As compensation for that disappointment, I offer here the chance to make your own nativity scene (and learn a bit about the Order of Things Christmas as you do). Just click that big, red button below to get started.

Years before I was born, my father made our own model stable out of an old wooden liquor box. He was very handy that way. He’d collected odd bits of things left over from his job as a liquor salesman and recycled them; the boxes of Christmas stuff in our basement (or attic, depending on where we lived in any given year) always included bits of display materials from liquor store windows.

He covered the box with plaster to suggest the building style you’d see in 1950s depictions of the nativity, created interior railings for the stalls from small pieces of wood, and wired it with a socket to fit a white Christmas tree bulb. The plaster figurines must have come from some five-and-dime store. And I can’t imagine where he found the straw he laid on the floor of the box (and which I thought made it all seem pretty authentic), but I certainly appreciated the touch.

Each year we’d unpack the box and the plaster figurines which we’d wrapped the year before in pieces of holiday-themed corrugated cardboard (more leftovers from liquor stores where they formed the festive backgrounds behind a window display of whiskey and gin bottles).

I liked the whole doll-house sensibility mixed with the formality of following its time-honored storyline. We’d leave the manger empty because (of course) the Baby Jesus isn’t supposed to arrive until Christmas morning. And we had to squeeze the Three Wise Men alongside the liquor box because they can’t arrive for at least a week after Christmas.

It wasn’t as much fun as all the elves and twinkle lights, but it was fun to set up and plug in this more formal addition to our holiday trimmings. Besides, it seemed much more important to my father than all the other decorations combined.

Then one Christmas morning, my older sister had one of her fits of religious devotion and ruined everything. She insisted we could open no presents until we all knelt before the liquor box, placed the plaster babe in the space at which the proud parents had been gazing adoringly for some weeks already and said a ”Hail, Mary.”

What a buzz kill. I mean, really? Before presents?

[NB: This was the same young lady who informed me at my tender age of five that the reason all girls wore veils to church was because to do otherwise would invite an Angel of the Lord to swoop down and rape them. I had no idea what that meant and, on later reflection, decided she probably didn't either. But it certainly made the already grim ordeal of a 60-minute mass even less appealing.]

Since that dour Christmas morning, my relationship to this part of the holiday narrative has been a bit strained; that is, until I decided to co-opt it and reshape it into something that conformed better to my own ideas of what Christmas should be.

Now you too can create your own Christmas Nativity, just by playing with this puzzle. As an added bonus, you’ll gain a better understanding of who gets to attend the blessed event and why (or why not). And best of all, each time you play, the game is a little different.

Maybe it’s because they capture some twisted idea of celebrating the holiday spirit in my mind, but most of the ads I’ve collected are all about booze and smoking. A couple just seemed lovely examples of mid-century graphic design.

And anything that tugs on heartstrings tuned to the frequency of wartime America gets me every time. I’m sure this will disappoint most of my friends but, despite the horror of warfare and killing (and the greedy interests that are eager to profit from the warfare and killing), there’s something about the second World War and its popular belief in a unity of purpose that still hints at people’s better natures. All that business about the families at home working hard to support the young men and women abroad — a mythology carefully crafted and disseminated through the popular culture of the period — always forms a lump in my throat.

So there you have it. Without anything more interesting to say about them, here is a small collection of holiday advertising images from decades past.

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Night comes early in late December. And, as a kid, that suited me just fine.

When night came, I’d plug in the plastic candles that sat on the windowsills of our apartment, turn off the rest of the lights in the living room and plug in the tree. Then I’d sit quietly in the shadows — or space permitting, lie directly under the tree — and stare at the play of the twinkle lights on the glass ornaments and slivered plastic icicles … well, until someone demanded to know why the hell all the lights were off and I was sitting like an idiot in the dark. But even then, my mother would have to pause for a moment before telling me to turn on a lamp. And she’d take that opportunity to comment:

“I know I say this every year, but that’s the most beautiful tree we’ve ever had.”

Through the magic of plastic extrusion technology, it was, in fact, the very same tree we’d had for several years running. But that didn’t matter. It was beautiful. And the light it shed was the perfect counterpoint to the early darkness. In the warmth of its glow I could release my fantasies into the room around me. But my fascination with the tree wasn’t limited to the hours after sunset.

I was a solitary kid and, outside of school, I spent most of my time by myself. I filled my afternoons and evenings with the stories I’d spin around my toys or the characters I discovered in comic books and on television. It sounds a bit lonely, but I found it very satisfying. And something about our Christmas decorations stoked the fires of my vocation.

As I’d unpack those familiar items each year, it was like greeting old friends. Sure, most of the ornaments were just silvered glass balls tarted up with various kinds of tinsel or paint. But many — usually the cheapest ones — took more specific forms, like those of misshapen fabric elves or animals. And there were the dozens of other tchotchkes my mother had purchased over the years, too: santa and snowman window shade pulls; the ceramic elf candle holders which contorted their little holly-covered bodies to spell out the word “noel.” One of my favorites was an old wooden sleigh that she’d pack with a Santa-shaped candle and as many miniature candy canes as would fit. Then she’d tie it to a stuffed reindeer with a yard of red curling ribbon and place it proudly by the front door.

These weren’t just decorations. They were toys charged with that special energy that I attached to all things Christmas. And they slid seamlessly into the stories I’d spin over the few hours between the time I got home from school and the time my mother got home from work.

G.I. Joe could scale the tree to rescue the elf ornaments hanging helplessly by the points on their hats. My plastic Creature from the Black Lagoon could join Santa in that sleigh as it flew from the living room, into my bedroom, and back.

In my mind, this Christmas time of year changed the stories of every one it touched. It engulfed us all in one big narrative of goodwill and twinkle lights. So it made perfect sense that the Creature would accompany Santa, that G.I. Joe would befriend those weird little elf ornaments, and that we’d all sing along with Perry Como as his voice blasted from our portable stereo. We all embodied that Holiday Spirit as it infected each one of us and we passed it along to those we touched. That was what made Christmas so different from the rest of year; it’s what made it so painfully wonderful.

In a fit of nostalgia for those flying sleigh rides around the apartment, I decided to recreate some of those Holiday Spirits. And now you get the chance to experience them for yourself. Just click on the big, shiny button below to get started.

That’s how Truman Capote describes the start of an annual ritual in his childhood home, a sprawling old place in a southern country town. His world revolves around the kitchen where he passes his days with a 60-something-year-old cousin and the dog they share.

It’s an insular little world he describes in A Christmas Memory. And he makes that fact palpable by neglecting to present us with almost a single other character. But that world feels whole, as though there’s not much room for anyone besides the simple-minded lady, the seven-year-old boy and the rat terrier.

Capote whittles his story to fit the kind of shapes that memories occupy in our minds: leaving out the mundane details we might rationally ask — where the money comes from to run this big house, who does the shopping for food and prepares the meals — in favor of the stuff that feels important to us emotionally. We learn about this cousin and the dog, the baby stroller they use to gather pecans, what they eat together for breakfast or supper, and the big stove that heats the kitchen; not much else.

The biggest part of the story he gives over to the intricate preparations necessary to turn out 31 fruitcakes with very few resources besides their own enthusiasm.

So what’s so important about making fruitcakes — a confection that’s become the dull punchline of a dozen holiday jokes in the minds of Americans over the last few decades — and why so many? Whom are they for?

Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share are intended for persons we’ve met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who’ve struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J. C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through town twice a year. Or Abner Packer, the driver of the six o’clock bus from Mobile, who exchanges waves with us every day as he passes in a dust-cloud whoosh. Or the young Wistons, a California couple whose car one afternoon broke down outside the house and who spent a pleasant hour chatting with us on the porch (young Mr. Wiston snapped our picture, the only one we’ve ever had taken). Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends? I think yes.

It’s a funny thing about Christmas. It brings out in many of us this need for connection, a need we may have shrugged off the rest of the year. And, in the best of circumstances, those of us who feel that need most keenly reach for it according to the rules of the season, doing for people with whom we want to experience that connection.

Before I’d ever read Capote’s story, I decided to start making fruitcakes for loved ones at Christmastime. It allowed me to feel connected to friends in ways a store-bought gift never could. For reasons I can only intuit, rather than understand, a gift you make yourself — and particularly food — doesn’t impose the same burden of reciprocation. It’s too simple to carry any monetary value and too ephemeral, too easy to get rid of (either by consuming or trashing it) to create any real bother. And fruitcake reached back into some collective ideal of Christmas I gleaned early on from Sears catalogs, holiday movies and the ads I saw in magazines as a kid.

In the least invasive way I could imagine, I was asking people to allow me the favor of feeling close to them for a few months of the year. I could believe I was reaching back to some age-old tradition of Christmases gone by — though certainly not any tradition I knew as a child — and at the same time, reaching out to people around me in the present season. Making cakes was my willful attempt to weave a fabric of continuity that encompassed the Loved Ones I longed for over the holidays, even if they were people from whom I’d grown distant over the years. It wrapped those friends and me in the warmth of some Time-Honored Christmas Tradition, even if the tradition wasn’t really mine to share, borrowed as it was from my crazy idea of what a Proper Christmas would be.

What did I know about fruitcakes? My childhood Christmases played out in the 1960s, in a depressed little town in central Connecticut where our only traditions were assembling our artificial tree and decorating it with the dime-store ornaments we’d carefully packed away the year before. And, as fond as I was of those ornaments, they only seemed like heirlooms because I couldn’t remember a time when we didn’t have them. This overly developed sense of holiday tradition I’d pasted together with the pieces I appropriated from the cover art on Christmas albums and the four-color pages of the Sears Wishbook. The year I announced I would make a plum pudding, it was after months of staring at the photos in our three-volume set of The Life Book of Christmas.

I was certainly a weird kid. But this business of mining the collective culture for memories of a past none of us ever experienced: well it wasn’t all my idea. The frisson between memories enshrined and the present is a central piece of the Christmas experience. From the earliest days of the modern Christmas — beginning with the stories of Washington Irving and later, Charles Dickens† — looking back to a kinder time, one in which age-old traditions were cherished and revered, was part and parcel of the holiday. It was impossible to separate it from a collective nostalgia, even if that nostalgia had been carefully manufactured.

As a kid, I’d imagine that the very traditions in which I engaged — listening to carols, decorating the house, exchanging gifts — were not only those I’d performed for most of my seven or eight years on the planet, but were also the same traditions carried on by the Victorian ladies and gentleman depicted on Christmas cards or inside the gatefold of our Mitch Miller and the Gang album. Today, the layers are deeper and more complicated as I blend fragments of Christmases from my childhood with those manufactured memories of Christmases from an earlier era. Before my mother died, I was able to get hold of a few of those remaining dime-store ornaments. And as I take them out of storage each year, I feel myself floating in a dream of my own memories and those I borrowed from the images I saw around me as a kid.

In the most beautiful and subtle ways, Capote recreates that same frisson of memory as we read A Christmas Memory. We’re never unclear that this is a story from the narrator’s past, a narrator who is now a full-grown and articulate adult. And to remind us, he’s careful to lift us gently from that past from time to time.

When Christmas morning finally arrives for our characters, the two best friends can’t wait to exchange their gifts for one another. Unable to afford anything more, each has made a kite for the other, as they did the year before and the year before that. They’re eager to get outside and to launch their new gifts:

The wind is blowing, and nothing will do till we run to a pasture below the house where Queenie has scooted to bury her bone (and where, a winter hence, Queenie will be buried, too).

That simple aside reminds us that our story is — as its title announces — only a memory. And the memory is all the more precious because time has changed the world in which it first took shape, dissolving all the beautiful details our narrator describes.

So each year, I begin the same ritual as Capote’s characters. I search for some connection to people in my life — however distant our actual connections may be — and for a connection to some greater past of tradition and ritual. Beginning in mid-summer, I start to collect the ingredients that will go into my cakes (10 in all, a far cry from the 31 in the story).

Fruitcake is the opposite of a fancy or delicate confection. It involves no skill in the making. What makes or breaks the quality of the cake is what goes into it. And the only reason I can imagine that most Americans don’t like — or even know — these cakes, is that the store-bought varieties typically use ingredients that just don’t taste good.

Like a stew, the flavors of the various ingredients that go into a fruitcake should hold onto their individual characters, even as they blend together to form an overall impression. A good fruitcake offers a variety of fresh nuts, dried fruits with a range of flavors (not just an endless parade of raisins), and candied fruits and peels that have been made with real skill, preserving their flavors and textures. All this stuff can be hard to find and costs money. So if you can’t find a very personal delight in seeking out all the delicacies that go into a proper fruitcake, you should forget the whole enterprise. It’s precisely because the ingredients are rare that the process — collecting the ingredients, baking the cakes, and bathing them with brandy as they ripen over a couple of months’ time — takes on meaning and importance. With every moment or dollar I spend in this enterprise, I feel that I’m doing something special. That makes the gesture feel special. And in some distant way, even if it’s only for a few moments, it makes me feel special, too.

Finding nuts isn’t much of a challenge; I use equal portions of pecans, English walnuts, hazel nuts and black walnuts. Black walnuts aren’t as easy to find as the other three, but their deep and oily flavor makes a good base for the higher-pitched notes some of the fruits will bring. And, just as importantly, black walnuts seem rare and out of the ordinary.

Dried fruits are pretty easy to come by these days, too. So arriving at a suitable mix of flavors, colors and textures isn’t a big challenge; but figuring out your own mix is part of the fun. A small portion of raisins is fine, but too many will leave the cake with an insipid uniformity of taste. I use black or red raisins (Thompson or Red Flame), along with some golden variety and even a small amount of currants. Try to get organic varieties whenever possible, if only to avoid the nasty addition of sulfur dioxide used to keep light-colored fruits from turning brown as they dry. Cape gooseberries add a bright, sharp tang to the whole, as do dried cranberries. Dried sour cherries contribute a surprising richness with their combination of sweet and sour. And while dried wild blueberries are a bit sweet on their own, they bake into the whole nicely, unifying some of the more distinctive flavors; use them sparingly.

Candied fruits present the biggest challenge. When I was a kid, you could find containers of mixed ones in the baking aisle of the local Stop & Shop. And those same nasty, particolored bits are still available in most stores today. But you’ll want to find candied fruits and peels that would be delicious to eat on their own, confections made with care and skill. For reasons I don’t understand, it seems that no one on this side of the Atlantic wants to put that kind of effort into their production. So we look to the other side. I’ve always found a great selection made by Agrimontana at the Chelsea Market in Manhattan. When I moved to Toronto this year, I brought this year’s supply along with me. Until I find a local supply, I’ll continue to do the same.

Candied sour cherries, lemon peel, orange peel, grapefruit peel, whole clementines and citron sparkle like semi-precious stones when you cut them into pieces large enough to be recognizable in a slice of cake. But the most important ingredient — and the most difficult to find — is the candied stalk of the angelica plant (for a quick point of reference, consider that angelica is a primary ingredient in Chartreuse). I can’t say with confidence that without its subtle herb flavor the cakes would be any less delicious; I’m not even sure that anyone knows it’s in there besides me. But the quest involved in collecting all these items makes the cakes seem all the more special.

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Come the last weekend in September, I mix all of my finds with a lot of eggs and butter, some flour and blackstrap molasses, and a healthy dose of allspice. Then I bake them slowly for three hours or more and bathe the finished cakes in brandy over the next eight weeks. Come early December, I pack each one up, attach the gift card I’ve made to explain each of the carefully considered ingredients and ship them off.

From most of the recipients, I get a polite acknowledgement; from some, no acknowledgement at all. A few dear friends seem to recognize how much the giving means to me and send a heartfelt note in return. But my closest friend always gives me so frank and detailed a critique of each year’s offering that I truly feel that connection I so desperately hoped my gift might create.

Another Christmas comes and goes. But for a moment, I feel connected; wrapped warmly in a web strung between the past and the present, among friends and family far away. And in that web, I have shape and meaning and purpose; maybe just for a moment, but in the scheme of things, a moment like that is nothing to sneeze at.

† Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20) contains a string of stories about a country manor where Christmas is kept as tradition would have it. However, the traditions described were carefully fashioned to fit a new ideal of the holiday; one much more domestic and far less raucous than in documented traditions of the period and preceding centuries. Similarly, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) uses the holiday as a method to promote his very personal political agenda: charity and social conscience over the encroachment of an industrial economy ever more ruthless in its use of (and contempt for) the lower classes on whose backs it was built. Interestingly enough, the politics of the two authors couldn’t have been further apart, one from the other.

For a careful and truly inspired examination of the origins of our modern Christmas holiday, see The Battle for Christmas (Stephen Nissenbaum, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

Each morning of the school week becomes an exercise in steely determination. He knows he has to cross that border at the edge of his internal life and enter into the world outside. So with every step toward the school yard, he tenses another psychic muscle (and probably few physical ones). Like the proverbial fish out of water, he struggles to survive in that strange, hostile environment. And if he’s a kid like me, he sneaks back as often as possible into the safety of his fantasies for a quick gulp of fresh air.

I felt very much on my own as a kid. But I figured a lot of people had to feel the same way. Why else would catechism classes and Sunday masses make such a point about this god who knew us intimately and understood what was in our hearts? If there weren’t an audience eager to hear it, why tell us He gave more credit for good intentions than for how often you were able to hit a damn softball at recess? I believed that story. And it gave me a lot of comfort late at night while I lay in the dark, feeling very much alone. No matter how lousy things seemed then — at age seven or eight — I felt confident there was someone who understood me, watched over me, and gave me points for what went on inside my head.

The church promised that my suffering now would earn me a reward from heaven later. Unfortunately, the reward it promised was a seat for all eternity at the right hand of Jesus. Now I’ll admit there was some satisfaction in knowing that those people who made my days miserable — the bullies, the gym teachers, the school crossing guards — would be spending that same eternity in the sulfurous pits of hell. But all that seemed an awfully long way off. I’d really been hoping for some payoff a little sooner and right here on earth … ideally one with a more positive spin than simple revenge.

I was an earnest child, however disturbed. And being earnest, I worked hard to see beyond the bland picture the church painted of its god’s Celestial Order. I sensed something of real substance in the messages the church offered — a benevolent god, the value of good intentions, peace on earth, goodwill toward men — something that felt right to me. Moreover, the truth of those messages came back to me 100 times over and through as many channels in the greater [and by "greater," I mean both "way better" and "secular"] culture around me. All those messages collected in my head and, over time, they formed bright crystals, as hard and brilliant as pieces of rock candy. And in those crystals I saw a vision of a heaven on earth.

What if goodwill were able to trump brute strength? What if the reward for treating people with kindness were greater than the value of the milk money I had to guard from the bigger kids on the playground? And what if the true order of the universe included people empowered to reward good behavior and protect the weak from injustice?

That picture fit well enough with what they fed me in Saturday-morning catechism class. Certainly if we could pray to the Blessed Virgin or any number of saints to intercede on our behalf, then there might be other champions right here on earth. The evidence to support my theory was all around me.

I used to spend hours pouring over my brother’s old comic books in the basement. Every one of them was filled with stories of supernatural beings who hid their powers from the casual observer. But I knew their secrets. And I could see plainly that God put them on earth to avenge the weak and to fight for justice. Why else would he have given them those powers … and such enormous pecs, such pronounced abs, and the skintight outfits that showed them off so well? The crush I had for Superman grew as much from my appreciation for what he did as from the way he looked. And it never escaped my notice that he had to hide his most special qualities — his secret life — from the people around him, even as he shared them with me, his devoted reader.

The TV shows that filled my afternoons and evenings brought me stories of beautiful witches and genies, talking horses and automobiles. Like my superheroes, they hid what made them special in plain view of the dullards who filled their towns and cities. And like those superheroes, their purpose was to do right for the people they loved.

I wanted desperately to believe in such a world hidden just out of plain sight; a world of others, outsiders; a world in which super-powered good intentions created a kind of magic among the people around me. In a world like that, people would behave better; not because they had to, but because they’d understand the value in practicing a little kindness, in exercising simple civility. But it’s impossible to believe in something for very long without getting some small proof that it might exist out there, beyond the gray edges of the dull and the day-to-day.

And I got that proof. Every year, beginning with the day after Halloween, my eyes would light up with renewed hope in the promise of a better world.

On that day, King’s Department Store moved the last of the plastic masks and bags of candy to the purgatory of the 50%-off section. During the night before, workers set up a row of cheap, imported plastic trees down the center aisle of the store, covering them in Japanese twinkle lights, rotating Santa tree-toppers, and ornaments that blasted an ear-piercing sonic whistle their package described as “a festive bird song.”

Walking into the store that day was like waking from a bad dream. The world had been scrubbed clean of its grim, day-to-day reality in a wave of carols, lights, tinsel and that fiberglass angel hair that’s probably still eating away at the lining of my lungs some 40 years later.

Christmastime was here. And the magic of a brighter, other world wasn’t just inside my head. For the next two months, everyone around me seemed compelled to pay homage — or at least a respectable amount of lip service — to a reality I knew was only just out of sight during the previous 10.

Even the pieces of the story I got from church were magical: a star in the east; a god born in a stable; shepherds and animals, angels and kings all coming to pay their respects to the promise of the season.

Typically, the church seemed to miss much of what was so wonderful about Christmas and embalmed even those magical elements in a rigid story that gave all the emphasis to the wrong characters. According to Catholicism, Baby Jesus sits at the center of the Christmas universe. And just like the plaster figurines we placed inside the stable my father built out of an old whiskey carton, His doting parents sit to either side of him. [NB: Mary gets considerably more emphasis here, since God chose her to bear His son. Joseph's part is mostly one of patience and acceptance: good character traits in a supporting role, but hardly the stuff to inspire a cult of religious devotion.] There are shepherds who leave their flocks in order to visit the child; an ox and a lamb who watch over Him. Most wonderful of all is the choir of angels who sing carols and (I imagined) sound just like Mitch Miller and the Gang.

It’s not that there’s any one thing so terribly wrong with this picture of the world at Christmastime. It’s the general lack of holiday spirit that bugs me. Compared with the truth I knew in my heart, the approved Catholic picture of the Celestial Order of the Christmas Season feels a bit stark. As I would see time and time again over the years, the church had clearly missed the point.

Any god who would create that star and all the drama leading up to the birth in a stable — the very splendor they preached from the pulpit — wouldn’t stop there. If God were truly in charge of the whole show, then nothing was outside of His plan. He wasn’t responsible only for the Baby Jesus and that star; it was clearly His idea to create tinsel and holiday record albums and those amazing little twinkle lights that didn’t even melt the branches on our plastic tree. He must even have had in mind styrofoam snow and those plastic flocked Santas, like the one that turned in an endless pirouette at the top of the biggest tree at King’s, its gears grinding so loudly you could hear it way over in the shoe department.

And what about the TV programs? Wasn’t it part of His plan to create the specials that played once a year throughout the month of December? And wasn’t He ultimately responsible for those wonderful episodes of the regular series that taught us about the true spirit of the season? Of course He was. This was His way of letting us know there truly were special people on earth whose only purpose was to make life a little kinder to the rest of us.

I was most confident of all in His plan to populate the world with those magical creatures who saved the rest of us from complete despair. If God could create Baby Jesus with the power to charm farm animals, turn water into wine and raise the dead, then He could certainly create Santa and Rudolph, Superman and Wonder Woman, the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future … and yes, even Samantha Stephens.

Bewitched, “A Vision of Sugar Plums” (season 1, episode 15; originally aired December 24, 1964)

The church was too bound up in its own doctrine to see what Christmas was really about. A more accurate picture of the Celestial Order of the Christmas Season would look like this:

click on the image to explore the true order of things

For two glorious months, the world of my fantasies spilled out into the everyday. It bathed reality’s cold, hard truth in the soft shimmer of tinsel, in the glow of the twinkle lights and electric candles that lit up the long, dark nights of early winter. Most importantly of all, everyone took part in this fantasy of mine — the stores, the television programmers, the public library, my teachers and yes, the Catholic church, too. Hell, even that nasty school crossing guard had one of those Santa pins on the lapel of her uniform; the kind whose nose lit up when you pulled on the cord hanging below.

Lonely children and Christmas go together so well for a reason: their need for the beauty of the season keeps its true spirit alive. Its not really about expensive gifts or even the obligatory holiday parties. Its about finding a moment in the year when people think just a little bit harder about doing something for those around them, about finding in themselves the will to be kind.

It’s no wonder that one of my favorite Christmas movies is Val Lewton’s Curse of the Cat People (1944, dir. Gunther von Fritsch & Robert Wise). It’s the story of an odd and solitary little girl named Amy (Ann Carter) who finds her only friend in a person that no one else seems able to see.

The movie pretends to be a sequel to Lewton’s Cat People (1942). That movie’s heroine, Irena (Simone Simon) died in its final scene. Whether or not she actually changed into a panther when aroused was never entirely clear. But now her widower has remarried, moved to Connecticut and had a daughter: Amy.

Sad and lonely, Amy prays for a friend to share her days. Out of her deep need to be loved and through the force of her own will, Amy changes her own reality. She calls forth — from either the grave or her own psychosis — a friend in the form of Irena, the cat woman of the first movie. And when this friend appears, she explains that she’s come from a place far away, “a place of great darkness and deep peace.”

Dad’s none too thrilled to learn that Amy claims her special friend to be the wife he’d lost some years earlier. And we’re never quite clear if Irena really has returned from the grave or if Amy has simply lost all touch with reality. But it doesn’t matter. The tenderness of this moment on Christmas Eve — of gifts exchanged with love between a fairy princess and a lonely little girl — explains the promise and the glory of the Christmas season. It’s pure magic, just as Christmas should be.

All this obsession with the season may sound like a set up for horrible disappointment when it’s over and the people on the street revert to their previous day-to-day manners. Sure I’m sad when the season is over and we move from the magic of candles and twinkle lights to the bleak cold of winter days. But my sadness isn’t profound.

To paraphrase Mr. Nietzsche: a person can’t look into the abyss without changing forever his knowledge that behind the world’s veneer of bright rationality lies chaos.

In much the same way, I can’t look into Christmas — its lights, its beauty, its promise of a kinder world of good intentions — without knowing that people can be better when they just put their minds to it. If will or tradition, peer pressure or the cheap glitz of tinsel and commercialism can coerce people to behave more like human beings for a couple of months out of the year, then life just doesn’t seem so grim over the other 10. Like little Amy — crazy as she may be — I look for my own redemption in those gifts exchanged among friends with love.

* The covers of Comic Cavalcade No. 9 (Winter, 1945) and Action Comics No. 92 (February, 1946) come courtesy of Golden Age Comics.

Oh, we might feel a twinge now and then. But by that certain age, we’d certainly have found simple and reliable remedies to quell the pangs:

A walk to the grocery store provides an easy (and practical) simulacrum of social interaction. You share the space with your fellow shoppers. Your exchange with the person behind the deli counter has some of the trappings of an actual conversation. You may even see a face you recognize from some past gym or former job, giving you further reassurance that you have a place in the world, that you exist in the awareness of other people, and that this is a context to which you belong.

You might have assembled a library of movies on DVD, a surprising number of which offer the pop-cultural equivalent of comfort food. Surrounding yourself in their familiar sounds and images is like re-visiting a memory, but one in which every detail is available to scrutinize and savor.

You may even keep a stash of remedies on hand that are so hardcore, you hide them safely in a cabinet, out of sight; something so particular and disturbing it would merit several sessions of discussion with your shrink to understand its origins and purpose … say a collection of vintage Christmas catalogs from your childhood. This is much more comforting than a visit to your actual childhood. After all, it was that very childhood which drove you to spin fantasies of a perfect holiday season from late August until well into January.

And then there’s the comfort that comes from the constant companionship of one who seems to need you as much as you do him (and who never hesitates to let you know how important you are).

All of those remedies are so constant, so readily available that you reach for them without thinking. In that accessibility, those peculiar remedies become invisible; and you forget how much you need them, imagining instead that a lifetime of solitude has made you immune to loneliness.

In fact, I’m beginning to realize that the real purpose of those remedies is to build a kind of instant context around oneself, placing the builder at the center of a little universe in which everything refers back to him, granting him purpose and meaning and definition. Without access to those quick fixes, a boy is left to face the fact that he may have little or no definition or meaning; no purpose or importance.

I believe in my heart that it becomes ever more important as we grow older to challenge the assumptions we’ve built about the world and our place in it, particularly since those assumptions become more solidified the older we get and the longer they go unchallenged. But it’s hardly pleasant to give up even a fabricated sense of security, to experience that sense of  fragility that comes when loneliness creeps through the cracks in your armor and settles in your heart, all cold and damp, reminding you of just how poorly defined you are in a world from which you could vanish without a trace. Indeed, believing you should challenge your regular behavior and actually doing it are two very different things.

When I experienced big changes in my personal circumstances — leaving the city I’d lived in for the last 25 years, losing my beloved companion of the last 10 — friends commended my courage. I had very little to say in the matter of my dog’s death. And it seemed funny to describe as “brave” the decision to pull up stakes and move to another city, even another country. It still does, but for a different reason: “courage” presumes that you realize what you’re getting yourself into and decide to do it anyway.

What I’ve discovered since is that, in a new city, there’s none of that comfort of the familiar. Novelty is, after all, a function of “new.” The faces around town are new. The cold cuts at the deli counter are different. And being from The States (as the locals refer to the place I’ve taken for granted over most of my life) brings with it a certain stigma; not just the political one, but it marks my otherness as being of a more profound variety.

I’m also living with someone for the first time in almost 25 years. Sharing a home with someone else — even someone you’ve decided to allow into the more intimate parts of your soul and body — makes escaping into the usual sanctuary of movies and mail order catalogs nearly impossible. And conjuring the memory of your dog is cold comfort when what you want to feel is the familiar warmth of his body against yours as he pushes closer for his own reassurance.

In short, a new city, a new life means — by definition — the absence of routine and the comfort it used to offer. It means rubbing raw the ends of those nerves you’d wrapped so carefully with soothing sameness over the decades, reassuring yourself that life doesn’t mean uncertainty and that you have a good deal of control over the events of your days and years. It means recognizing that you have no intrinsic value, no ready-made place in the world. In the most uncomfortable (and even terrifying) ways, it means engaging with life on its own terms rather than yours.

With the clock ticking and the number of years ahead waning noticeably, that might seem like the only reasonable course of action. It may prove to be something glorious and wonderful; a middle-age breakthrough that brings with it new perspectives for the years ahead. But, at the outset, it just makes you want to cry.

In all likelihood, we just shape that potential breakthrough into new forms of old habits: we wear new paths into the streets of a new home, find new places to call our own. And, in my case, the comforts of strange and solitary preoccupations will grow into the comforts old married folks find in the sanctuary of their partners. Indeed, trading a private viewing of a favorite movie for one with my husband certainly sounds like a trade up; in fact, it sounds like the very thing I might have dreamed up in one of my private fantasies. But that’s just me.

Balancing personal growth with personal comfort seems to be a delicate game … and more challenging than we might have figured. But no one ever promised that growth would be easy. Here’s hoping we all have the courage to meet the challenge.

But what he leaves behind first — most painfully and, with time, most poignantly — is his absence.

It’s a realization built of the unremarkable bits and pieces of the everyday. And it comes quietly, surprising you each time it arrives. When you think to complain to your mother about something you know would annoy her even more than it does you. When you carefully put aside some of your sandwich makings so that the dog you’ve loved and spoiled all his life will have something to lick off the plate after you’ve finished your meal.

Those are the moments when you feel most deeply your connection to the one who’s gone. It’s when you understand most plainly that you’ll never experience again those moments of communion apart from the ones you’ve committed to memory. It’s when his absence feels the most disturbingly real.

Each of us experiences loss in his own way, and probably a little differently each time it comes. This morning (after a weekend of tears) I lay in bed and started to sob all over again. And I thought of one of the most beautiful, most heartbreaking depictions I’ve ever witnessed of that experience of another’s absence.

In Fritz Lang’s wonderful M (1931) — a movie remarkable for the complexity of its sentiments and the subtlety in its mix of sympathy and social commentary — there is a moment in which the director needs to convey the effect of a girl’s disappearance on her mother.

There’s no unnecessary wringing of the hands or wailing at heaven. There’s no literal exposition of the facts or of what the woman’s thoughts must be. Instead, we can read in the expression on Frau Beckmann’s face both that slow process of realization and the heavy counterweight of her inability to accept what’s happened.

To explain the fact of the little girl’s murder and how it feels when someone steps quickly and finally out of your life, Lang shows us a world without Elsie Beckmann.

It’s so simple, so lyrical. And it’s so heartbreaking to see this elegant montage of all the places where Elsie isn’t.

Time doesn’t really heal all wounds: that would mean forgetting when memories are all we have left. Instead, there are some wounds we just learn to live with, even to cherish for the way they put us back in touch with those who aren’t there anymore.

Why not click the big, shiny button on the left and give “Ode to Billie Joe” a listen now? After all, it is the 3rd of June.

“Ode to Billie Joe” tells such an elegant and economical story; it’s like quick, loose pencil strokes that give us precise renderings of a few minute details, but go soft and suggestive in their depiction of larger pieces of the picture. Gentry tells us so many little things about the hours from breakfast through dinner: who said what while passing which bowl around the table. She captures whole characters by quoting only the smallest pieces of their conversation. But she tells us almost nothing about what happened that day on the Tallahatchie Bridge, just enough for us to sense the pall it casts over the entire scene and the rest of our narrator’s life.

While most of us would never know the Tallahatchie Bridge without that song, for some its name brings to mind the story of a boy lynched nearby in 1955.

That summer, 15-year-old Emmett Till had come from his home in Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi. The story goes that he whistled at a white woman on a dare. A few days later, when the woman’s husband returned home from a trip, she reported the offense to him. Three days after that, Emmett was found at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. His murderers had beaten him and gouged out one eye, then shot him through the head and thrown him in the river. When the authorities recovered his body, the fan from a cotton gin was tied around his neck.

There was overwhelming evidence to support a conviction of the three men charged with the murder: witnesses who testified that the men had bragged about their crime afterward; testimony from Emmett’s great uncle who was present when the men abducted the boy; and another eye witness who saw Emmett in the back of a truck with the accused.

All three were acquitted.

The jury deliberations took 67 minutes. As one juror explained, “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken us that long.”

The genius of Bobbie Gentry’s song is that it doesn’t really matter what happened that day on the bridge. What matters is the mood she creates with her careful balance of first-person narration and direct quotes from the conversation. And somehow that mood — slow and heavy — manages to convey the weight, the quiet oppression of the summer heat and rural southern morality.

This song made for an auspicious debut. The album even knocked Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band out of the #1 spot on the U.S. charts. But Bobbie Gentry’s debut didn’t follow through to the kind of stellar career her talent deserved.

She followed this 1967 album with another impressive single in 1970. But that song, “Fancy,” didn’t gain the same broad appeal, reaching only #31 on the U.S. pop charts and #26 on the country charts.

And don’t bother going looking for the bridge; it was demolished in 1987.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was just 18 years old and published the novel anonymously the following year, in 1818. Deep inside that story are ideas compelling enough to hold my interest almost 200 years later. It seems that such compelling ideas trailing from the pen of such a young woman has generated speculation over the years that it was her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who actually wrote the book.

But that brings me to my other point about the book. To put it nicely, the storytelling in the novel isn’t as impressive as its ideas: it leans heavily on grand gestures and flowery language to cover the awkwardness of a really rambling plot. It’s unlikely that so seasoned a poet would be the real author behind such a book.

I found a quote on the matter from a woman named Hilary Bailey. Her most important credential is that she’s written her own sequel to Frankenstein. I don’t know if her book’s any good or if she’s any better a writer than Mary Shelley, but I did get a chuckle from her comment on the whole question of the novel’s authorship:

The style of Frankenstein is, to be brutal, clotted and pedestrian. Shelley didn’t write it, and if he did, it would be kinder not to say so. 1

So, let’s just say that it’s not the best writing in all of English literature. But somehow it’s easy to see through all the clumsy Romantic flourishes — the mechanical references to Milton and Goethe, Victor Frankenstein’s really dull habit of swooning with profound emotion every 25 pages — to the wonderful character at its heart: the monster. Remarkably (especially in so highfalutin a story-telling style), he seems very much like us, much more so than any of the human characters in the book.

The monster is trapped inside a physical self that doesn’t rightly belong to him, that doesn’t fit his spirit or intellect. He’s as repulsed by his body (made of dead things, pieces stolen from others) as are the people he encounters. And when his pain turns to anger and hatred after so many rejections and acts of cruelty, we don’t blame him a bit.

Sure, it’s baffling when he explains at length how he compares with Milton’s Satan. But that’s only because we don’t need any big analogies to find nobility in the character. Just knowing his intentions and hearing him describe his feelings are enough to win our sympathies. And Shelley handles these passages very well. We understand that the monster means well, that he tries hard. But he gets only hatred and rejection in return for all of his efforts. And the most guilty in failing to love the creature is his own creator, Victor Frankenstein.

The monster is only about a year old through much of the story; everything is new to him. Shelley goes to uncomfortable lengths to explain how he happened to learn such eloquent language and to acquaint himself with Romantic literature. Whatever. The point is that he’s an adolescent who finds himself trapped inside this body with its own demands — both physical and emotional — which he doesn’t really understand or want to own. I’m not so old that I don’t still remember the feelings of confusion (and wonder) at what was happening to me at that age. And because I was a budding homo, I also remember my anger and revulsion at the realization that I was becoming something I didn’t want to be: something loathed, something outside of society and its careful codes of appearance, action and (most of all) desire.

This idea that the people around him can’t see beyond the monster’s appearance, through his physical self to something more truthful, more beautiful inside; that they can’t recognize the nobility of his spirit and the goodness of his intentions; it’s horribly disappointing. And that his own father — his creator, his god — can’t give him even a small bit of the love he deserves … well, isn’t that just the core of our human experience? Aren’t we always looking for that affection from our mother or father or some god; for that unconditional love, the recognition that we are so much more than the sum of our parts? And when we can’t get it from them (and can’t find it in ourselves), aren’t we left feeling bitter and angry and abandoned?

We don’t need the careful comparison to Paradise Lost to get the point. But, however precious the reference feels, I have to allow Ms. Shelley that it’s an appropriate one. That lack of recognition is, after all, why Satan is so much more compelling a character than that insipid little daddy’s boy, Jesus. And however hideous his appearance may have become, that dark and brooding fallen angel is beautiful enough to hold our attention through all the stanzas of his story.

Looking to capitalize on the success of its earlier release, Dracula (1931), Universal rushed into production that same year another ghoulish tale from the public domain: a movie based on Shelley’s novel.

While much of its story draws on events and characters in the book, Frankenstein (1931) is far from a faithful retelling. The aim in producer Carl Laemmle, Jr.’s mind was to spook, not to present philosophical questions or high Romantic ideals. But Laemmle hired a first-rate director for the project; one who wasn’t too crazy about making a monster movie for the matinee crowd. And that director, James Whale, understood precisely which elements of the novel made the story worth telling, spooks or no spooks.

The movie’s script gets away from the book’s high Romanticism. It elaborates on those ghoulish details the book leaves purposefully vague — collecting body parts, the apparatus of their reanimation — and builds a certain amount of suspense by concentrating on murders and abductions. But it doesn’t remove our reasons to sympathize with the creature. We don’t get any long explanations of the monster’s lofty intentions; we don’t need them. The script spells out clearly and simply how the other characters misunderstand and mistreat the monster. We can see for ourselves how Frankenstein and his assistant torture him.

Moreover the movie’s monster is mute and much more simple than Shelley’s character. He’s not able to articulate his feelings in flowery speeches stuffed with literary allusions. But speeches prove unnecessary.

Most of the performances in Frankenstein are uniformly bad: overly melodramatic or just weak. The important exception is Boris Karloff, who never speaks a word of dialogue, but brings to the monster remarkable depth, nuance and subtlety. His performance makes sure that we not only feel sorry for the monster, but that we identify with him. And that’s so much more satisfying than long speeches, anyway.

Frankenstein was a huge success. And that prompted Universal to put much more time and money into a sequel which some people (me, for one) think is a much better movie than even the original: Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

Whale was apparently even more reluctant to make this movie, but finally agreed. After rejecting several script treatments, he began to work on his own adaptation with a screenwriter, pulling elements from the novel that the first movie had passed over.

The witty dialogue and a couple of really fine cast members make this movie feel very different from the first in its refinement. But the theme of the first movie — this idea of a noble, if simple creature trapped inside an unfortunate body — becomes even more specific as the monster seeks a mate, someone who will be a constant companion, a friend.

In a lovely scene, the monster enters a wood accompanied by Franz Waxman’s pastoral theme music. He nibbles on a root and goes to the stream for a drink. The way the monster moves, the little sounds he makes communicate in a subtle way how delighted he is with these simple pleasures. But as the surface of the water quiets down, he sees his own reflection. Angry and horrified by his own appearance, he splashes until the image no longer haunts him.

The one person who’s able to accept the monster on his own terms and with genuine affection is a blind man. And like all those blind men in movies (and highfalutin Romantic literature), he can see clearly the heart and soul beneath the veneer of the physical. It’s corny. And the hammy performance of the blind man (O. P. Heggie) does little to bring it home. But the scene works because, once again, Karloff is masterful in the subtlety and nuance of his performance.

I can’t help myself: I ignore the old man. I ignore the crucifix superimposed clumsily over the image. I forget the very funny parody of the scene in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. I’m engrossed in this moment.

The monster’s disbelief at his good fortune, the moment of discomfort that comes with not knowing how to respond: you can read each of these experiences in Karloff’s performance. And when that wave of emotion consumes him and a tear runs down his cheek, I find myself sobbing right along with him.

Bride of Frankenstein is a very different movie from its predecessor. The mix of high style (Expressionistic set pieces, Elsa Lanchester’s goth-glam makeover) and high camp (Ernest Thesiger’s very clever and very gay Dr. Pretorius) add texture and depth to the movie without taking away any of its poignancy. It feels much more grown up and much more satisfying than the first. It feels much more queer.

If the homo experience is one of being on the outside and looking in with the rich mix of wit, cynicism and compassion that such a position can produce in the best of souls, then this movie captures much of that sensibility. In fact, I’d say it throws into greater relief those same themes which had been a bit harder to pick out in the first movie.

The decision to give the monster speech in the sequel must have been a difficult one; it could have sullied the simple clown-like character and made it more difficult for an audience to identify with him. Instead the growth of the monster’s character into one who can articulate his feelings emphasizes the spirit beneath his flesh. It calls into deeper question the connections between our physical self and the person inside. And, most importantly, it allows the monster to describe why he has to die; even if it’s really that over-wrought Doctor Frankenstein we want to get rid of, and not the three best — and most homo-friendly — characters in the story.

Antony Hegarty is a singer and songwriter who performs under the name of Antony & The Johnsons. He sings in a falsetto that has all the richness of a true counter-tenor and seems to float above the melody of his songs. More than one review and quote on liner notes have described his performances as “angelic.”

Antony’s 2005 album, I Am a Bird Now explores his experience as a transgender person in lyrical compositions that are often less than direct in their exposition of meaning. In references to himself (or to the speaker in the song), he doesn’t describe his gender as clear and specific. His life as a boy seems like some immature physical state tied to the past; the promise of his life as a woman is still off somewhere in the future. The connection of his self to his body is in flux, to say the least.

One day I’ll grow up
and be a beautiful woman.
One day I’ll grow up
and be a beautiful girl.
But for today, I am a child.
For today, I am a boy.

(from “For Today I Am A Boy”)

On the CD single from that album — Hope There’s Someone — he’s added an extra track entitled “Frankenstein.” The exact meaning behind the lyrics is opaque. But there are themes that echo those of Shelley’s book: cold and ice, a longing for love, and a dissociation from the pieces of his body.

Listen to Antony & The Johnsons perform “Frankenstein”

In the song’s first verse, the singer describes a sort of confusion about his body, as if he’s unclear where it ends and where that of some loved one begins.

Well, I’m falling into a chasm.
Well, I’m falling with you in my arms.
No wait, these are your arms,
Your arms of love that I’m falling into.
Is this a vision of love?

This theme of disconnection from his body feels right at home with the other songs from the album which describe an impression of gender that spans some in-between place, neither one nor the other. But unlike the monsters in our book and movie, there’s no hint of pain here.

The monsters in the novel and the movies suffer horribly, caught between men and animals, the dead and the living, sympathizers and antagonists. But our song’s narrator finds in his lack of definition a kind of communion with the object of his love. The feeling of falling he describes is less about a plunge into a dangerous place, than it is a sensation of floating free from the confines of his individuality. It’s as if, in love, he’s found a moment of such complete communion that he’s no longer clear which pieces belong to his body. He and that other person have bridged the gap created by their separate physicalities.

At first, the references to the monster of the title seem literal and specific. In fact in the context of a story about a body made of spare parts, the confusion about whose arms are which sounds comical.

But then there’s the unexpected juxtaposition of his grown womanhood and his strong, cold arms. It’s as if he’s giving us a different spin on Shelley’s monster, as if the relief and joy that come with that connection to another being has freed the monster from the pain of his physical self. It’s as if the distance he feels from the parts of his body allowed him to appreciate them in the way someone else might. It’s as if he’d learned to love what’s unique about himself.

You can see these arms;
They are big and strong now baby.
Well I’ll prove to you these arms can hold you tight, hold you baby.

It’s as if our monster — low and miserable — had blossomed into a kind of super hero.

And somehow this message coming from the voice of an angel, with layers of his own voice creating a choir in the background, is heroic, too.

In another post I described how, as a kid, I conquered my fear of the monster in my closet by imagining that he would become my secret friend and protector. Shelley’s monster never finds that resolution. Once Victor Frankenstein is dead, the monster only regrets the sympathy he never found with his creator. We’re left to understand that he remains miserable for the rest of his life.

Something inside me still wishes we’d found one another when we needed each other the most, when we could have given each other the love and support we were both looking for, the scared little homo and that big scary monster.

But Hegarty’s description plays back the happy image of that protector, freed from his misery by my love. Two misfits who have found one another in a big, cold world. Two creatures taking care of one another, each offering the other what he’s missing from himself. Yes, that’s a vision of love.

1 “Frankenstein’s Fraud” on PerthNow.com, March 25, 2007

I’m sure I’d have forgotten the whole affair decades ago, except for one small detail: a man at the bar, probably between 25 and 30 years old. As I stood alongside him, I was mesmerized by the sight of the sideburn on the left side of his head. I don’t remember him as a person or even as a whole body. But I can still conjure the image of that sideburn today, discrete and disconnected from the person it belonged to.

Now I know that sounds just bit sociopathic. But wait: it gets worse.

That sideburn may not belong to anyone too particular in my memory, but it does belong to a host of emotional responses I felt at the time and (in more subtle ways) still feel today. My idea of the masculine body — ok, of masculinity in general — is built from a collection of these disparate parts like Frankenstein’s monster: a sideburn, the size and shape of a hand, the hair on a forearm, the length and breadth of a foot, the delineation of a chest muscle and the hair that covers it.

Sure, my response to these pieces of the masculine body is sexual. But it’s not just that simple stirring in the loins, the blood rushing to my cock, the rise in my predatory instincts. These things have an effect on me that’s less localized or specific: I sense a reaction at the back of my head, as if someone were stroking my neck or holding me in an embrace; I feel a softness, a longing deep inside.

These pieces of the body become fetishes — and I mean that as much in the religious sense of the word as in the sexual sense — and my focus on any one of them blocks the rest of the picture from my senses. Like prehistoric artists did with the genitalia on their Venuses and fertility idols, my brain inflates the importance of these objects of my affection out of all proportion to what’s around them.

More important is everything I came to associate with those body pieces. In my mind — at age five and ever after — those characteristics were only the outward and physical expression of something harder to pin down and describe, something deep inside each of the men who displayed them. “Strength.” “Power.” “Self-sufficiency.” “Virility.”

Nuts? Maybe. But if assigning so much emotional power to disconnected body parts were peculiar to the wiring in my brain alone, why would there be such general interest in porn that focuses completely on close-ups of a particular body part? Why would there be groups on Flickr devoted only to very specific pieces of anatomy? For that matter, why would there be advertising on bus shelters that shows us only a pair of perfectly plumped and rouged lips measuring in at four and a half feet? There’s got to be some more universal pay-off here to keep people buying expensive adult DVDs, clicking through pages of posted images, or paying for over-priced lipstick.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have lots (and lots) of vintage erotica. At first, my interest was simply to collect examples of what I found hot back in the late 70s.

And as I scoured eBay for prime examples, I did find those images to be a turn-on. But soon, I found I was putting them away in binders and boxes, looking at them only rarely. They stopped being the stuff I pulled out for an afternoon of self-abuse, and became something I “collected”; something I filed and cataloged and … well, cherished.

And I kept buying more.

Then one day friends gave me a book on vintage beefcake photography. I was fascinated: here were images that toyed with the same fetish-y display of all those body parts, but submerged that overt imperative to Masturbate Now! And the sensations they produced felt even more complicated: I was aroused both emotionally and physically. I saw an object of my desire outside of myself and a magic-mirror image of what I wished I could become.

This was the image [at left] that captured my imagination: Richard Reagan in a photo taken by Bob Mizer of Athletic Model Guild.† His apparent comfort with his own body and the physical world around him; the sturdiness of his build; the pose and the sledge hammer that suggest he’s able to mold his reality, rather than suffer through what life hands him. And then there’s the powerful arms, the beautiful chest hair, those strong legs and that cleft chin.

All of this is fine and fun and interesting to consider. But, over time, it begins to lock out the possibility of any substantial connection with real people. Oh, I found my share of men who exhibited the requisite collection of body parts. But like the obsessive Frankenstein with his monster, I wasn’t prepared to engage with the whole person inside the pieces I’d put together.

The journey toward a reconciliation of these two halves of my inner life has been a gradual one: this longing for a fantasy assemblage of iconic physical pieces (and all they represent) with a connection to a whole person. And it’s been only partly deliberate. [I just haven't evolved enough as a person that I would know how to plot that course all by myself.]

But maybe I’m over-thinking this. Maybe it’s not so strange to have a template in one’s mind for what’s attractive. And maybe it’s not so strange that any candidate for more interaction — a date, a quick one-nighter, going steady, or taking a chance on the long term — has to pass that first test, however arbitrary and formulaic it may seem. Lots of people are naturally attracted to partners younger than themselves, for example. And what registers in their minds as “appealing” may be as much the promise of “youth” and “optimism” and “innocence” as it is “smooth skin” and “robust health” and “staying power.”

And maybe it’s not so strange that we continue to see in our chosen partner that assemblage of characteristics that made our eyes widen and our pulse quicken at that first encounter. In fact, it might be an awful shame to lose sight of that first, primal reaction.

I’m married now. I was somehow lucky enough to find a man who displays all the physical stuff that continues to arouse me sexually and to recreate that deeper emotional response, that fetish-induced tingling at the back of my head and deep in my heart. He’s also very tolerant about the boxes and binders full of porn and erotica.

But most remarkably of all, he’s able to make me see him as a complete person, a synthesis of those things I associate with their outward expressions on his body, as well as the contradiction of each and every one of them. When I look at him, I’m able to see this man I love and still learning to understand. But I also see the strong hands, the broad shoulders, the beautiful eyes, the perfect feet and legs and backside. And that dimple in his chin and on his left cheek [all the more adorable because it has no match on the right side].

That vibration in my head between the pieces, individual and discrete, and the whole man — that quivering in my mind, that frisson — is disorienting and exciting. I don’t know if I would have gotten to know a man who didn’t fit that specific template of desired physical traits I keep filed in my brain; so I don’t know if I would have had the chance to fall in love with someone who wasn’t as physically beautiful as he is. But I do know that I couldn’t have given myself to someone who wasn’t (in many significant ways) both the embodiment of what those physical traits represent and their contradiction: someone who’s at home in the physical world and is comfortable acting upon it, but someone who’s also as plagued with doubts and insecurities as I am.

In the future of my fantasies, my brain will continue to quiver in just the same way well into our old age, vibrating between images of the individual pieces and a grasp of the whole man.

As for Mr. Reagan: I still cherish his images and everything they represent. But it’s kind of like the torch I carry for that statue of Mercury on top of Grand Central Station: I like to look and even to dream. But he’s not the guy you want to marry.

And just in case you want to form your own opinions about the image that first captured my attention, here are more of Richard Reagan (sometimes identified as Richard — or Dick — Reagen) from Athletic Model Guild (and one of my many binders of photos).

[Just click on a thumbnail to launch the overlay.]

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

† An issue of Physique Pictorial (July, 1962, vol. 12, no. 1, page 13) which features another image from the same Athletic Model Guild session identifies him as Dick Reagen, 21, of Santa Monica who left his native Newark to become an actor. Giving him a name and a story, fixing him at a particular place and time, somehow increased the romance of this person who (for all practical purposes) is a complete fabrication, who’s never existed for me as any more than the image reproduced as Ben-Day dots in a magazine or as the fixed grains of silver nitrate on a photo print.