As part of her current successful Aphrodite world tour last night Kylie Minogue played the Hollywood Bowl to wild applause and tonight (May 21st) the Australian born global pop star will perform to a packed house at San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Center. In all the stops on the tour to promote her new Aphrodite album on Astralwerks, which is being documented in YouTube clips by her website (see the clip from Guadalajara, Mexico earlier this week), the audience will include a large gay ratio.  Long a gay icon, Kylie has enjoyed an increased gay fan base since, ten years ago on British TV,  she and singer Geri Halliwell, another gay icon, kissed as a public statement, they said, "to end prejudice." Additionally, Minogue is widely admired by fans for her victory in beating cancer. In 2005 she was diagnosed with breast cancer which lead to the much publicized sudden cancellation of of her  Showgirl – The Greatest Hits Tour, and soonafter she underwent chemotherapy treatment, something she later described as like "experiencing a nuclear bomb."

Most notable is that Minogue was widely praised for the influence she had by openly addressing her cancer diagnosis and treatment. In fact, France's Cultural Minister was quoted as saying, "Doctors now even go as far as saying there is a 'Kylie effect' that encourages young women to have regular [cancer] checks." While Minogue is a major star here in the US, in her native Australia and also in Britain (in the UK she is considered an "adopted Brit") she is an even bigger star. And last year a British marketing research study dubbed her the "most powerful celebrity in Britain."

I should've been so lucky...

I’ve just returned from a two week cruise in the Caribbean islands.

Stop right there! Undoubtedly your reaction is one of jealousy, but it’s unfounded – or would be, if the cruise you went on was the same as mine. Not so much a “luxury cruise” as it was… well… a floating Budget Inn. I was confounded gastronomically, degraded socially, and had an overall poopy time. You should be no more jealous of me than you would of some forgettable uncle who attended a dental convention one week in Sacramento. Olé.

One of the many, many awful attributes this cruise had was the piping of pop music in the halls; a convoluted mix that sounded as though it had been compiled by a twelve-year-old schoolgirl using her tape recorder and whatever radio station came in best. Now, even this is an improvement over, say, smooth jazz or Top 40 contemporary country, but they not only re-looped the same music (imagine hearing this every seventh hour!) but kept it playing all through the night! Had the cabins been sound-proof, this would’ve been fine, but they weren’t. So every night, I could hear the muffled beat of Kylie Minogue from the door, the thirty-something, sex-crazed, Italian couple making babies on the forward side, and what sounded like a TB ward on the aft. Olé.

My iPod became an important part of my survival kit, and I found myself gravitating towards easy-listening music; something to soothe the myriad ways in which my humanity was compromised. (Ever been molested by a shower curtain? It happened to me, daily. Ever eat a lasagna that tasted of peppermint candy and WD40? I have, now.)

There's no amount of parmesan cheese that can help this.

I couldn’t get enough of Anita Kerr. For those of you unfamiliar with her, she’s a singer / composer / producer of large success but smaller fame, these days. Her hey-day was the 1960’s, where her talents were lent to many projects beside her own. Anyone who listens to country music from that period has almost certainly enjoyed her handiwork, whether you knew it or not.