I'm taking this course at work that's all about storytelling for non-profits. The idea is that people respond to stories in a way that they don't respond to a mission statement or raw data.

One of the case studies we looked at today was for an organization that is trying to ban the practice of dressing up chimps in cute outfits for movies, television and so forth because apparently the people who do this are assholes to the chimps and the whole thing is exploitative and gross.

This saddens me partly because I loathe cruelty to animals, of course, but also because a chimp in a little sports coat, holding a telephone always seemed fun, like a retro pin-up or something. But while the thought of a world without monkeys holding stethoscopes while dressed as doctors is sad, it's even sadder to imagine some asshole whacking the poor monkey with a stick in order to make it behave photogenically.

I digress.

The story that illustrated the humanity of these animals involved a chimp who learned sign language and one of its caretakers, a woman who was pregnant. The chimp was super-into the pregnancy and would come over to touch the stomach, sign questions about the baby and so forth.

Sadly, the caretaker miscarried. When she returned to work, the chimp signed, asking hey, where'd you go? The caretaker, knowing that the chimpanzee herself had two miscarriages, signed, "My baby died."

The chimpanzee touched her finger to her eye, making the sign for, "Crying," and, at the end of the day, she blocked the caretaker's passage out of the enclosure, signing, "Hug person please."

I got no snappy ending here. Just a sad monkey story.

Alex is moving in on Saturday and I have been obsessing a little bit over my non-stick cookware.

Alex cooked dinner a while back and afterwards I looked at my non-stick skillet and asked, "Did you use a metal spatula on this?" He told me that he did not but later, in a different conversation, suggested that I might need to be a little less uptight if he was going to be expected to do some of the cooking around the house.

The way this obsession has gone involves me reiterating the importance of using only plastic or wood, no metal. To me that is simple and straightforward. But I know how to cook and am comfortable around the kitchen. I have lots of these rules and they are good rules--don't put the cooked chicken into the raw chicken juices, for instance. But I can see how it seems like a big list of mysterious rules. All the skillets are not the same and some spatulas are different than others and you should memorize all those details AND make a goddamned grilled cheese already.

My internal obsession usually ends with a pan totally scraped up and thereby causing the non-stick stuff to flake off into the scrambled eggs or whatever the bad thing his and then I very martyr-ly throw the pan away and martyr-ly buy a new pan and generally act like a tool.

Today I bought some new silicone tools and got rid of the metal ones. Ta da! I felt like Indiana Jones when he's confronted in the marketplace by the guy wielding a whip and Indy rolls his eyes and just shoots the guy. I'm like the Indiana Jones of gay kitchen cooperation. I should have a show on Bravo.

I dunno that either Madonna or Obama would be thrilled by the comparison, but hear me out.

Once upon a time, in the early 1980's, there were some established gatekeepers to the world of popular music, gatekeepers such as Rolling Stone magazine. And these gatekeepers knew, with certainty, what rock music was and what it was not.  Tom Petty, for example, was rock music and Madonna was not. She was a manufactured commodity, no different from The Monkees.

What has been interesting in the time since then is how these gatekeepers have been so angry, so totally indignant over the continued success of Madonna. It wasn't enough to simply dislike her. They have spent a ton of time and energy dismissing her as not music. Not simply music that they loathe, like bluegrass or Wagnerian opera or whatever, that it was not music.

This is interesting for a few reasons. One is that these same gatekeepers had been around long enough to see a similar revolution, to have heard people complain that Chuck Berry is not music, while an arrangement by Nelson Riddle most certainly is music. So they should have known better.

Here's why I think they got confused. Because Madonna originally appeared to be a known quantity--a woman trading primarily on her looks. For instance, wearing "Boy Toy" on her clothes, cooing about her virginity, etc. And while Madonna has never tired of showing her flesh, she has seemed entirely indifferent to the desires of straight men. She has, instead, formed a coalition of seemingly everybody else--women (gay and straight), gay men, racial minorities. And this turns out to be a significant number of people. Enough to make for an incredibly lucrative and long-lasting career.

As you've probably noticed, the behaviors that marked Madonna as "not serious"--use of synthesized sounds, focus on image, product endorsements--are no longer remarkable. It's a little much to say that she single-handedly created these shifts but she certainly was observant and saw the directions that the culture was headed and put herself forward as a leader.

Obama gave a speech about racism this week, a remarkable speech that touched me and millions of others. It was interesting how many pundits, self-described gatekeepers, came out to say that Obama failed some sort of mysterious test. They say this a lot about Obama--they know what a politician is and he isn't doing it.

In the early 1980's it was clear to the gatekeepers who the serious female musicians were (Carole King, Patti Smith) and who the non-serious ones were. But it turns out that people will do things, they will cast a vote, whether a literal vote or a metaphoric vote of money or attention, even when the experts tell them that they are betraying some official set of rules.