14 September

Provincetown: Dogs On Vacation

by Jon Katz
Dogs On Vacation
Dogs On Vacation

There are few children in Provincetown any longer, but there are plenty of dogs. There are dogs everywhere there – on the beach, on leashes, in every other window, in outdoor cafes, in art galleries and specialty stores,  in the National Seashore, in motels, behind gates and shrubs, clustered with groups of people, in fancy rooming houses. Half of the stores in Provincetown have water bowls for dogs and some told me – only half-jokingly – that you can’t buy a house in Provincetown if you don’t own a dog.

There is a dog park in the town with elaborate concrete sculptures, tunnels, grave running tracks, it is one of the only places in the town with ample parking. There are all kinds of dogs – the tourists seem to favor Pit Bulls, Labs, Golden Retrievers, Huskies,  and large shelter dogs, the residents seem partial to small pure-bred dogs, especially ones that need a lot of grooming and bark. A lot of Scotties and lap dogs.

I love dogs – they are a significant part of my life and my work – but, as often happens, I am in a freakish minority when it comes to things like bringing them on vacation. For one thing, I love sleeping late and not worrying about feeding or walking them in the morning. For another, I can’t say I see the point of walking a big working or hunting down down a crowded tourist town  at mid-day, tongues hanging to the ground, jostling for space with many thousands of people and their dogs. I didn’t see many happy dogs on those streets. Many were understandably anxious.

If it’s considered abuse for the carriage horses to walk around in the heat, why is it good for a Lab from Michigan to be panting on hot asphalt in August with people pressing on him from all sides?

Even a decade ago, it was unusual for people to bring dogs on vacations, animals were not permitted in most hotels or motels. There was some space between them and us. Now, as dogs are increasingly emotionalized elements in our lives, I know many people who won’t go on vacation if their dogs don’t go, and are proud to say so.

For me, dogs are a distraction on vacation. I like to take photos, walk on the dunes, pop into stores and restaurants, stop and focus on what is around me. I don’t want where I walk to be bounded by where my dog can go and where everybody else’s dog is going.

There are many conflicts surrounding dogs in Provincetown.

Some people tug at their dogs and yell at them to move along. Dogs dump on the beach during their walks, there are signs everywhere imploring people to clean up, even stands with doggie bags (many people don’t clean up, of course) and motels contend with barking dogs, or dogs that fight with other dogs. People walk around with aggressive dogs who go after other dogs, you can hear the fighting and yelling on the streets.

There are raging battles reported in the local paper between dog-loving residents and the town’s animal control officer, who lurks on the beach and gives big tickets for dogs unleashed at the wrong time.  On the National Seashore, dogs are forbidden on hiking trails and sand dunes, but I saw many on both. Some dogs love to run on the beach, others struggle to walk on the hot sand. It did feel uncomfortable to me to see dog feces on the sand trails of the dunes.

The problem with being dog friendly is that many people are not dog responsible, that seems to be a part of human nature.

But Provincetown is a mirror of our deepening attachment to dogs, in so many ways. They are a ubiquitous presence in town.  Dogs are no longer on the periphery of our lives, they are at the center. They are not pets for many people, but beloved members of the family, nearly indistinguishable from children. I guess I fall somewhere in the middle.

Dogs are not just pets for me, but part of being on vacation is freedom from the conventional chores and responsibilities that mark our lives. I just don’t need them to be with me every minute, and I don’t believe they need it either. It is easy enough to think about what we want, harder to understand what they want or need.

I do not believe our dogs miss me or Maria when we are away – there are really no signs of it. I have never had a dog with separation anxiety.  Our dogs love our pet-sitter – they are on familiar turf, they play and walk with her, cuddle with her at night, eat heartily, play and behave normally. I believe this is better for them than driving to the beach and hanging out in motel rooms and on crowded streets.

I did not miss them in Provincetown, and was grateful to be spared the responsibility of walking, feeding, cleaning up, exercising and monitoring them. I was very happy to see them when I got home, absence really does make the heart grow fonder for me. Dogs love routine above all, and it was great to know they were safe and healthy right where they were.

 

14 September

Provincetown: The Outsiderness Of Being. An Evening At The Bird Cage

by Jon Katz
An Evening At The Bird Cage
Lisa Manelli: An Evening At The Bird Cage

Provincetown is an outsider’s place, it always has been, and I am an outsider, I always have been. I have never found a group that I wanted to join or that wanted me to join. I have lived outside of the tent, it is where I belong and am comfortable. I believe I live outside of the suffocating labels, expectations and assumptions of other people. I call it the Outsiderness Of Being, it is where I live, I believe Maria comes from the same place, it is a state of mind I suppose, something we share.

There are people who look at the world from the inside, people who look from the outside, often with longing. I guess this is why I have always identified with drag queens, with people whose art is impersonating other human beings, people they perhaps wish they were. It is a poignant life, often a painful and difficult life.

In our culture, there are few people who experience outsiderness more directly than the drag queens, transvestites who assume the identities of other people, especially famous ones, usually men who act out the lives of women. They call them cross dressers. In Provincetown, there is one movie theater on the second floor of a wharf-turned-mall, but there are at least three clubs where drag queens perform several times a night. We went to see an “Evening At The Bird Cage,” where two gifted men – Joe Posa and Thirsty Burlington – impersonated Joan Rivers, Cher, Lisa Manelli, Michael Jackson,  and Barbara Streisand.

The culture is different than Broadway, even though the shows evoke the big stage. The shows are generally inexpensive – about $25 to $30 in Provincetown. The rooms are usually small. The audience comes with dollar bills to hand out to the performs who march down the aisles at least once during every song. The singing is often very good, the costumes outrageous, the humor biting and funny, self-aware and merciless. Drag Queens know how to be outrageous – big hair, big wigs, sparkling gowns.

Joan Rivers would have wanted the show to go on, said the manager, and so it did. Cher was uproariously funny, and there was a sense of community and intimacy in the room that you will never find in a Broadway musical. Outsiders are a community in themselves, part of the Outsiderness Of Being.  It was as if we were all in it together, and I suppose this is so. We were. Even as you laugh, your heart breaks a bit.

Maria and I both loved the show, the spirit and the pain and the artistry of it. It is never easy to be an artist or a performer, to be a drag queen takes a particular kind of passion and determination and love. The drag queens have always inspired me. If they can do it, I can do it.

Our world is increasingly corporate and conformist, the outsiders and the drag queens pushed to the edges of our culture, usually out of sight, confined to a few outsider towns with outsider audiences. I’m not sure why I belonged there, I have never wanted to put on a sequined gown. But the Outsiderness Of Being is a state of mind, it is not really just about gender. If you are a citizen of this place, you know it in your bones.

14 September

Content Seagull. I Made A Friend On The Beach

by Jon Katz
Content Seagull
Content Seagull

I made a friend on the beach, I named him Content Seagull, a good pilgrim name. I found the beach a wonderful place to meditate – the waves are so restful – and Content Seagull joined me in my meditations, he seemed to like me and he hung out with me. I told him we had no food to give him, but he didn’t seem to mind, when he heard the gong on my meditator app on the Ipad, he appeared and sat there with me, a message of some kind that I cannot being to fathom. The horses have been talking to me all year, now a seagull? Perhaps a benign kind of dementia. Perhaps a benign kind of sanity.

14 September

Provincetown: The Power Of The Natural World

by Jon Katz
The Power Of The Past
The Power Of The Past

In Provincetown, we went out on the water in a beautiful 89-year-old schooner called the “Hindu,” and as the sun set over the horizon, we saw another schooner right in the middle of the sunset. It was a powerful moment for me, a powerful image, out there on the ocean we had entered a different world, a lost way of life – no screens, cable news arguments, texts, e-mails, smart watches and tablets. There was nothing to focus on or absorb but the beauty of the world, the so rarely visible to us in our frantic lives.

I do not romanticize the past or celebrate the idea of nostalgia – that everything was better than it is now. I am mindful of the fact that were I alive in the past I would almost surely be dead now, they didn’t open up hearts and repair them then. A simple life is not always a better life. Still, how precious to go back in time, even for a few hours and come face to face with the past and the awesome beauty of the natural world, my world.

We are disconnected from the natural world, thus broken. Our dogs connect us, a ride on the ocean, the presence of the carriage horses in New York. We turn to animals and to the natural world to heal or broken spirits, both are sacred to us, or ought to be. That is what I was feeling out on the ocean, when the other sail appeared as some sort of mystical message on the horizon.

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