.:: The StrongBrain Collective ::.

Women baffle me.

The other day -- without prompting -- my girlfriend Julie said, "I'm sorry for being angry with you."

Startled, and having no inkling as to the reason, I responded, "You were angry with me?"

"Yeah, I'd been arguing with you in my head for the past half hour."

"Huh?"

A week before that, work was bumming her out. I was doing my darndest to console her with sage advice, but even my ears heard the words as ringing hollow.

For example, I think I said something like, "You know ... don't fret, baby. Things will turn out ... you know ... good and stuff."

She turned and looked at me with a pitying expression. After a pause, she declared, "Jason, I need presents. STAT!"

A day later, I received a six-page SOP entitled "Relationships 101", providing me with situational information such as the section on "How to Console" and the section on "What Never to Say". I reference it daily and it is the reason we are still a couple. It is surprisingly universal, so for every man reading this Strongbrain article, copies are available for perusal. All I ask in return is a $5 contribution to my girlfriend's next present.

Women bewilder me, indeed.

Another aspect of that gender that I have yet to comprehend is their infatuation with homosexual men in general, and drag queens specifically. I have never encountered a woman who does not get frolicsome when a drag queen is in the general vicinity. What am I missing? I don't get all giddy at the thought of a lesbian dressing up like a construction worker, making constant crotch adjustments and crushing empty Budweiser cans in each fist. While grunting and spitting.

What's going on?

One woman (not Julie) said that she loves the fashion sense every gay man seemingly possesses. Another said that having a gay male pal is like having a best girlfriend without the inherent catty behavior.

As for drag queens, Julie is fascinated by their uninhibited style, their animated comportment, and the whole public transformation from man to woman -- the makeup, the wig, and the hiding of the penis (research for this article ferreted out some interesting facts about the penis concealment: Duct tape.)

Her infatuation with this gender-bending thing transcends what I would consider normal. Whereas my "experience" is limited to "The Birdcage" and that scene in "Crocodile Dundee" where Paul Hogan grabs that drag queen's crotch, Julie and her friend Shawnee have expressed consternation at their utter lack of gay male friends. They have legitimate plans in place to "get us one", like they were after tuna on a fishing trip.

With this in mind, I was a tad reticent to go see a live performance of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" at the Celebration Theater in West Hollywood. (What was it celebrating? Twenty years of quality gay and lesbian theater.) This is a cult favorite about a rock-and-roll drag queen who, starting as a boy in East Berlin, falls in love with an American soldier and goes for a sex-change operation, waking up to find nothing but a "one-inch mound of flesh" where his/her sex organ should be.

Before I continue, let me make a disclaimer right here. I'm not homophobic, not even in the slightest. I'm just ignorant, having little interaction with de-closeted homosexuals, either man or woman. I wasn't nervous because I thought gay men would start hitting on me, slapping my ass and asking me to have sex with them. If not every woman does that to me, why should every man? Certainly, the laws of attraction still apply.

No, I was nervous because I had no desire to be "That Guy". I was fully cognizant that this would be a unique experience, that a dynamic array of personalities that I had never previously beheld, except, embarrassingly, in movies would be attending the play. And I would not want to be so startled at the scene as to begin gawking. Obviously, with almost 27 years under my proverbial belt, I am mature enough to handle myself in new situations.

But those were two conflicting motivations that I had to reconcile before driving to L.A. Every new experience is invariably exciting, whether it is the birth of a baby, the first glimpse of the Grand Canyon, or two men cuddling at arm's length in front of you. And you find yourself WANTING to stare. You want to absorb everything, to make memories of these new situations. But despite all that, you don't want to be "That Guy", either.

What was I to do?

Well, thankfully Julie was with me, acting -- as she often does -- as the voice of reason: We sat in the back.

Perfect location, for two reasons.

1. I could stare to my heart's content and soak up the experience. And, luck have it, relaxing in the row directly in front of us were two very gay gentlemen. No more than two feet in front of my eyes was hand holding, a head resting on a shoulder, adoring gazes into loving eyes, and finally, some sloppy kisses. Across the way were two very punky gay men, tattoos and mohawks and piercings abound. There was woman with a fire-engine red jacket and matching hair. There was a giant black gay man, with rippling, tape-measure muscles pushing his t-shirt almost to the point of tearing.

2. Julie and I do not, as they say, disappear into a crowd. I'm six-foot-eight with entrancing eyes and Julie is six-foot-even with angelic red hair and an archangelic smile. Plus, we both are relatively shy and the theater did not lend itself to too many places to remain unnoticed. The theater was 60 seats only, two rows of 10 on each of three walls with the stage on the fourth. This was a seriously small theater, with the "stage" perhaps more aptly described as "the floor in the front of the seats." And the people in the front row were not exclusively part of the audience, either. They were spit on, sat on, referenced, and a face was humped. Read on.

Anyway, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" was a hit off-broadway play for a few years in the late nineties. In 2001, it was made into a well-reviewed film and enjoyed a cult status even approaching that of "Rocky Horror Picture Show." When Julie signed up for NetFlix, she was able to get three movies at a time. And whenever she would send back these three movies, she would immediately get three more. Well, for almost two months, she only got two movies. When I asked why, she informed me that she had kept Hedwig for almost that whole time. (Remember those presents she wanted? STAT?! Her own copy of Hedwig was the answer. She once again gets three movies at a time.)

The production of Hedwig at this small theater was astonishing. Click here to see the reviews and to search Celebration Theater. I was preparing for the spectacle of the attendees, not the show itself. Since I had never seen the movie, I didn't really know what to expect. The "play" was 1/3 musical, 1/3 play and 1/3 stand-up comedy.

Once it began, I was no longer in a West Hollywood theater. I was immediately transported to Hedwig's world. I have never experienced anything like this. I was no more than 20 feet away from Hedwig at any point in the show. He was an amazing singer, too. The goosebumps I usually reserved for Mozart and Phish were unbiddingly crawling up my neck on several occasions.

It was hilarious, too! You know when you laugh so hard that you get stuck and have to suffer for a second until your diaphragm lets go your lungs and you can once again breathe? I experienced that feeling twice. The first: when he called J.K. Rowling a bitch for not casting HIMSELF as Harry Potter's owl of the same name; and then performing his ridiculous owl impression to convince some imaginary casting director in the crowd to hire him. And then the second: when he jumped up on a chair in the front row and, in his short leather skirt, began humping the male occupant's face. (I'm convinced that had we been sitting in the front row, I would have been that man.)

The acting was so real, so intense, and so transportive, that during the more vulnerable and self-explorative moments, I was forced to berate my eyeballs for becoming enveloped in this clear liquid that impeded my vision. The range of emotion I underwent followed the path from Mariana's Trench to Everest's Peak and back again. I really do wish I were being hyperbolic for the sake of dramaticizing these two hours. But the experience was indeed that intense.

I think that because of the size of the theater, the intimacy of this production relaying the story of a man who has an angry inch of flesh where his penis once swayed was intensified. If I had been watching from the rafters, I'm sure the experience would not have been as memorable. However, as it turned out, I could not formulate any words for many minutes following the cast's final encore. The first words I uttered were literally, "Top Five."

And then I repeated those words. "Top Five."

Julie, who was also enjoying the post-play glow, did not understand.

Startled out of my reverie, I turned and explained that what I had just witnessed was definitely in the top five of any of my life's visceral experiences. And although I can't say that I've traversed the world or enjoyed the finest wine, I have met a woman that I'm convinced was an angel, I have heard transcendent live music, and I think I saw an alien spaceship once. And, still, this has achieved "Top Five" status.

And included in the "Top Five" status is no less than passionate kissing of two men. I was never grossed out, disgusted or wishing I could purge that memory from my hippocampus. None of the above. It was an experience, just like witnessing a baby's birth or beholding the Grand Canyon. I am more of a well-rounded person because of it.

And I owe it all to drag queens, too! How about that?

I would never have seen this Hedwig play if I had not known Julie. Never in a lifetime would I have visited a gay, West Hollywood theater to watch a play about a drag queen with a botched sex change operation if not for her. And I never would've grown as a result. Just as I was contemplating this fact, she called me and said that she would have never gone either, if it weren?t for me. She didn't know any man that she felt confident enough to which to expose that culture without giggles or judgmental behavior.

Her and I are like a jigsaw puzzle, one that has a million pieces of varying difficulty. But in the end, each and every piece fits perfectly together, and the energy that it took to figure out every seemingly disparate piece's match makes the finished puzzle undeniably magical. Not the type of magic that uses smoke, mirrors and whatever David Blaine has conjured up, but the magic that is supernatural and has the ability to accomplish literally anything once the power of the completed puzzle has been harnessed.

There are a lot of puzzle pieces that I look foward to fitting. And while I have put her piece of homosexual infatuation together with mine of homosexual ignorance, she has yet to see the third installment of "The Lord of the Rings."

What's up with that?

Goshdarn it, Julie! I watched two men make out! Why can't you watch LOTR with me while cheering at the battle scenes and growling at The Eye and crying with Samwise?!

Sheesh, women make no sense. I think I need to write up an SOP, too.