We discussed relationship hacks; now how about social-life kludges?

Here is the (literally) coolest one we’ve seen in a while.

As you know, BG is not a big fan of revenge. But this right here is some evil genius.

You may know him from “How I Met Your Mother” or “School of Rock,” from his popular YouTube channel, or from his critically acclaimed, extended-run show at Hollywood’s Celebration Theater. Or you may know his sidekick, Lucas Coatney, from season 3 of Idol! He’s Ryan O’Connor, a self-described “big fat gay singing Kathy Griffin, and his big fat gay singing show, “Ryan O’Connor Eats His Feelings,” is coming soon — very soon — to a cabaret near you.

The show tells O’Connor’s life story through song and gab, covering his childhood and adolescence in conservative Arizona, his relationship with a Mormon ex-college-football star from Salt Lake City, and his lusts for everything from food to theater.

Our own Amy K. caught up with Ryan as he was preparing for his national tour’s June 7 launch in San Francisco (that’s Monday night!):

AK: Are gay breakups different from straight breakups?
RO: The truth is, gay breakups just tend to be more dramatic. But I’ve also noticed that the transition from boyfriend to friend is more prevalent in the gay community than the straight community. My boyfriend and I are always going out with exes of mine or exes of his. Truth be told, they’re usually his — I’m not as good at it. My breakups tend to be more abrupt. Besides, it’s not my favorite thing, if I’m going to be completely honest. I feel like if you’ve cut it out, really cut it out. That’s part of the magic of crossing that line — knowing that once you cross it, you can’t go back. If I’ve been naked with you, I can’t un-see you naked. And with my boyfriend’s partners? I try to be the bigger person, but I can’t help but be like, “you slept with it?”

AK: I know what you mean! I have my husband’s ex-wife to contend with!
RO: Oh, that’s even worse! Not only did you sleep with it or live with it — you married it! That’s one of the blessings of not having gay marriage — not having ex-husbands to deal with.

AK: Well, speaking of — what did you think of the Prop 8 experience here in California?
RO: It was so surprising, when the Supreme Court even made that ruling in the first place, and it came as a total shock to most of us. I was single at the time, and suddenly there was this right we didn’t know what to do with. We were all aware there was this tiny window of time when we could get married and have it be legal, and it felt like there was tremendous pressure to partner up — now! It was like a giant game of emotional dodgeball.

Then when Prop 8 went through, it was such a letdown. It all happened at once. I was at Obama’s headquarters in Century City here in LA, and it was this huge ballroom where all these giant TVs were showing the announcement that an African-American had been elected president. And on this tiny TV in the corner with about 15 gay and lesbian men and women huddled around it, and that’s where I found out Prop 8 had gone through. So there was all this hope on one side, and disappointment on the other. But never fear. A lot of people have had their consciousness raised by this. I think California will have gay marriage by 2011.

AK: I’ll take that bet. You talk a lot in your act about being a compulsive overeater. What’s that like on a date?
I’ll tell you, I’m so fortunate because my boyfriend is what you might call a chubby-chaser. Though that has its own complications: if someone loves me for the thing I hate most about myself, could I lose the man I love just by getting skinny? I’ve learned to love myself in a whole new way because he loves my body the way it is. And I have to, too: because if I can love myself at any weight, dropping pounds is just icing on the cake — no pun intended!

AK: What’s the show like?
It’s called cabaret, but I’m going out of my way to make it accessible to people who’ve never been to cabaret in their life. Even though it’s very specific, it’s completely relatable — it’s called Ryan O’Connor Eats his Feelings, but it could just as easily be called John Doe Drinks his Feelings or  Tiger Woods Fucks his Feelings. Because it’s about learning to feel your feelings through music and laughter rather than whatever addiction you have.

To me, it doesn’t make sense that cabaret is not as popular as standup. They’re both storytelling. Cabaret should be as mainstream as Kathy Griffin or Dane Cook. It just takes a few people getting out there and starting it.

Click here for Ryan O’Connor’s full tour schedule!

A real classic from March 30, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that I have recently been dealing with a difficult breakup. The good news is that it’s not mine…

My boyfriend’s ex is, well, a psycho hose beast. Before we were dating, they had broken up, but she was still causing him a lot of pain and suffering. He was obsessed with her for a while, and then he finally seemed to be letting go of her. A while after that, we started dating. Things were mostly OK. She would come up in conversation occasionally, but I never felt seriously threatened by her. I know that she is bipolar, and can be a very nasty person for no reason.

(more…)

You know that charming but not TOO charming, witty but not TOO witty, flirty but not TOO flirty back-and-forth you’ve struck up with that guy at CouldThisBeTheOne.com? You might actually be flirting back not with that guy himself, but with virtual-virtual him: a correspondent hired to take care of the pre-meeting nitty-gritty online half of online dating.

The Washington Post reports that more and more singles (roughly 80% men) are getting some very personal assistants — whether their own secretaries or via a new cottage industry of ghost writers — to manage their online dating correspondence for them: creating their profiles and handling all  correspondence up to but not including the actual, real-life date. Why? Mostly, they tell the Post, because they’re busy. Really busy. And yes, to be fair, the online part of online dating — while efficient — can indeed be time-consuming. Then again, so can explaining why it was not actually YOU that they’d been flirting with the whole time. So.

Part of me wants to say “Hey, we’re all ‘busy.’ Make time, hosers.” But part of me can summon a little more rachmones than that. I mean, they’re trying. They’re not giving up. They’re not getting all Up in the Air and letting “busy” be an excuse for not searching at all. Tacky, maybe, but there’s some hope there, too. And I can always get behind hope.

What do you think? Acceptable compromise, or Cyrano-no?

Is this: When it comes to other people’s relationships, you just never know.

At least when one door closes, another [big, gay] door opens.

But beyond that, we can’t put how we feel about the Gores’ split any better than FOBG Rebecca Traister, writing in Salon:

My attempt to sort out why I am unexpectedly gutted by the news of Al and Tipper Gore’s separation:

1. Of course we only see publicly performed versions of political couple-hood, but the Gores’ public performance was pretty damn heart-warming, even if it did tilt a touch too far on the ew-gross-mom-and-dad-are-making-out spectrum. But that’s the point! Mom and dad made out and they still couldn’t make it?

2. Forty years. You get through forty years — of ill-behaved children and ill-behaved bosses and stolen elections — and then you split? This is precisely the kind of mysterious and inexplicable narrative of marriage thing that scares the bejesus out of people who are newly or not yet married. Forty years?

3. Relatedly: so soon after Robbins and Sarandon? Really? Couldn’t divorce have taken the Bushes, or maybe the Broderick-Parkers, first, and given us some respite from confounding and embarrassingly inappropriate sadness over the personal decisions of celebrity couples whose marriages we didn’t even realize we had any emotional investment in until they dropped this bomb all over our post-Memorial Day Tuesday and now we can’t work because we’re really, stupidly sad?

4. Good god, does this mean that Al Gore is going to date? And plus, oh please please please tell me he has not already been dating. Do not want to know. Nyah, nyah, nyah. I cannot hear you. I cannot heeeeaaaar you.

5. Relatedly: they were supposed to be the functional couple. The ones who personally disapproved of the cigars and the thongs and the rest of the ridiculousness so mightily that they eschewed the Big Dog’s help in 2000 and look what happened! All because they were the functional couple!

6. It had never occurred to me that it would bother me in the slightest if Al and Tipper Gore got a divorce mostly because it had never occurred to me that Al and Tipper Gore would ever get a divorce.

…I didn’t know I had any room at all to care about the Gores’ relationship, but maybe because it’s something so much smaller, so much more personal, a headline so much easier to absorb than the other larger tragedies playing out around the globe that this small piece of political gossip turns out to be such an unbelievable freaking bummer.

News flash, as it were:

“The Flash is close to being greenlit. We never thought that film would get off the ground (and technically it still isn’t), but this is definitely a good sign. But that’s not all — Meyer also commented that Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Mad Magazine movies were presently in development.”

io9 continues:

“We really want to DC make more comic-book movies, but before they start readying a hastily-made Justice League movie arc, everyone needs to hear Tony Stark’s song about continuity. Please do take a listen.”

Example #429 of why I quake in terror at the notion of heading to the altar: This guy was so mad that his wife didn’t have dinner on the table when he got home that he burned the house down. He had the clarity of mind to tell her to get out first, thankfully, but that begs the question: Why the house? Because — to my mind — the house represents a life made together, a life (to his mind) become dry tinder that apparently needed very little to go up in flames. He was out to destroy the whole picket-fenced picture.

Perhaps stranger still was his wife’s reaction: “Why did he feel he had to burn down the house. Why?” she asked. “Because it’s not like he can’t cook, he can cook.” (Right, so if he couldn’t it would have been OK to torch the place.) Clearly, we’re dealing with a scary, unbalanced guy here. My guess is this wasn’t his first offense, nor (though of course this wasn’t her fault) her first moment of denial.

Now look, I know that most marriages (or husbands, anyway) don’t deteriorate to this extent. But imagine if you will, this same couple 20 or 30 years ago. Maybe he rides a hog and has a soft spot for bluegrass. She’s a dish – and makes the best cherry pie this side of the Appalachians. They get married on a warm summer day, a lifetime of kisses and shared meals and Jim Beam swirling in their mind’s eye. Then what happens? The same thing you see in a lot of marriages. Her face gets lined and her sweet concern starts to sound more like nagging. He grows hair in weird places and his sexy wild side becomes gruff and tiresome. And so on. I’m not against marriage. I’m just hoping we (if there is ever a “we”) can work together to keep a different kind of home fires burning.

Caring too much on March 30, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

My live-in boyfriend (who’s 30, I’m 41) of three and a half years told me he wanted to ‘just be friends’ this past September. I moved out. He got engaged New Year’s Eve to a woman (she’s 29) with whom he had a brief fling in college and has heard from or had visit him a couple times a year for the past nine years (each time they met, she was all over him like the proverbial cheap suit). They are to be married in May. I have two questions. Will this marriage work? and Why do I still care?

— Patton

Dear Patton,

Why do you care? Of course you care. Are you kidding me? Even Breakup Girl cares, and she doesn’t even know these people. Dumped you in September, engaged in December?! Yeesh. All I can say is, she may have been all over him like a cheap suit, but oddly enough — as the genuine-article fashion zombies from the 70s and 80s attest — sometimes it’s the cheap ones that last.So this thing could be a flimsy rebound, or it could be some solid perma-crease that somehow never got ironed out. Or, gulp, it could be an age thing. So I don’t know if it’s going to last or not, but I do know that you’re not allowed to obsess about it. Write to Breakup Girl, speculate with your friends — but I can trust you not to pull any “I must stop the wedding” Julia Roberts antics, right? Buy your bad self a pricey suit and find some gent who doesn’t have his past mixed up with his future.

Love,
Breakup Girl

Another good bi from March 30, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Ohmigod! This guy, my kinda friend, just told me he wants to ask me out. He’s really strange. He’s a bisexual, which is totally cool with me if we’re friends, but not as a boyfriend. He paints his nails and dyes his hair and carries around hair cream. The whole thing just kinda creeps me out. I’m really spazzing now because it is so odd to be around him. To tell you the truth I don’t even like him that much! I feel really bad but! Ahh help me please!!!!!!!!!

— SOOOOOOO Stressed

Dear SOOOOOOO Stressed,

Ohmigod! Relationships are, like, complicated enough, even when they start out on the right foot. But believe you me — and I think you’re catching on to this — “I don’t even like him that much” is soooooo the wrong foot to start out on, even if the toes thereupon are sporting some phat shade of Hard Candy. So if you do want to hang with him, say, “Hey, thanks a million, I’m not sure dating would work, but hanging out would be great,” and then walk the talk. If you don’t want to hang out with him, say, “Hey, thanks a million, I’m not sure dating would work.” And let me leave you with one question: is it odd to be around him because you’re profoundly concerned for his feelings, or because — much the same way Cordelia used to find it “odd” to be around Buffy, Willow, and Xander — the only vote he’ll get for Popularity King is from the hair cream lobby? Think about it.

Love,
Breakup Girl