I didn’t accomplish much in April. Now it’s May.
Oh yeah, I did ask my long-term, short-tempered girlfriend, Aimiee, to marry me, as threatened in my last Sugar Water column. And the answer was no, but don’t start crying for us just yet.
See, she wants to marry me, but as she put it, “If gay couples can’t legally marry in Illinois, why should straight people like us have that right? Plus you abandoned Xing, our seven-year-old adopted Chinese son who’s actually our daughter, in Nebraska right before that safe-haven law was changed last November, which brings up a wide range of trust issues.” (The Cornhusker State’s Some Children Are Inevitably Going to Be Left Behind Act, as you’ve probably heard, was a failure. Or a success, depending on how you feel about children.)
See, all I have to do is convince the Illinois Supreme Court that gay marriage isn’t a threat to the moral fiber of our state — or Chicago’s chances of hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics — and Aimiee will be my wife. Of course, at the beginning of April I was pretty crushed since there seemed to be no way Illinois would legalize gay marriage, but suddenly its corn-fed neighbor Iowa was down with hot man-on-man lifelong commitment and kinky girl-on-girl sacred vows.
Yes, Iowa and Vermont accomplished something much more important in April than writing a new Sugar Water column, though they’re welcome to sub for me at any time while I watch syndicated reruns of the so-bad-it’s-good TV show Boston Legal to prepare for my Supreme Court appearance. Unfortunately, the recently canceled “dramedy” hasn’t taught me a thing about how the law actually works. William Shatner doesn’t play a starship captain on this spin-off of The Practice, but it might as well be another self-punched notch on his science-fiction belt since it’s so far removed from reality. The attorneys at Boston Legal’s fictional firm are constantly being arrested or sued, and that’s when they’re not suing each other just to kill some time. In real life you’d take your business elsewhere if it weren’t for the fact that they win 99 percent of their cases, thanks to sanctimonious courtroom speeches delivered by James Spader that employ zany one-liners and statistics from the latest issue of Newsweek in equal measure. In the final episode, which aired last December, Shatner and Spader’s characters went before the U.S. Supreme Court to defend their right to marry each other even though they’re not gay.
