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Unlimited.
    Wrinkles.
    Unattractive male friends.
    Budweiser.
    Dude.
    â€œOh, my God! You’re … 
straight
!”
    â€œ
Sssshhhhh!
Shut up!” he said. “You think it’s easy being straight and loving the Academy Awards? I can’t help that I got the gift, too.”
    I could’ve blackmailed him right then and there.
    I could’ve started screaming and pointing, “Breeder!”
    And there’s a good chance he would’ve endured the same outcome as Sebastian in
Suddenly, Last Summer
.
    And yet, even though I had been beaten at my own game, I admired the prowess and intellect of my straight nemesis. I knew what it was like to be driven by a gift granted at birth.
    Mostly, however, I knew I had still come out on top.
    Not only because I could talk openly about my night, without fear of retribution, but also because I knew—as a PR pro—exactly what was coming next.
    Just then a photographer appeared, yelled “Smile!” and snapped Liza with a Z’s picture, the flash capturing the shock, horror, and bewilderment of this straight man realizing his photo would appear all over town with a caption screaming: LIZA WITH A Z WINS GAY OSCAR CONTEST!

ASH WEDNESDAY
(Not the) Son of a Preacher Man
    O ne of the new ministers at our little town church had a wicked penchant on Ash Wednesday of making his more infrequent parishioners resemble Al Jolson.
    Unfortunately, my family was among those who attended church only on the “important holidays,” like Ash Wednesday, Christmas, and Easter, the holidays when, as my dad liked to point out, “God was paying particular attention and truly taking count.”
    Which is why instead of tracing dainty little crosses on our foreheads, as was done on the foreheads of the church deacons and Bible-study leaders, our minister made our family look as if we had just been pulled free from a collapsed coal mine.
    I wanted to believe, like any person of faith, that our minister had giant hands, or a touch of Tourette’s, or simply—like an untrained singer—bad technique, but I realized, the older I got, that he simply had a vicious streak.
    I remember one particular Ash Wednesday when I was in junior high and my mother returned to the pew looking as though she had just crossed Oklahoma in a covered wagon.
    â€œAre you going to work like that?” I had asked her, the contrast of her white nurse’s uniform and ashen face making her look like a photo negative.
    â€œI can’t wash it off!” she said. “That’d be blasphemous.”
    What was blasphemous, however—after years of watching our minister work—was his evil ash-decorating techniques. For the
truly devout
, he would always keep his left hand clean, using it to hold their holy faces steady while his right index and middle fingers swept shallowly through the ashes and then softly but deftly formed a cross on their God-fearing foreheads. He would smile proudly as they left the altar.
    But with heathens like the Rouses, the minister used both hands freely, as though he were in a schoolyard fight and his mission was to blind his enemies with as much dirt as he could possibly toss.
    And I swear that the man of the cloth would always smirk as my family walked back down the aisle.
    What was an even bigger and dirtier slap in our faces, though, was the fact that the minister always had a perfectly formed cross on his very own forehead, almost as if he had stood for hours in front of his little mirror in the rectory next door and etched it with a well-sharpened eyebrow pencil before outlining it in mascara.
    This ongoing Ash Wednesday debacle was particularly difficult for me during my overweight youth because I always went to school resembling the spawn of Fat Albert and Tootie from
The Facts of Life
.
    Moreover, this seemed to create a chasm between my mom and dad.
    Whereas my mom loved to attend church—she enjoyed the pomp and