Three Kings.

I believe that the Festival De Los Tres Reyes is on the 5Th, but January 8Th will always be the 3 Kings day to me. It's the birthday of three very important men in my life Jim, Sunil, and Elvis. Each man god on earth has affected me to my core in one way or another, and since yesterday was monumental to Jim, all are being saluted.

On the eighth Jim turned 40, and this is happening all too frequently around me. What is it with this fruit and it's ripening stage? Jim was the most youthful of us all in the Anne Frank Acting Camp. That's very tongue in cheek actually; an acting company that was sequestered in the actual mansion where we portrayed the family that lived there in 1891. The fact that we also did a staged reading of Anne Frank the musical just brings my joke together. If any reader is Offensivsensitive, hit the keypad cupcake. Jimmy was the scrawny, pretty one who sang a beautiful tenor and could torment any of us in the cast to the point of wrestling, how butch for all of us. Jim is BIG fun. Jim was also my gateway drug to coming out. When I started to get my swerve on, he was one of the first to offer a big ear to listen, and turn me to decent literature to frame my personal constitution. This seems like it happened yesterday, and yet it was in our early twenties. Happy Birthday Jimmy, you'll always be the happy ward on the front lawn in the jodhpurs with his butterfly net, running free with a big smile. Tongue in cheek, literally.

Sunil was the crazy Indian I worked for in Yankee Key West. Imagine; A five foot four Indian basketball star, schooled in Zurich, leaving the Caribbean, to cook Cajun, for Yankees, in an old funeral home, surrounded by silk flowers. He would freeze milk, to save a buck or two when it was on sale (it never came back fully and was called Zombie Milk) We called the place 'The Temple Of The Unusual' (props to Zsa Zsa) as it was a hoot. Sunil taught me about the art of the deal and how you can negotiate with a noose. He fell in love with a pretty little blonde on the high seas and followed her to her hometown, a sleepy little lobster town on the CT shoreline. He's an amazingly talented man, with incredible food who always makes me laugh and who's stories will ring through the Internet on this blog/bell/belle. Happy Birthday Suny, you'll always be the happy Egyptian scaring the shit out of uptight garden club members looking for gift certificates.

The third king, and really The King, in Elvis Aaron Presley. Back a couple years he released a compilation of digitally remastered work that included an released track that soon went to number one on the dance charts. "A Little Less Conversation" was a great driving tune that had me and Suzie Q chair dancing all the way through Newport and the Cape of Cod. It was especially fun to ask people, "Have you heard the new Elvis song?" just so we could say, "No, not Costello". Has anyone ever seen anyone as beautiful as this man was. He would have been seventy two and there's a large faction of the American populace that believe he is alive. He is still a very hard working man in show biz, and god knows Vegas wouldn't be the same without his presence. This year his holiday CD, the largest selling Christmas album of all time, retained it's title against the monumental sales of Josh Grobins. Gone all this time and not forgotten. Elvis taught me how to rock my hips and how hip is rock. I'm moved to tears when I think of Graceland and Elvis in the service and his love for his momma. There ain't much more that's as American as that. Happy Birthday Elvis, people have some stuff planned for you. I'm still waiting for you to return my call.