I’ve been lucky enough over the past several weeks to find myself with enough time to devote daily sessions to practising not only my drums, but also rediscovering the xylophone (which I hauled with me to PEI, finally, and set up in my new music cabin here), and attending to the trombone, which I started playing last year, in order to be able to complement Alex (French Horn) and Simon (Trumpet).

As my practising has become more consistent, I have noticed a distinct pattern: Spending sufficient time on warm up exercises each and every time I practise, and playing for at least 20 minutes total, have both led to a noticeable improvement in my playing. I know I’m improving with the trombone, because I am now able to hit notes I could not reach a few weeks ago (this afternoon I finally played high F for the first time!!), and also because my teacher recently told me that my tone was “really coming along”. :-)

When working through Stick Control exercises at the kit, my double sticking feels much smoother than it did a month ago. A benefit derived from drumming regularly (at least three times a week now) and for a minimum duration of 20 minutes each time.

My xylophone skills are slowly but surely returning to the levels I was attaining in Grade 13 (yes I am that old!!) when I played Flight of the Bumble Bee for an exam. I know this because I have been working on Bach’s Violin Concerto in A Minor (First Movement), and am inching my way closer to my desired speed on the metronome, with considerable accuracy. Both my speed and accuracy are also improving with the Gallop Solo, which I still have memorized from some 30 years ago, and which I have also been practising, for fun!

Working in a focused fashion on “boring” warm up exercises for all three of my instruments, and repeating sections to perfect accuracy, speed or tone, is (re)teaching me valuable skills which I hope to transfer to my professional life once I return to work later this month and leave my music cabin behind for another year.

For more discussion on the benefits of different approaches to practising, check out this article (with link to other articles) I found online.

It was a grey, overcast morning. But COPA Flight 57 in Charlottetown, PEI was determined to host a successful COPA for Kids event, and so off to the airport I went, just as determined to make Canadian Aviation Pride’s maritime event debut a success as well!

Canadian Aviation Pride, or CAP for short, is a national organization of LGBTQ+ aviators engaged in not-for-profit work to unite, celebrate and promote diversity in the industry. We count flight attendants, air traffic controllers, aviation engineers and other aviators amongst our ranks, though the vast majority of our members are pilots. Most of our Board members are located in Vancouver or Toronto, and as a result, most of our events happen in these two cities, with more recent branching out to Montreal and a few western cities.

Being able to participate in an event in Eastern Canada was a really exciting opportunity for us, and I was pleased to represent CAP as the board donated 100 of our signature rainbow airplane necklaces and a bunch of other swag to hand out to the kids.

People sometimes ask why we volunteer at events like this, setting up a booth or table, and spending the day chatting with folks, some of whom can become mildly unpleasant or downright hostile when they discover we are a “gay” organization. The main reasons include promoting aviation as a fun and inclusive industry, so that young people, many of whom tend to be more open-minded than their elders, can see opportunities in an industry that sometimes has a reputation for homophobia, sexism and/or racism.

A big factor for us is to be models of what well-adjusted, “successful” professionals who happen to be queer might look like. This helps both LGBTQ+ youth to see themselves reflected in an exciting industry that we want them to consider, and their families, who may not yet know or may still be adjusting to the fact their their child is queer. It provides a standard for straight families to see what a gay person in aviation might look and sound like beyond a flamboyant pride parade. It also helps to normalize an often still stigmatized identity for queer families, those with two moms or two dads, etc. Lastly, it allows us to be open and visible for aviators who identify internally as LGBTQ+ but are not (yet) out themselves. We can be brave for others who are still gathering the courage to bring their whole selves to their work or hobbies.

As a queer woman, I have additional motives as well.

In Canada (and indeed throughout most of the world), flight decks comprise only about 6% women. While there are some exceptions (most notably, Porter Airlines in Toronto), most airlines are still holding steady at 6%, and this figure has been extremely slow to reach. So, I want to promote not only LGBTQ+ inclusion in aviation, but more specifically, WOMEN in aviation, queer or otherwise!

PEI is a particularly challenging environment for this work. The local flight club is made up almost exclusively of men, with wives and girlfriends being included only for things like administrative and other “helper” tasks. (The registration desk at this event was staffed entirely by women!)

And, critical as their organizational help was, I can’t help but struggle with the image this projects to the girls in attendance at such an event: All the pilots are men, and the women stay indoors and work at the desk.

The boys and their families also subconsciously adopt this image. Aviation is for boys and men.

So, as I chatted with the kids and their parents who visited our colourful booth, I made sure to talk about the fact that I, too, am a licensed pilot, and that my partner, a woman, works as a pilot for a commercial airline. This was an important message for the girls to hear, as well as their brothers, and their parents!

I was pleased to see that COPA had adopted a woman-aware approach as well, including a female aviator at the top of their banner. But I was shocked at how few girls were signed up to fly. The overwhelming majority of kids registered for a free flight were boys, and ALL the volunteer pilots were men.

Happily, as the grey skies cleared up, I got to help on the ramp, directing groups of kids to the planes for their free fam flight. This meant that I had a direct hand in working with each pilot to arrange who sat where.

You can be sure that I made certain that for every group I had with a girl in it, the girl got the right seat, up front, at the controls!!!

With 50 percent of the population still being grossly underrepresented in the cockpit and elsewhere in aviation, I feel like it’s my personal duty as a person of some periphery influence in the industry to not only expose girls to aviation, but to also engineer opportunities to make that exposure as meaningful as possible!

I’m happy to have had the opportunity to represent CAP in Prince Edward Island this summer. And while I am grateful to Flight 57 for including us, and for all the volunteer pilots who came out to ignite a passion for flying in the kids whose parents registered, I am also hopeful that as a result of meeting an actual email pilot and being able to spend 20 minutes at the controls of an airplane in flight, future years will include some female volunteer pilots on this still very traditional little island.

A few of the unforeseen opportunities that have arisen: A week in, I got my criminal record check (in 24 hours; unheard of in the GTA!!) and was able to volunteer in a local school for a week. It was the first time I’d been in a classroom in two years.... AND the first time I’d been in a classroom where I was not in the cultural minority. It felt very strange to be surrounded by children who looked and sounded like me. But it was fun, and I appreciated learning what a classroom experience can be like in a rural school, since the vast majority of my own teaching career was fostered in urban and suburban settings.

I also got to participate in the inaugural lighthouse beach bonfire, to celebrate the lighting of the recently restored local lighthouse lamp!

And I have been volunteering at the local library (developing and facilitating a course on how to use instagram to connect with friends and family and promote your small business).

Finally, I have availed myself of the opportunity to take a few Argentinian tango lessons in town. Milonga!

Soon my kids and partner are coming. I hope to have enough systems and routines in place by then and I can take some actual “time off“, and really just enjoy the island for a few weeks!!!

I’m amazed... shocked, really, by how quickly a gift of three months can evaporate.

Being partner to a pilot who frequently flies to Newark as part of her job means I get to tag along on the odd layover, taking advantage of a cheap flight, free hotel and a chance to discover a few more corners of this famous city as I add another 5-6 hours to my New York tourism experience. While I must confess that so far I’ve been more disappointed than impressed (just seems overly loud, busy and materialistic to me personally), I do see the value of familiarizing myself with such an iconic place.

This was my third visit to the Big Apple. It was a warm spring weekend in April; this time we brought one of the kids along for the adventures.

Each brief sojourn has provided another piece of the puzzle for this somewhat reluctant traveler. This time, we got to visit the site of the former twin towers of the World Trade Center.

I remember exactly where I was when 9/11 happened (a Grade 1/2/3 Spec Ed classroom, as it were), and the complexity of emotions that plagued me both on that day and in the weeks that followed.

Having attended Come From Away (the musical), and read about both the Canadian side of the events (i.e. in places like Gander, NL, that rallied to support so many unexpected and emotionally overwhelmed short term visitors) as well as a book written by a journalist who covered some of the Afghan history and general world political and historical context as well as sharing minutes details of the terrorists’ organization and preparation to intentionally end their lives and so many others, I was eager (if such a word is appropriate here) to visit an American site and see some of the artifacts from this horrific day.

As I had been warned, it was a tremendously emotional experience, even for someone who did not have any personal connection. (I know no one who worked or lived there, and truth be told, I’m generally not a fan of the type of work that such a place represents.) The Americans have done an excellent job of finding a way to impress upon visitors the magnitude, while respectfully honoring the victims and survivors, of 9/11.

It did not feel right somehow to take photos on site, and it is difficult to really capture the whole experience with words, other than to say that it was quite visceral for me.

Surprised by my tears, my partner noted that under any other circumstances, I would not be likely to have a lot of time, emotionally or otherwise, for the sorts of people who typically would have worked at the WTC. (Other than maybe the cleaners.) True as that might be, I could still appreciate that everyone who worked and died there that day would have been someone’s parent, child, aunt or sibling, someone’s friend or neighbour. This context allows me to feel an incredibly strong human connection with them and with those who would have been looking for them, waiting anxiously and increasingly hopelessly as the horrible hours turned into endless days and eventually — for too many — dark weeks and months. And then there is the thought of all those who lived or worked or happened to be walking their dogs in the surrounding area on that fateful morning when one of the most incredible achievements of humanity - a flying machine - was used as a most deadly weapon.

From the accounts of first hand witnesses, the physical/geographical/climactic effects of two massive planes barreling into two giant towers lasted for weeks. The psychological and other impacts would of course have lasted much longer, and the way the site is set up now is a tribute to both that and to the desire for recovery, collective strength and determined progress.

Instead of photos at ground zero, I snapped a few pictures later, at Battery Park and out towards the Statue of Liberty.

Can Americans remember what that iconic symbol once stood for? And can we Canadians find ways to be good neighbors, encouraging and supporting our partners to the south to find new hope, and let this hope and vulnerability— rather than fear and hatred—drive their vision for a more humble and collaborative future?

As we near the end of the second decade after the horrific events of September 11, 2001, and pause to consider the ways in which travel to America (and indeed across the world) has changed since then, one can only hope so.

I had a day to myself today. Kids at their dads, and Tats on a 3-day pairing out of town.

This doesn’t happen often, and when it does, it’s dangerous. Invariably, I abandon my long list of projects and “to-do” items that have been piling up over the previous weeks (and in this case MONTHS), and waste a whole bunch of time on some sort of frivolous drivel. Almost without fail, my big plan to build a website or manage a project and practise my music and read a book and have a nap and go for a jog with the dog and do some yoga turns into 5 hours of scrolling through instagram in my jammies, or, more dangerously, getting dressed and going shopping.

I am proud to report that today’s adventures were fairly tame, through I did end up dropping about $14 on iTunes.

It was critical, I felt, to build up the “reliving my youth” playlist on my iPhone. The luxury of being able to instantly download and own forever a whole song that I would in former times have had to listen to hours of radio before successfully capturing with my uncle’s external mic onto a cassette tape was just too much of a temptation to pass up.

Listening to the whole intro right from the beginning without the tail end of some radio announcer’s voice is a delight that sends thrills down my spine.

My own LP collection as an elementary school student consisted of about five albums: The Mini Pops (No judging — it was a birthday gift people!!), Cory Hart, the Muppets rendition of the Frog Prince, Englebert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, and 101 Dalmatians.

The rest of my early musical tastes were acquired via the ghetto blaster my mother had installed on the sideboard in our modest dining room. Mostly it was CBC classical music and a little jazz. She also played CDs that she bought in Cuba (“Dancing with the Enemy”) and at the CNE (“Borgey’s Banjo Favourites”). If I wanted “pop”, I had to go to a friend’s, or lock myself in my room and turn my uncle’s radio on very low and try to record from there to an external tape deck using a detachable mic., I kid you not!

This past summer I took a road trip to NFLD with my kids. The “mom’s classics” playlist was short, since it consisted of mainly music I already had on my device. Between that and some Stan Rogers I wanted to expose my kids to, we soon exhausted the tunes (it’s a long drive, folks!! I underestimated!) and I was forced to listen repeatedly to Africa by Toto, which had made a comeback, and which my kids had decided they needed to listen to about 17 times a day!!!

So, inspired by my recent viewing of BoRap with said kids, I decided to spend a few of my precious hours today downloading more music for the “classics” list. $14 is not bad, I’d say. And I only lost an hour to that. Well, and the subsequent 2 hours I spent reading up on Boy George after I downloaded some Culture Club (did you know he DJ’d for a while? And how did my 12-year-old self not get that he was queer? Man we 80s kids were in some heavy denial around LGBTQ+issues!!!)

Nevertheless, I also managed to knock off a bunch of the tasks on my “to do” list for a youth aviation event I am planning. All while Walkin’ on Sunshine and listening to “Like a Virgin” (OOoooh!) and “Careless Whisper”. I Never Surrendered to any other distractions. Every little thing I did was magic. I even practised my trombone!

It was a New Sensation, having all this time to myself. What a wonderful Sunday afternoon.

It’s been several years since my partner and I have vacationed without the kids. Desperate for a break from the ice and snow and endless cold of a Toronto winter, we decided to escape someplace warm for a week: Mexico.

We’d heard that both the diving and snorkeling were outstanding off the coast of Cozumel, and — too burnt out to do much pre-planning — we elected to book a stay at an all-inclusive resort.

We were not disappointed in our choice of location!

Having arrived at the resort quite late on the Sat night, we must have seemed a little disoriented when we stumbled out of our villa to breakfast the next morning; despite our pre-vacation research discovery about the perils of the vulture-like timeshare folks on site, we nevertheless lost a good two hours of our Sunday morning to them!

We got a discount coupon at the on-site Spa for our troubles, having elected to forgo a free, all-expenses paid vacation, 25 years worth of priceless memories and a host of other time - limited bonuses.

Sunday afternoon found me getting a much - needed pedicure and practising my admittedly limited Spanish at the resort spa while Tats retreated to the private jacuzzi and sauna. Then we went to grab a bite to eat from the plentiful (and happily still open) lunch buffet before taking a walk in the beach, where we got stuck in the downpour of a massive storm!

Tulum and Cenotes

Despite staying on Cozumel, which is an island, we did want to explore at least some of the better known ruins on the mainland. So on Monday morning we took a taxi to the ferry docks, where the two main ferry companies vyed for our business to carry us across the water to Playa del Carmen. (They offered essentially the same service at more or less identical prices, but the seats on the blue and yellow Ultramar looked marginally more comfortable, so we went with them.)

The one thing we had prearranged prior to leaving Toronto was a customized Airbnb "experience" with a licensed local tour guide. Alejandra picked us up from the infamous Senor Frog's at the Playa side of the ferry terminal, and thus began one of our most adventure - filled days of the whole vacation!

We visited four different cenotes and swam in two of them, including one dark cavern that she illuminated for us with a headlamp so that we could see that we were surrounded by stalactites! We ate fresh mangoes and tried mamey (sapote) for the first time; it's a fruit that belongs to the avocado family.

All good things must come to an end eventually, and soon it was time to head back to the Playa del Carmen ferry terminal for the 40 minute crossing back to the island of Cozumel.

Beach Day and Books

Since we'd not yet really explored the grounds of the resort where we were staying, we spent most of Tuesday doing just that.

The Occidental Cozumel comprises a collection of 3-story villas, each with a dozen or so suites. The paths that cover the property and lead up to each building are surrounded by mangroves, and as such, it is not unusual to find oneself face to face with a small coati or a large iguana; both roam freely around the property, the first in search of leftover human food and the latter in search of the perfect spot for a sunbath (the adults only pool seems to be a favourite).

Tuesday was also for diving into some of the books we had brought along. In spite of her protests when I picked it out for her at the airport, Tats couldn't seem to put down a nonfiction book about a guy running a cross-desert marathon and some stray dog. I, meanwhile, tucked into a book I'd been meaning to start forever: The Very Marrow of Our Bones, by a Canadian (local - Mimico!!) author.

With full time jobs, teenage twins and too many projects demanding our attention at home, rare indeed is our uninterrupted reading time. So we really enjoyed parking ourselves at the beach for a few hours and getting lost in British Columbia and the Gobi Desert respectively.

Working Wednesday... And Scuba!

I'm fortunate to have a job that sometimes allows me to leverage technology to telecommute, and since Wednesdays are usually a "work from home" day for me, and since I had a number of meetings to attend and emails to write that couldn’t wait, and since I am always on the lookout for ways to stretch my meagre allotment of vacation days, I decided that this Wednesday would be like every other. Well, except that the temperature was a wee bit warmer than that where I usually work!!

For $12USD, an allegedly reliable Internet connection could be had in ones hotel room. So, while Tats headed off for a day of Scuba diving on Wednesday, I settled in for a full 8 hours of meetings and work-related tasks online.

I spent a good part of the morning working from our tiny balcony overlooking the mangrove. A little bird joined me. Perched on the balcony railing, she seemed to say, "don't worry, I'll keep you company until your workday is done!" It helped considerably.

Fortunately the sun was still out when my workday was done, and I enjoyed a short swim and a half hour of reading at the beach before supper!

The ability to work off site sometimes is a flexibility I cherish, but truth be told, I’m not sure I’d do that again in this sort of context. Live and learn.

Bar Hopping in Cozumel

I’m not much of a drinker, and in general, the bar scene doesn't really appeal to me. But I'd read about a "must-visit", ocean-side, off-the-grid bar about a half hour (by car) from our hotel, so on Thursday we rented a jeep and decided to do some exploring on the other side of the island.

We stopped at a beautiful beach along the way, and went for a swim before heading over to Coconuts, our intended destination. Coconuts bar and grill sits atop a bit of a cliff, which provided a lovely vantage point out over the ocean.


After lunch, we ambled along the various paths and exploring around the bar. We even found a geocache!

While sipping on our fresh squeezed lemonade and munching on some homemade guacamole and nachos, we had chatted with the other couple at our table, who were part of a bar hopping tour from a cruise ship docked in Cozumel for the day. This was their second time on the island, and they highly recommend that we continue our “pub crawl” further down the street to make a stop at Punta Morena, from wence they and their group had just come.

Intrigued by the promise of seaside hammocks, we decided we had to go check it out for ourselves!

Punta Morena turned out everything they promised and more! We ended up spending several hours lounging by the ocean there, and were pleased to find this spacious beach club and bar was not too overrun by tourists. The place offered fish pedicures (We did not partake), relaxed seating directly in the pool, a plentiful menu and as promised, a wide array of seaside hammocks. We enjoyed a quiet early evening reading our books, enjoying more drinks, and (for me) a dip in the ocean.

One More Seaside Bar

As we were not sure whether the lights on our old jalopy worked, we thought we had better head back to our hotel for sunset, so we eventually pride ourselves out of the hammocks and made our way back to the jeep and managed to reverse out of the parking lot and onto the main road without stalling.

As of happened, the lights did work, and so we heeded the call of one last oceanfront tiki bar, This one aptly named “The Liquor Box”!

Happily, driving stick shift is a little bit like riding a bike; once you’re back in the saddle, muscle memory takes over and everything sort of clicks into place. I quite enjoyed my truck back to the hotel, which was complemented by escapades of my drunken girlfriend, who insisted on riding standing up in the back of the Jeep, singing Russian marches at the top of her lungs, occasionally punctuating these with a fist pump in the air accompanied by a loud “TEQUILA!”

A Snorkeler’s Heaven

Friday it was back to the spa for both of us; a nice Jacuzzi was followed up for me with a massage while Tats studied (as a newer first officer with her current airline, she keeps a strict study regime to stay on top of everything she needs and wants to learn about flying and aircraft systems).

Following that, we embarked on a snorkel tour that picked us up from the pier at our resort and took us to three amazing nearby snorkeling destinations: El Cielo (to see starfish!), Columbia (where we saw sea turtles), and Palancar, where Tats had gone to dive earlier in the week. After that experience, I could see why so many people choose Cozumel as their dive/snorkel destination!

The local fauna was also out in full force; we sighted a small family of mini-coatis, and four iguanas were sunbathing simultaneously at their usual haunt on the rocks by the pool. It was as though they were putting on their best show for our final day at the hotel!

We enjoyed a final dinner at the buffet and lamented the fact that in a few short hours we would be back in a world where the temperatures had been for the past week as many degrees Celsius below zero as we had enjoyed above zero here on the Yucatan Peninsula, and where we’d have to fend for ourselves when it came to food.

Then it was time to pick up our luggage from the little room where it was waiting for us.

I had to pry Tats away from the hotel lobby and push her into the shuttle along with a few fellow Torontonians who were also heading back to the cold and snow with us that night. She was NOT ready to return home yet (and truth be told, neither was I!)

Soon enough we were boarding the Air Transat flight from Cozumel back to Toronto and in the blink of an eye, the journey was over and we were stumbling bleary eyed through the door of our apartment, the allure of a week’s worth of laundry enough to lull us to sleep at 4 a.m.

The Cozumel sunsets had already become a distant memory, with only a bottle of tequila and a pound of Mexican coffee which we had brought back as gifts for friends, as proof that we’d been spent a week in that warm, sunny climate!

For many, the advent of Christmas marks a season of anxiety and stress. Money is tight and fuses are short as extended families bicker about who goes where for Christmas, and what happens once they get there. Stores and online ad campaigns pull at your heart strings and play on your guilt to try to get you to loosen the purse strings and spill all your hard-earned cash into their coffers, so that you can have a faint glimmer of hope of living up to wildly unrealistic expectations. Even the most pious among us can get swept up in the superficiality and busy-ness of the season.

For me growing up, this intensity was seldom apparent. In fact, quite the contrary was true.


Stability and Peace

With virtually no extended family, my mom, Omi and I had few if any competing expectations. As far as gifts were concerned, modesty won out over both extremes of abundance and scarcity. And as Europeans, we would generally forego the traditional Canadian turkey dinner in favour of homemade German potato salad (kartoffelsalat) and wieners w crusty buns and Dijon style mustard, followed by Weinachtsstolle (German fruitcake) and Dominosteine, served on the evening of Dec 24, as soon as my mom got home from work. It was an exciting family gathering, but not a noisy one.


When I was little, my uncle formed part of the small group around the table for dinner. After he died, it was just the three of us for a few years. Later, as a teenager, I remember my mother’s friend, Horst, joining us for Christmas Eve.

Ironically, this annual holiday ritual represented one of the most stable seasons in my otherwise chaotic and unstable upbringing! Despite the schizophrenia, suicidal depression and clinical anxiety that wreaked general havoc my single parent, immigrant family life, Christmas Eve and the events leading up to it seemed like the glue of reliability that held us together year after year, and kept me — as the only child in the midst of this mayhem — sane.

The Reliable “Weinachtsbaum”

Come hell or high water, there was some form of real Christmas tree every year, with the same damned decorations, including the „Strohsterne“ that had been carefully preserved by my great-aunt in Germany and then my grandmother and my mother after her. There were the red balls packed neatly away in yellowing cardboard egg cartons, and there was the always-too-short string of yellow lights to emulate the real candles my grandmother‘s family‘s tree would have sported when the Tannenbaum was unveiled on Heilig Abend in their modest living room each year. (Oh how I longed for the multi-coloured lights and too much tacky tinsel that festooned the plastic trees of my Canadian school chums!)

Symbols of Stability

Unbeknownst to me at the time, that meagre tree, the gifts that surrounded it, and the simple supper of Wuersten with Senf, Kartfoffelsalat and Dominosteine that preceded the opening of said gifts each year provided a beacon of hope in my emotionally tumultuous childhood and adolescence. Where so much uncertainty prevailed, our family’s Christmas rituals represented the security so lacking in other areas of my life.

My family‘s Christmas Eve tradition is one I‘ve insisted on emulating each year into my adulthood, in spite (or perhaps because?) of the fact that my mother died 2 days before Christmas when I was 21, and my grandmother and mom‘s friend Horst are also no longer with us.

My 14-year-old twins lead even more scrambled lives than I did at their age (along with a competitive helping of insanity and chaos in the emotional states of the adults around them!), and my hope is that the predictability and structure of our Christmas Eve traditions — and in particular, the tree — provides them much-needed stability each year, as it did for me growing up.

What’s on My Tree

Our tree features a combination of old- and new-world tradition. The lights that serve as the base each year are not multi-coloured as I‘d pined for as a child, but the string of soft white mini lights that adorn the tree is sufficiently long so as not to leave giant gaps even those years when we splurge on a larger tree! And in lieu of tinsel, we usually include some form of sheer, golden ribbon poking out here and there. (Reusable, of course!) Next come the red balls in assorted hues and sizes. They are not the same ones my mother used (those have long since broken), but they reflect the overall feel of my childhood Christmas trees.

After the red balls, the homemade wooden stars, painted yellow, that my roommate and I bought on Roncesvalles in my mid-20s after eyeing them in a shop window for some time one year (the same year we stayed up until 4 a.m. baking gingerbread for a house that looked considerably more pathetic in the end than the photo accompanying the recipe on the cover of some Sally Homemaker style holiday magazine that had inspired this foolishness in us!)

And so our Christmas tree finds its way into our annual routine, predicable in both its appearance and content, offering up its cherished heirlooms to whomever in our little circle might appreciate or benefit from these varied traditions.

I hope it will do so for many years to come!

While we've worked hard in our personal life to surround ourselves with influences that positively portray the fluidity of our people, the mainstream world around us apparently continues to wallow in a quagmire of clearly defined roles, rules and gender stereotypes.

The literature, activities and announcements on board harp on these stereotypes, and while no one was outright homophobic, it was generally assumed that everyone aboard was "normal", ie straight and aligned with the gender binary.

In the middle of our cruise, there was a game show, based on an actual TV game show, called "Love and Marriage", held in the theatre. It was here that Tats and I elected to challenge the somewhat stifling straight culture that surrounded us.

On a whim, Tats and I auditioned (if an impromptu queer interpretation of the required ultra-hetero Tarzan scene could be called an audition).... And the next thing we knew, we had won the audience over and found ourselves on stage as one of the three couples selected for the show!

Wedged in between two newlyweds and a husband and wife who had been together for over forty years, Tats and I representated "mid range" (over five years and under 20). We were also the only lesbian couple, and -- I suspect -- probably the only LGBTQ couple they've ever had on the ship's show. As a result largely of this latter fact, we found we gained considerable fame and notoriety; for the remainder of the cruise we kept getting "recognized" wherever we went. This consisted largely of people coming up to us with a big, friendly smile and telling us how much they had enjoyed our performance, and the occasional person yelling, “sing in Russian!“ across a room at Tats, because of a response I had given to one of the questions asked during the game show.

While it was a little disconcerting to be thrust into the public eye like that, it was in some ways a not altogether unfamiliar feeling. As a parent of monozygotic twins, I've become accustomed some level of notoriety (this was especially true when Alex and Simon were small and more easily recognizable as a “pair”).