Twenty-Four Years of Queer Delight

(Photo Credit: People)

Today is a special day in Roxie’s World, as we celebrate International Women’s Day (which this year we have decided to call International Bitches’ Day for reasons regular readers will understand) and the first of the several cork-popping occasions that March brings to our household calendar. (Stay tuned, kids. We’ll be celebrating all month long!) Today we commemorate the 24th anniversary of the late-winter snowstorm that forced Moose and Goose to spend their first night together. (Long story, not entirely appropriate for a family-friendly blog.) That’s right: twenty-four years! They got together in 1984, the year of Ghostbusters and Terms of Endearment, the year when Michael Jackson’s Thriller won the Grammy for Album of the Year, the year when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to run on a major-party presidential ticket and Vanessa Williams became the first African American to win the Miss America pageant. (Sadly, Williams also surrendered her crown in July of that year, after nude pictures of her appeared in Penthouse magazine. Happily, the career setback was temporary, and Vanessa now chews up the scenery as the incomparably wicked Wilhelmina Slater on ABC's Ugly Betty.)

To honor the occasion of their anniversary, I sat down with Moose and Goose to talk about the secrets to their extraordinary relational success.

Roxie: Congratulations, you two. How have you done it? How have you managed to string together twenty-four years of queer delight, fourteen of which have included a really cute dog? What’s your secret to staying together?

Goose: Inertia.

Moose: Lack of imagination.

Goose: Fear of mid-life dating.

Moose: She has too much dirt on me.

Goose: She has too much dirt on me.

Moose: It would be too hard to teach someone else our unique Automated Fight System. Some arguments we’ve had so often that we don’t even bother having them anymore. Instead, we’ve come up with a numbering system, so we just say the number and start laughing, thus avoiding conflict. You know, like Fight #46B, Regarding Goose’s Inability to Depart on Time for Family Trips.

Goose: Or how about Fight #37D, Regarding Moose’s Annoying Habit of Asking, “Is there something wrong?”

Moose: Fight #29M, Goose Doubts the Reality of PMS and Refuses to Answer the Question, “Does this make me look fat?”

Goose: #18A, Moose Frowns When Goose Makes a Second Round of Drinks on a Tuesday Night.

Roxie: Come on, you two. Get serious. Twenty-four years is quite an accomplishment. I’m sure a lot of our readers would like to know how you’ve done it.

Moose: Really, Rox, not being too serious has helped a lot. We used to joke with our couples therapist that we were going to write a book called Putting the Fun Back in DysFUNction.

Goose: And at our commitment ceremony in 1989, Moose promised me a joke a day for the rest of my life. It was in her vows, and she has more than kept that vow. Most days, I get way more than one joke.

Moose: That’s because she’s such a good audience. As you well know, Rox, Goose has a wonderful laugh. Most of the time, I crack a joke just to hear that sweet sound.

Goose: Aw-w-w . . . .

Roxie: Couples therapy. What was that all about?

Moose: Oh, you know – a mid-course adjustment.

Goose: Yeah – I had to be re-programmed so that I wouldn’t roll my eyes every time Moose said, “Honey, we need to talk.”

Moose (laughing): Well, that was part of it. Mostly, we needed a little help understanding how our inner children were getting along in the relationship, how our pasts were influencing the present. It was very illuminating.

Roxie: I’ve noticed that your inner children do quite a bit of singing. Could you talk about the role of music in your relationship?

Moose: Oh, yes, music is central. We’re children of the rock ‘n roll generation, you know, so we have a huge repository of shared words, sounds, and images to draw from –

Goose: Uh-huh, though we differ on disco and the pop rock of the 1970s.

Moose: You better not say anything mean about Abba or the Carpenters, dear. It’s our anniversary.

Goose: Of course not, darling. I’m on the top of the world looking down on creation –

Roxie: You also write songs. Tell me about that.

Moose: Well, when we first lived together, we lived in this tiny little town down on the shore in Jersey –

Goose: Down highway 9, chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin’ out over the line

Moose: Right, and there wasn’t a lot to do in the off-season, so we filled in the time by writing songs about, well, everything –

Goose: Like our cats. We had a great song about our incredibly spoiled cats Spike and Lily being the center of the whole wide world.

Moose: Yeah, that was a good one. My favorite may be the tribute we wrote to our bad eating habits back in the days when we thought clam dip was a vegetable. Remember “We Buy Fruit and Watch It Rot?”

Goose: Oh, yes, a classic of lyric simplicity sung to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” I loved that one.

Moose and Goose (singing):

We buy fruit and watch it rot
Watch it rot
Watch it rot

We buy fruit and watch it rot
Because we think it’s fun!

Roxie: Enough, you two! I finally figured out the secret of your relational success.

Moose and Goose: Really? What’s that?

Roxie: You are both completely nuts in ways that are perfectly complementary. No one else could understand or put up with either one of you. Thank dog you found each other!

Moose and Goose (laughing and rubbing my tummy): Thank dog, indeed, Rox. Thank dog on earth!