Lessons From the Kissing Booth

The first time I visited the Salvador Dali museum in St. Pete was on an afternoon outing with a family friend who was also a pre-op transsexual, someone I had always known as Stan and was learning to call Dee. Memory records no context for the museum trip, but even still today I recall vividly standing in front of the painting "Hitler Masturbating" just as it came to me exactly what it was that my companion was going through. I can't say if it was something in the painting that triggered recognition, but I stared at that sinister snowscape and figured out just how little I really understood. (At the time I was still just a little too young to know both who Hitler was and what he was doing in the painting. This was, however, the same trip where I fell deeply in love with the massive "Hallucinogenic Toreador.")