(Since I no longer have access to the article that got my dander up, I have let the author be anonymous in my response. You can probably figure out just what she said from the context.)

Pardon me, but my dander is up. I know that is a difficult, and potentially embarrassing to raise a dander while wearing a skirt, but by golly it's hoisted and flying in the hot air of opinion.

I saw another one today. I was driving along a country road and over there on the left, by the well kept farmhouse was another of those rather weird examples of modern art known as the "moonie". Have you ever seen a moonie? No, I am not talking about some earnest and well scrubbed youth in the airport lounge selling flowers for the Korean Messiah, but rather the mushroom shaped and gaily painted depiction of someone's legs and nether regions that are sprouting on lawns all over country like, well like mushrooms.

It has been brought to my attention more than once that I have a big mouth. I'm sure that you, my readers, have remarked on my talent for fearlessly offering opinion and advice from behind the safety of the printed page. Unlike talking, where my pontifications can be challenged by a loud "Oh yeah, that's what you say!", if someone out there wants to comment they have to take the time to compose their thoughts, put them on paper, find a stamp and mail the thing.

The year 1989 marks the 100th anniversary of the Brassiere, as it was first called, an item of apparel dear to the hearts of all transvestites. I find it hard to conceive of a time without the bra, so integral has it become to feminine fashion in our culture. It and the jockstrap are the only garments that have an anatomical function limited to one sex; all other clothing takes its gender from the culture. A male wearing a bra can only be doing so for the pleasure of it, as we all well know.

A reminder: I wrote these columns 20 or more years ago.

Oh dear, it's finally catching up with me. Age, that is. Don't hand me any of that crap about life begins at 40, I believed it when I was 40. I just turned 46 and I'm straining to believe it now.

I am developing an acute case of envy for those of you who live in the sunny clime of California. Here in the Northeast the trees are turning colors and the frost is on the pumpkin. If it would only stay on the cussed pumpkin I wouldn't object, but it is also invading my apartment, and wardrobe drawer.

Sometimes I wonder if the entire world is crazy or if it's just me. For quite some time now I have been staying home unemployed while my wife goes off to work or school. Being unemployed is not the greatest thing in the world, but it has given me a great deal of time to be dressed, and therein lies the source of my bemusement. Tuesday to Thursday I get up after everyone has left, Ricky gets dressed and is alone until shortly before the school bus arrives in the afternoon. I am a solitary dresser, I'm not used to having anyone around when I wear a dress.

I'm confused. Well, more than I usually am, and that's a bad sign. I need Identity, I need a Label to pin my hopes and dreams to. I thought I was a Transvestite, but lately I have found out that is too clinical a word and I shouldn't use it. So I tried being a TV but the rabbit ears kept falling off my head and the satellite dish was just unbearable.

With apologies to those of you who weren't around to listen to radio in the sixties, I'll start this with a famous quote. In the immortal words of the Chicken Man: "They're everywhere, they're everywhere". Crossdressers, that is. In the last week everywhere I look I see a crossdresser, right out there in public.

Good Grief, can it really be? Charlie Brown and Snoopy have just turned 40. I mean, it was a shock when I recently turned 40, but how can Snoopy be 40? Even if you count in dog years it seems incredible. I mention this because I have had an image of Snoopy in my mind lately. The image is the one where old Snoops is clinging to the roof of half a doghouse, the lower half having been swiped away in one snarling swat by the cat next door.

I hate Philadelphia. Well, maybe that's a bit too harsh. I hated living in Philadelphia. I took a job that made me move to Philadelphia once and lasted precisely one and a half weeks before I ran screaming back to my rural home and continued unemployment. But perhaps I was a bit hasty, for now it seems the enlightened curators of the Museum of Art there have declared my favorite fetish to be a legitimate subject of cultural study.

I'm sure that you have seen an ad or two (or twenty) for one of those 900 phone services. They usually have neat names like 1-900-HOT-HOTT, which is a real number that a teenage neighbor called twice on my garage phone before I caught him. I never could understand why someone would pay $25 for the first four minutes of talk when for a smaller monetary investment you could go to a bar somewhere and buy some floozy a few drinks and get the talk live, or possibly something more if you have a golden tongue.