at around 3 am, i awoke to find the voicemail indicator on my phone flashly insistenly at me. not sufficiently awake to actually check my messages, i checked the missed call log. the best friend from his cell circa 2:30 am. i played the message this morning. here is the jist.

he was having a heated debate with friends and colleagues about our coinage of the phrase "whatever madonna". one in this crowd insisted that ALL gay men say this and i was instructed to call back and explain how this was first uttered while reading a letter from my ex in our room at 46 mall chambers. and so on from there.

sometimes the specifics of ten years ago are a little fuzzy for me. not so for the best friend, who has a mind for these sorts of things like a steel trap. as i'm in no mood to offer a safire-esque etymological defense, i will offer the following: if he says it happened that way, it did.

what i do remember is this.

we had been discussing a magazine article. the specific magazine escapes me but it was probably an american rock rag, like rolling stone or spin. the article dicussed the "abc's of generation x". yeah, i know, could anything sound MORE dated? the letter W was for "whatever". as in "well, jennifer, you are about to graduate, do you know what you are going to do? actually, dad, i've been giving that a lot of thought and i've decided to do...whatever!"

interestingly enough, "jennifer" ended up doing exactly that. i mean, without that attitude, who would have fueled the dot-com explosion of the late nineties?

so, whatever was definitely on our radar screen at the time. furthermore, i remember with clarity when "whatever madonna" morphed into "whatever whatever" as a paeon to prince's devolution into what was known interchangably as squiggle, tafkap, or, my personal favorite, the unpronounceable, multi-gendered love symbol. to us, he was simply whatever.

i know this doesn't resolve the question of coinage. of that we will never know for sure. but, one thing is for sure. on a cold, dreary evening in a london flat, reading a tortured missive from my recent ex, for whom i had travelled countless miles to be near to, "whatever madonna" entered OUR lexicon, amidst the sort of laughter reserved solely for the best of friends.