking your head in the oven just yet.

But since we’ve set a theme here, some angry bloggage. From a posting Jolene made in yesterday’s comments, Ta-Nehesi Coates isn’t interested in having a conversation on race, because you can’t have a conversation with people who won’t listen.

And Thomas Frank has some issues with Newt Gingrich. But don’t we all?

Finally, the good news out of the Gulf of Mexico is balanced by bad news out of …Kalamazoo? An oil spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan? You better believe it. And a very very bad one.

Me, I’m off to spill some color on my gray roots. Have a swell one, all.

Yeesh, what a morning. I decided to take time to absorb the morning newspapers in all their deceased-tree glory, really pay attention and be-here-now and all that, and what did it get me? Behind. That’ll teach me.

And now, since I have about a million edits to do before 1 p.m., let’s toss up some links and let you guys get the party started, eh?

This story flapped around like a dying carp for a few hours yesterday, and I still cannot believe it: The American Spectator calls Shirley Sherrod a liar for saying one of her relatives was lynched. I simply refuse to link to the original material; you can find it elsewhere. But Josh Marshall captures it succinctly:

This one’s really one for the history books under the subheading of right-wing #outragefail, as the young folks might put it. (Writer Jeffrey) Lord starts off vaguely sympathetic and works up into a crescendo of high-dudgeon because Sherrod says her relative was lynched when in fact he was arrested by a sheriff and then beaten to death on the courthouse steps while allegedly resisting arrest even though he remained handcuffed through the fatal beating.

I am shocked, shocked that anyone would think any part of the right wing has racist elements.

Haven’t checked in on Sweet Juniper for a while; apparently he’s been canning and camping and — Jesus Christ, Jim — making a homemade sleeping bag? But there’s always interesting action over there if you check the sidebars. And whaddaya know? This photo is evidently not Photoshopped. But this was the week’s show-stopper for me:

We are the annoying people who come to your kid’s birthday party with homemade presents. It’s okay for now I guess, but in a few years, when your kid wants Legos and we bring hand-sewn madras shorts or something, it’s going to be really embarrassing for our own children.

No, Jim. It’s embarrassing for the other parents at the party who didn’t give, along with the homemade present, a custom photo book of a story featuring the homemade present and the birthday boy and all the rest of it. Damn overachievers.

Do you have Planet Money bookmarked, and do you listen to their podcasts? If not, you should. By the way, when Mitt Romney said “liberal policies” destroyed his family home in Detroit, recently leveled by bulldozers? I think this is a far more likely narrative.

Richard Cohen sort of embarrassed himself today, regarding the Wikileaks doc dump. Mitch Albom sounds a lot like this, too, when he dismisses “internet blogging,” as he did in his own recent cane-shake, at Andrew Breitbart. And Bob Greene is still sitting in a hotel room, still trying to draw grand conclusions from trivial observations. This has been your edition of Print Dinosaurs at Play in the Tar Pits for today.

And I’m off to spin straw into… if not gold, at least something readable. Later.

It was hot this weekend. How hot was it? Here’s one of the neighbors at Alex’ house:

Alex said he’s never seen a squirrel relax like this. I have, once. It was on a picnic table, and it was stretched out, belly down, in much this fashion. It was also on a hot day. Spriggy would stretch out like this, terrier-style, but almost always on a cool surface, like a tile floor, or even wood. That picnic table wasn’t cool, but maybe it was, relative to everything around it.

Or maybe squirrels know the behavior, but aren’t good about applying it. Little pea-brains.

It was a hot weekend, yes. Mid-90s, horrible humidity. We went to the lake Friday, our staging ground for a run to Fort Wayne Saturday, then home again Sunday. Kate wanted to see her friends. Alan hadn’t been back since we left. Good news: Our house was sold, downtown looks great, I got a mint-condition large-folio collection of New Yorker cartoons in the Friends of the Library shop for $8. (God, I miss that library. The recent expansion and remodel cost $80 million, and required a tax increase. The usual suspects whined and passed petitions for a remonstrance. Why do we need a fancy library when we have the internet, etc. etc. blah blah blah. I would hear none of it. All my damn life my tax money has gone to support stadiums I will never set foot in. Just once I wanted a big fancy public-works project for people like me, and I got it. And then we moved. Sigh.)

The bad news: The south side is looking pretty… what’s the word? Oh yes: Detroity. Our neighborhood grocery, closed. Our neighborhood Italian restaurant, closed. Our neighborhood fancy restaurant, closed. General Electric factory, closed. Lots of plywood, lots of For Sale or Lease. The recession hasn’t been kind to any city, but it’s been especially tough on Midwest manufacturing centers.

But we saw our old neighbor, Deb, and sat outside in the shade in her lavish new outdoor kitchen, watching her goldfish swim in her new outdoor pond. She was seeing a contractor for a while. I told Alan that if anything happened to him, that’s where I’d be hanging around — construction bars, making eyes at guys in tool belts. And we saw Alex, and marveled at his place in summertime. I’d only seen it in winter, and needed to behold the enormous vegetable garden and flower garden and boat lift and outdoor fireplace. The vegetable garden has an electric fence and metal plates driven a foot deep at the perimeter to discourage chipmunks, but they get in anyway. Suggestions welcome, I’m sure.

And then home, where a line of thunderstorms passed through and blew some of the heat away, so I can commence Manic Monday with a relatively dry scalp. Some bloggage:

Roger Ebert on BP. Simple, sane, bewildered — as are we all.

Why I love the British newspapers, chapter infinity. Imagine pitching this story to an American editor: “I’d like to ask a variety of prominent artists about how Caravaggio influenced their work.” “News peg?” “None.” “Sounds great!” Would never happen.

The Wikileaks doc dump on Afghanistan is today. This New York magazine piece has several links within. Read, wail and commence gnashing teeth. I don’t know what else to do. Except get to work. So that’s where I’m heading.

We had a carjacking here in the Woods last weekend, just a couple blocks from my house. Armed carjacking, very scary — a woman leaves a business and goes to her car, parked on one of the busiest thoroughfares on the east side. Gets in, rolls down the windows to let the heat out, a guy dives through the passenger window and puts a gun to her head. Pushes her out the driver’s door, roars off.

Well, they caught him. This is the sequence: After the carjacking, he heads up to Roseville, and tries to rob a woman in a grocery parking lot. In the scuffle, he drops the keys to the jacked car. Steals a delivery truck, abandons that in a chase, heads into an apartment complex, where he hides in one of the units after breaking in. He changes his clothes, helping himself to some of the tenants’, and escapes on a bicycle.

So how did they catch him? He went back for his clothes. You can see how police grow cynical.

Guy was paroled last week. He’s looking at life now. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.

Violent crime brings out the distancing in all of us. “Distancing” is what I call the phenomenon we all indulge in from time to time: Something bad happens to somebody else, and we try to figure out why that could never happen to us. I never go into that area after dark. I would have left when they said the hurricane was coming. I would never marry an alcoholic. And so on.

Auto theft in general is so widespread in Detroit that you hear a lot of anecdotal comments on how to avoid it. Don’t drive here, don’t buy Chrysler products before a particular model year, etc. Some people go limp — an acquaintance lives in a loft conversion in a sketchy neighborhood, and never, ever locks her car. It’s rifled from time to time, and someday someone might figure out how to get it started and drive it off, but she prefers that to replacing a window every three months.

And now I give you mine: Be just a little more troublesome and/or less attractive to thieves than the next guy. I’d never own one of those $3,000 road bikes, and don’t mind that my unglamorous hybrid bike is a little dirty. It looks dowdy in most bike racks, which is the way I like it. I also drive a stick shift. Someone might try to jack it, but I’m counting on the widespread lack of manual-transmission skills to deter all but the most determined thieves.

Alan thinks this is crazy, but I recently read on the Facebook page of a well-known crime novelist that she practices the same strategy. Hmpf.

If I’m ever shot to death in a carjacking, I’m sure the last words I’ll hear are, “Bitch, what is this shit?”

So, some bloggage for what looks to be a hot, steamy weekend:

Lance Mannion is on vacation, but of course, writers never go on vacation. Get a dune, you two!

The curse of Waterloo continues. Bret Michaels busted for pot in Deliverance, Indiana.

Got a note from Deb — not Deborah, Deb — last night. She lives in Milwaukee. Sue’s out that way, too. They got six inches of rain last night in about two hours, and she was sending the boys out to bail the window wells, which were full to the brim. Is this the most exciting thing to ever happen in Milwaukee? snarks Gawker. Oh, shut up.

Finally, Tucker Carlson keeps earning his reputation as a lying, double-crossing weasel, over and over again. Ezra Klein provides some backstory.

Time for the Friday get-down. Enjoy your weekend.

Mitch Albom got the Red Smith Award from the Associated Press Sports Editors this month. It’s a lifetime achievement award, the sort of thing you get with your gold watch and appointment with the death panel. Mitch, at 52, is probably covering the gray in his hair but nowhere near retirement, but hey! That’s entirely in keeping with his career! By the time Mitch hits what would be retirement age for you or me, we’ll all be watching white smoke pour out of the Vatican chimneys as he’s elected the first Jewish Pope. George Clooney will be working as his houseboy. And so on.

Over time, I’ve reached a sort of peace with Albom — I only get my dander up when he wanders off the sports pages. Which is often. But this isn’t one of those times. Let the APSE give him whatever award they want. I don’t even work for newspapers anymore. They made their bed, and they can lie in it, the feebs.

Then, yesterday, someone sent me this, from Deadspin. Snicker:

…the Happy Meal theology of (Mitch) Albom’s books that would’ve made Jonathan Livingston Seagull want to fly into the nearest wind tower.

I know it’s not just me who hates him. I once batted around the idea of a separate Mitch blog with another Detroit writer, or maybe even pitching a column to the Metro Times, in the grand tradition of Bobwatch, the Chicago Reader’s Bob Greene snarkfest. Among sportswriters, however, I’ve always assumed the dislike of Albom was based far more on jealousy than anything else. The number of sportswriters I honestly respect as writers, period, is pretty low, and I’ll bet the overwhelming secret thought most of Mitch’s colleagues entertain is this: Why didn’t I think of this shit first?

However, Deadspin lays out a pretty good collection of arguments as to why this award is the equivalent of Pia Zadora winning a Golden Globe. Its cornerstone is this Dave Kindred column about why Albom’s 2005 transgression — lavishly covered at the time, I won’t go into it here — ought to have disqualified him for this sort of laurel forever.

Well-argued, but as I said: That’s the APSE’s business. I was more interested in following the other links, especially this one, for which I reserve a comment I know many of you find offensive, but I cannot help myself: Jesus fucking Christ. If I recall correctly, Mitch’s 2005 shenanigans cost this man two weeks’ pay in the final arbitration. I guess not everyone can hold a grudge as long as I can.

Oh, well. Deep breaths. All better now.

Some of you may have noticed these new entries are arriving later in the day than they usually do. I’m sleeping later, plus I’m getting hammered with work from my hyperlocal site. Which is good for me, but may necessitate another schedule rejiggering, because I can’t keep this up.

So let’s skip to the bloggage:

Not quite OID, but close: Little girls set up lemonade stand, which is robbed. (Note to self: GREAT MOVIE SCENE.) In what newspapers love to call “an outpouring,” they’re finding this is probably the best thing to happen to them, ever.

Coozledad, remember when you said you found a worthless eHow article on burning pellets in a wood stove? One of the writers speaks:

“I was like, ‘I hope to God people don’t read my advice on how to make gin at home because they’ll probably poison themselves.’

“Never trust anything you read on eHow.com,” she said, referring to one of Demand Media’s high-traffic websites, on which most of her clips appeared.

Finally, a sweet story for cat lovers. Because you know what a softy I am in my tiny black heart.

Happy Thursday. Where did the damn week go?

Why we still have a lot of work to do on gay acceptance. When a guy like this doesn’t feel the need to marry a woman and have sex with men in parks, then maybe we’ll have made real progress.

Oh, what am I talking about? We have made real progress. When I had a bad riding lesson, my instructor would counsel the long view: Don’t think about where you are today. Think about where you were six months ago, and how much you’ve improved since then. It’s depressing when a married father of four, faced with arrest in a gay cruising spot, panics and things escalate to the point of violence. But where were we a few years ago? At least some gay people can get married and live out ‘n’ proud. I ran into a married father of two the other day in the grocery store, but he’s married to another man, the kids are adopted and if they were any more decent and upright, they’d be in danger of being elected to office.

I got an e-mail from a friend the other day:

I wouldn’t call it a milestone, but it’s a definite ministone, one of those little markers that show how the complexion of ordinary life is changing. During a four-hour stint at the Wells County 4-H Fair yesterday, I stumbled into a long talk about, broadly speaking, the gay experience. Met a guy I went to high school with, we had eons of time to kill watching our kids in the same events, and we started comparing notes on politics. I found that Mr. hyper-Catholic is a low-key gay-rights booster, and it’s a serious area of friction he and his uber-conservative wife have with their extended families.

Their “radicalizing” experience: Another of our classmates, a close friend of theirs, came out to them in the late ’90s. Mr. Catholic had no clue, and he said he was left speechless and fumbling to react. “I gotta hand it to my wife. She gave him a big hug and said, ‘Do you have someone special? Tell us all about him!'”

On one hand, hers seems a corny reaction, like something Grandma would say. But mostly it’s charming that she could suppress all her religious worry-wartism in a blink and flash him what I think of as the universal old-biddy code for demonstrating acceptance of gay people: “Dish the gossip on your romantic life, on the double.”

This is, I remind you, one of the most conservative corners of one of the most conservative states in the union. As I said a while back on another website: It’s over. The skirmishes will continue, but the war is over.

But the skirmishes will likely continue for pretty much ever. Societal acceptance will help. The passage of time will help. But there will always be gay people who feel their attraction to people of the same sex is wrong, somehow, and want to change it. That’s the part of the pray-the-gay-away movement that interests me — the people who seek it out, for whatever reason.

We like to think that those people are self-loathing, and no doubt many of them are. But what about those who aren’t? What about people whose sexuality falls somewhere in the middle of the continuum, who want to push it closer to the other side? Do they have anything interesting to say in this? Consider that classmate in Wells County. The traditional path for a young gay person in such a community would be to head to Indianapolis or Chicago after high school or college, somewhere with old houses to fix up and community theater and softball leagues and Teva sandals and other stereotypically gay things, and settle in among the critical mass a smaller community can’t produce.

But what about the guy — let’s assume a guy, for this argument — who may be same-sex attracted, but actually wants a female wife and children and whatever else goes along with it? Is he going to Chicago? What if he likes small-town Wells County life? What if he wants five acres on the edge of town and a Rotary Club membership? Is he ever going to be completely comfortable in his skin? I don’t know. Probably not. My guess is, he’ll head to Chicago a few weekends a year, on business, and cruise the parks. I think the closet will always be with us. I think all we can do is make it smaller.

OK, then. I front-load my week: Monday is the busiest, de-escalating until Friday, when I try to take a little me time. But lately it’s been a full-speed blowout through Thursday, and pals? It is getting on my last damn nerve. So let’s cut to the bloggage before I hop to the shower:

“Scream 4” wraps in Plymouth. I blew up that picture of Courtney Cox and was reminded of Coozledad’s description of Madonna: “A stew bird.” Man, I’ll say.

The Andrew Breitbart business yesterday leaves me nearly spluttering with rage. When I get spluttery, I turn to Roy to channel it into coherence.

Oops, almost forgot: MRIs of vegetables. Because we can.

Me, I’m off.

Forty minutes to write this today. No, 35 — I have to leave room for personal grooming before taking Kate to the orthodontist. In the summer, that’s a five-minute job. Still.

And another e-mail just arrived in flames. This might be a 20-minute effort after all.

One of my Facebook friends posted a picture last night that he took with his iPhone, of two Amish guys in a Burger King. He’s a photographer, and is aware of the Amish aversion to having their photos taken, but the gist seemed to be wow! they eat fast food!, and comments followed indicating wow! I saw one buying gasoline once! and wow! maybe they were afraid of being turned in! and excuse me, but what? For eating a hamburger?

The Amish — they’re just like us. Srsly. Nothing those folks do drops my jaw anymore. The last time it did, it was when I saw a man driving his buggy along Rt. 37 in Indiana, talking on his cell phone. There was a lot of public discussion then about cell use while driving, so it was more the humor of the sight that killed me than anything else. But my time in the Hoosier state inured me to Amish weirdness of all sorts; my first screenplay, the one I wrote for Screenwriting 310, was about the Amish. I’m still proud of the scene of the buggy drag race, which ends in tragedy (for one of the horses), and is based on a story I read in one of the Adams County papers years ago. Non-Amish guy wakes up to see a dead horse lying in the road in front of his country home. Turns out it was involved in a head-on collision during a drag race and died at the scene. Everyone involved — the two racers (teenage boys, natch) and the unlucky oncoming buggy driver — was named Schwartz. No one was related.

That incident was followed by a string of drunken-driving incidents involving horses trotting merrily through intersections while their drivers slept it off in the back, in one memorable case among two dozen empties rolling around.

Now comes one of those July 1 law changes in Indiana, in this case a new requirement that anyone buying alcohol show photo ID, regardless of age. And while the Amish may drink and use cell phones and computers and eat Whoppers, they don’t allow their pictures to be taken, and hence cannot buy beer. Ahem:

Indiana’s NewsCenter visited Geneva’s Case and Quart, where the owner said about 25-percent of her business is with Amish customers. In fact, while conducting the interview an Amish man is in his 60’s was refused a sale because he didn’t have a photo ID.

I see two possibilities for the Plain People:

1) Add photography to their list of accommodations to the modern world. Having already embraced cell phones, power tools and drinking, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch, or;

2) Take a page from the teen handbook, hang around outside the store and ask other customers to do the buying. I’m sure Coozledad would be happy to help.

And that, pals, is 20 minutes. Hop to the bathroom, hop to the day. I’ll be back later.

“Diversity,” the way it’s used now, is such a damp, earnest word, a good thing promoted into something we need to “celebrate.” Which is why I haven’t made tracks to the Concert of Colors, “Metro Detroit’s Diversity Festival,” in the time we’ve been here. I envisioned a lot of old white men in dreadlocks and young black men in rasta tams, both nodding along to some faux-African world-music thing made with puzzling indigenous instruments.

But a couple years ago I learned that Don Was shows up every year, to lead a cavalcade of Detroit acts in a single show, spanning a wide range of genres and representing almost every corner of the area’s musical heritage — you know, a diverse show — that I started thinking this might be worth my time.

Last year he dug up Question Mark. Huh. Didn’t know he was a local.

And while Saturday was beastly hot, it wasn’t so hot you couldn’t move, and so we headed downtown. The Don Was All-Stars were performing on the main stage of the orchestra hall, free of charge, and it seemed air-conditioning might be involved. It was. And it was quite the show, 15 different performers spanning the range from rock to blues to trip-hop to… I dunno, I get lost in all these genres.

There was this guy, Andre Williams, and be advised that link takes you to a trailer for a recent documentary about him, that the clip autoplays, and the language is NSFW from about the first second. There was also Alberta Adams, who is now 93 years old and performs from a wheelchair. But there was also Ingray, young and loud described as having recently relocated to Detroit from Bosnia (please, hold your witticisms). They played “Immigrant Song.” Doop & the Inside Outlaws brought the country. By the time Kim Weston came out for the finale, in what looked like one of her old Motown gowns, you really couldn’t say you hadn’t been entertained.

As the crowd was filing out, the MC said, “Stop in next door. They’ve got some Punjab house music going.”

Alan said we should. I was dubious. It sounded like everything I’d feared, but it turned out to be the revelation of the night. These guys:

This is Red Baraat, self-described as “bangin’ bhangra and brass funk,” but if that doesn’t help, let me try: If Desi Arnaz left Havana bound for New Orleans, but was detoured through Amritsar, this is the band he would have assembled when he landed. Soprano and baritone saxes, trumpet, trombone and yes, that’s a sousaphone. But the centerpiece is Sunny Jain, the band’s founder, on the Indian dhoul drum. At first I thought we wouldn’t get in, because the crowd was so dense. It turned out there were plenty of seats available because everyone was in the standing-room space in front of the stage, dancing ecstatically. Well, not everyone was ecstatic. One guy was voguing. Some were shaking their bottoms. A couple tried to do a variation on the jitterbug. But most people just moved where the dhoul took them. We saw only three numbers, and left the hall raving, CD-buying fans. A good dhoul player can do that, I guess.

The CD is good, but the show is better. Here’s the tour schedule. If they’re coming to your neighborhood, you are commanded to go.

And that was the weekend, besides the usual pie-baking and a Friday-night movie excursion. Cherry and blueberry, and “I Am Love,” which left me thinking Tilda Swinton is worthy of being the new Meryl Streep (she speaks Italian with a Russian accent, and top that, Ms. Yale School of Drama) and that cherry-pitting is the most tedious job in the summer kitchen. I recommend both, preferably at once — pie and movies.

Bloggage:

The Catholic Church is marking the 50th anniversary of the birth-control pill by advocating no birth control other than “natural family planning.” Because birth control is bad, except when it’s their birth control, in which case it’s just fine. I have really fallen far, far away from the church of my baptism, because when I read stuff like this…

“Why does the church do this?” Ponkowski says to about 10 young couples taking a required pre-marriage class. “It wants us to have the best life possible.”

…I sprain my eyeballs, rolling them.

I’ve been catching up with old episodes of “Mad Men” in preparation for the new season. I feared I would be losing Betty Draper, who is not my favorite part of the show, but my God, her clothes. Advance publicity for season one would suggest she’s still a part of the show, and what’s more, she recently bought herself some black opera-length gloves. Oh yah.

Finally, this looks interesting. Haven’t read it. I will, as soon as Wild Monday settles into Somewhat Tamer Tuesday. Have a good week, all.

Photo of Red Baraat by Amy Touchette.