Charmed Ones

Very few drama series actually manage to finish with a memorable swansong to remember ... one of the few greats that I've seen is Sex and the City which had all the loose ends beautifully tied up in pink Prada ribbons with all the girls getting the delicious happy-ever-afters they deserved - while the comedy FRIENDS unfortunately botched it up a little close to the finale.

Lots of slips and misses in their final season but the Charmed Ones finally managed to make magic in the end with what comes close to a perfect finale. There's magic in every family but just that little extra in the Halliwell family that makes them special. Believe it or not, I actually faithfully followed the fanciful tales of the Halliwell sisters till the end although the last few episodes dealing with a particular naive, bimbotic blond-sorority-witch really stretched my patience thin. There were times I really felt like reaching into the screen and smacking the blond bimbo ( shades of Business Bitch / Bountiful Betty ) around for being such a nitwit.

Despite the occasionally mind-numbingly stupid plotlines and the sillier villains, the series based on the three very different witches fed my thirst for the fey, the fanciful and the supernatural. The fact that the accompanying side dishes were all serious male eye-candy certainly only added to the charm.

A belief in the supernatural? Certainly unusual for a man supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of science but like many other Scorpios, I've always believed in the supernatural. Hard to dismiss such fanciful notions especially in an Asian country where tradition and superstition are inextricably linked - where Koranic verses are recited in the intensive care to cleanse the area and various little amulets and charms line the bed of a dying patient. Unlike the cynical, patently disbelieving scientist Dana Scully, I do actually believe that some things just can't be explained away by sheer logic and science.

Come on. Hasn't anyone else ever wished for that little bit of magic? A spell to make your unkempt hair look fabulous and that extra kilo of fat just melt away? A potion to make certain big-biceped men fall desperately in love? A brew to have that bland, boring blind date fall inexplicably unconscious into his bowl of soup? A curse to have your competitor babbling absolute rubbish while pole-dancing during an interview?

Or was that just me?

Despite the fact that gay men seem to know the mysterious inexplicable secrets of turning freak to fabulous ( surely a magic of its own! ), gay practitioners of the arts seem to be a rare breed indeed - unless you count the skanky homoerotic tales of the Brotherhood and Dante's Cove. Still I've managed to find a handful of stories. Just check out Kelley Armstrong's online fiction which tells the story of a budding sorcerer named Sean Nast. And of course my own humble self-penned bit of fiction entitled Practical Magic! :)