"How'd your date go?" a friend asked me when it was over.

"He talked about himself for 40 minutes," I reported.

"Hot!" said the friend. It was now about 11 o'clock and the narrow bar had filled up with Sex Film candidates and other loose characters. Auditions continued Sunday but these were in essence closing ceremonies, the last official Sex Film activity for this group. For that reason, and because a number of us had seen the sun rise in unfamiliar neighborhoods that morning, the mood was several shades darker than it had been the night before; in addition to being hung over, we were starting to get paranoid. We were making calculations, weighing rumors, sizing up the competition, wondering darkly about that guy who used to be on "Third Rock From the Sun," counting up the number of auditions and dates we were called for, trying to divine our respective futures from everything John said and the way he said it and how it compared with what he had said to the others.

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So I immediately set about doing something, which consisted of calling up Barbara Scott, the San Francisco improv guru whose popular intro class at the American Conservatory Theater I had taken three years before. Barbara offered to hold a crash refresher course for me and some friends a few nights before my departure.

For two hours between 10 and midnight, Barbara coached four of us, all nonactors, on the basics of improvisation. The first rule was no blocking. Accept whatever ideas or premises your partner suggests; practice saying yes. Keep the mind clear of plans and preconceptions. Free yourself to a constant acceptance of the present moment and a mindful retention of the recent past. Endow your partner and your setting with physical attributes. Don't try to be funny or clever. Don't be afraid of silence; once a character has been defined, his or her silence has great emotional depth.

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-- Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever"

Thursday afternoon I arrived late to the Anthology Film Archives at the corner of Second Street and Second Avenue in the East Village, where we were to spend five hours watching each other's audition videos. While we waited for other latecomers, John Cameron Mitchell addressed the group, pacing casually in front of the oversize television and the pile of VHS tapes.

"When porn actually was good was when they had multiple cameras," the director was saying as I walked in. "Because they were like, 'They're having sex, and we don't have much money -- let's have three cameras, one of them slo-mo.' That's why you see stuff from the '70s that actually seems real, and emotional, and you think, Wow, these guys are actually having a relationship."

How much of a limb were we walking out on with this project? He went on:

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This was not our first conversation about the Sex Film Project. I had given her a vague explanation of my New York audition after being invited here, then received an e-mail from her assuring me that she knew I was an adult, but that she had just searched on Google for John Cameron Mitchell and was extremely concerned about what she'd read on his Web site.

Never teach your mother how to Google.

My next line of defense, after vagueness, was hagiography. Listen, Mom, I said, John Cameron Mitchell is an extremely accomplished and brilliant actor. He was totally amazing in "The Destiny of Me" and "Six Degrees of Separation" (a stretch on my part, as I never saw either play). Had she seen "Hedwig"? My straight roommate, a grown man in his middle-late 30s, blasts the soundtrack in his room until even I can barely stand to hear any more of it. And then there was that girl at Tower who, when I rented the "Hedwig" DVD, volunteered the story of seeing the director having drinks on the balcony of a Market Street bar, and hollering up to him at the top of her lungs, "Hey, John Cameron Mitchell -- YOU ROCK!" Look, Mom, I said reasonably, this isn't some sleaze-bag pornographer. He's the voice of a generation. OK, so it's a sleazy generation. But in addition to all his professional qualifications, he is a mensch.

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Sex Therapy Camp
My second day in New York I got my hair cut a few blocks from where I'm staying in TriBeCa. A middle-aged queen with a wicked look had leered cheerfully at me as I made the appointment the previous day. This turned out to be Fenton, who as he cut my hair the next day regaled me with stories about being a sort of proto-radical faerie in Cleveland in the early '70s at a house frequented by Jimi Hendrix -- among other celebrities who are miraculously still alive, so I probably shouldn't name them. What, I asked, was Jimi Hendrix like? The answer came in the form of Fenton's forefingers held about 14 inches apart. "I've been looking for Jimi Hendrix ever since," he said wistfully.

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The first thing to know about me and my audition for John Cameron Mitchell's sex film project is that I am not an actor. I'm not exactly a writer, either, although I've written somewhere in the neighborhood of a million words over the last nine years. I even had a literary agent, one of the best in the business. She didn't quite manage to sell my first book, or to like any of my others, and last year I found myself delisted by her agency after submitting an experimental narrative about an affair I had with a married couple, my age, who resembled my parents.

Since then I've been doing some photography, along with some floral installations in the rent-controlled Victorian flat I share with three others in San Francisco, and holding down a job that qualifies only under the broadest definition of writing. In other words, I'm one of those people in what Hedwig would describe as their late early thirties who have not quite decided what they are going to be when they grow up. I am sufficiently panicked about that fact, and enough of a supplicant to the American cinematic cult, to have submitted an audition tape for Mitchell's online cattle call to star in a legitimate movie with hardcore sex.

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Gandhi assumed power reluctantly at first, rebuffing those who sought to draft her into various public roles in favor of serving quietly in the shadow of her father, the prime minister. But like the teetotaler who, once alcohol passes his lips for the first time, never draws another sober breath, Gandhi fought to retain power once she had it -- and with enough zeal and ruthlessness to reduce the Indian constitution to a pile of saffron-dyed confetti.

It may help to explain her later antipathy to democratic institutions that she was born in the cradle of Indian democracy, because Gandhi had to compete with it for her parents' time and attention. For the most part, she lost.

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The correct answer isn't prostitution, but it does rhyme with it: execution, a line of work routinely ignored by career counselors despite the powerful draw it has had for people through the ages who seek a relatively safe, government-sanctioned outlet for their primal urge to kill.

The life of the professional killer with a state government paycheck is the subject of Ivan Solotaroff's "The Last Face You'll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty." Solotaroff's first offering since his 1994 collection of essays "No Success Like Failure," this ambitious book attempts to penetrate the inner lives of two men whose job it was to asphyxiate convicted murderers in Mississippi's gas chamber in the 1980s and 1990s.

Solotaroff's subjects present a study in contrasts: the hot-headed, obese, self-described Southern redneck Donald Hocutt vs. Donald Cabana, the thoughtful, sensitive warden with a masochistic habit of befriending the condemned. The first Donald approaches his work, at least initially, with something resembling zeal; the second with dread, grief and ultimately crushing guilt. Hocutt remains a death penalty supporter to the end, while Cabana ends up penning a 1996 "confession" repudiating his old line of work.

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The first rule of grand opera is that the plot should concern a woman of loose morals; this opera gives us a nun. Grand opera normally culminates in the tragic and untimely death of the heroine; "Dead Man Walking" serves up a dead man. Perhaps most important, the way to the heroine's inevitable and cathartic sacrifice should be strewn with lavish, colorful sets, exotic dance interludes and outrageous and expensive costumes. "Dead Man Walking" gives us gray prison interiors, grim fluorescent lights and dowdy, anonymous street clothes. Taken in the context of the operatic tradition, "Dead Man Walking" is either a misguided abuse of the genre or a radical reworking of operatic stagecraft.

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Even if the papers insisted on referring to the president of the Board of Supervisors as a gay comedian (the mayor was never identified as a black lawyer), voters and candidates kept the focus on rents, taxes, public transportation, planning and development. In San Francisco, an electoral debate over black or gay issues would be like a national election fought over prohibition or red-baiting.

But truisms have a tendency to fray around the edges, and the closer I got to the campaign the more tattered this one began to appear. On the brighter side, there were people, myself included, who wanted to see San Francisco elect the first gay mayor of a major American city. And conversely there were those who didn't think San Francisco should fire its first black mayor.

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Then, like the dust devils that periodically wend their way around Black Rock City, the word spread through the playa about an extraordinarily durable and vertical hard-on sighted at Camp Sunscreen. If I hurried, I could still see. With this advisory, I overcame my shyness and soon found myself standing at the camp's far table, applying runny blobs of SPF 30 to the calves of a buxom 20-ish woman while sneaking as many glances as shame would allow at the famed erection across the table. It lived up to reports by pointing skyward for another 25 minutes, flying from its apex a fine spider's filament of pre-ejaculate.

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Ozawa's tenure at the BSO and at its world-famous summer home in Tanglewood, Mass., has been tumultuous in recent years, marred by morale problems, firings and bitter resignations. In one high-profile meltdown, acclaimed pianist and Tanglewood veteran Gil Kalish resigned in protest against Ozawa's administration of the festival, accusing him in an open letter of causing "incalculable harm to a great institution." Pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher soon followed Kalish out the door. Meanwhile, back in Boston, morale was reputed to be at a low ebb in the orchestra, especially among veteran players.

But the muted sighs of relief that greeted Ozawa's announcement last week came not just from those who fought with the conductor or disliked his style. Almost across the board, orchestra members past and present as well as observers agree that 25 years is far too long for a conductor to lead a major modern American symphony orchestra.

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Christina Crawford -- actually Joan's adopted daughter -- was catapulted to fame and eventually into my 13-year-old consciousness after writing the memoir "Mommie Dearest," a harrowing chronicle of savage beatings and other less-orthodox punishments for infractions ranging from hanging dresses on wire hangers to refusing to eat steak tartare to falling behind on a couple of thousand thank-you notes every Christmas. The memoir was only the first in a chain of related posthumous PR disasters for Joan Crawford. The second transpired in 1981, when an unspeakably terrible movie based on the book appeared, featuring a career-stunting performance by Faye Dunaway in the title role. And in the third misfortune to beset the late screen legend, the movie "Mommie Dearest" inspired a widespread and durable cult, made up of gay men who to this day derive tremendous amusement from the movie's disastrous portrayal of Joan's disastrous role as a mother.

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Of course I had heard of John Dowland (1562-1626) -- I just hadn't heard any of his music. Now I've heard quite a lot of it, thanks to a Harmonia Mundi release of Dowland's "Complete Lute Works." The five-CD set features the lutenist Paul O'Dette, a modern master of the fretted, plucked string instrument that resembles a halved pear and sounds like an extremely well-mannered guitar. The collection includes works for the orpharion, which has a few more strings than the lute and sounds like its mystical, spaced-out cousin.

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Before retiring from the ballet stage, the Russian-American ballerina Natalia Makarova danced the role of the Firebird numerous times. In this recording, she returns to the Firebird as narrator and delivers a stunning dramatic performance. Makarova gives the characters of the fairy tale uncanny depth; her narration of Prince Ivan's encounters with the Firebird and with Princess Vasilisa is charged with pathos, innocence and eroticism. Makarova reads with a passion that I, for one, do not recognize from the fairy tales of my youth.

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