I cannot think of anything more annoying than being told to smile. When I'm in drag and someone wants to take a picture with me they always point their impossibly tiny digital cameras my way and say, "Smile!" And while we're on the subject, may I bitch about these aforementioned miniscule cameras for a moment please? I mean, just how small can these things get! "Uh, why are you holding a Tic Tac up to your eye?" "No, this is my new digital camera, silly. SMILE!" And now all these hateful new-fangled photographic devices feature what I call the Fake-Out Flash. You know what I'm talking about -- you pose (gut in, pecs or tits out, double chin painfully pulled as taut as possible in an attempt to make it at least momentarily appear youthfully single again, forehead relaxed as to lessen any and all wrinkles), you smile (if that's your style) and hold it for what seems like a goddamned eternity until ... FLASH! Then you relax, instantly re-inflating your second-trimester gut, allowing your nipples to once again point to the floor, unleashing your Jaba The Hut-like chins and letting every hideous wrinkle on your ancient forehead spring back to life so that the top half of your face looks as if Arnold Schwarzenegger just drove over it in his Hummer. Picture taken, you drop the smile and start to say, "Hey, do you guys want to -- ? and suddenly the camera flashes again and the real picture is actually taken. Psyche! The final product (which the evil photo-snapper always promises to delete, but never does, trust me) is this: Your mouth gaping open like that of a Japanese girl staring at a naked Tommy Lee and your eyes half-closed like a heroin addict with Down's Syndrome, but enough about Nicole Richie. Let's get back to the original topic of smiling, shall we?

The reason for all this talk of "turning that frown upside-down" is that I'm currently writing this on my laptop while sitting in the business class section of a ferry boat from Mykonos to Athens. I just performed on yet another Atlantis Gay Cruise and I had to leave early and get back to L.A. for a show by my band, Dirty Sanchez. Sweet Jesus, my life is glamorous! So here I am in business class, a criminal charlatan of sorts due to the fact that I possess a mere economy ticket. What can I say, I'm not just glamorous, I'm a frickin' rebel. Now, don't let the words business class fool you. There are no fancy meals, no reclining seats and no DirecTV here. Oh no. As a matter of fact there are only a few perks differentiating this hellish area from the full-blown nightmare of economy class, mainly a bunch of stained, scratchy banquets and a rather malodorous snack bar. It's wall-to-wall Greeks. Greeks are chain-smoking and yelling at one another in Greek while their Greek children run around like midget Greek crackheads beating on one another and little bitter Greek babies (some of them already sporting wispy little black mustaches) cry at the top of their little Greek lungs. And no one -- AND I MEAN NO ONE! -- is smiling. They all seem downright miserable despite the fact that Greece is fucking gorgeous. I mean, people come from all over the world to experience the natural beauty of Greece. And let us not forget about the art, architecture and history, not to mention the delicious food and the even more delicious men! And right now as I write this, the sun is all orangey-red and disappearing into the greeny-blue Aegean Sea, but still no one smiles. And then it dawns on me that maybe that's why it annoys me so much when someone tells me to smile -- because I'm a natural born smiler! YES! If I see a dog, I smile. Unswaddle your baby for me and I smile! Give me a breathtaking Mediterranean sunset, feed me some spinach pie or whip out your Olympian cock and -- you guessed it -- the corners of my mouth raise up in an expression of happiness. So to quote that corny old song, "Accentuate the positive, alleviate the negative, and don't mess with Mr. In-Between!"

Fuck, what's happening to me?

Do you have a question for Little Miss Know-It-All? Send an e-mail to NotSoNiceAdvice@aol.com. Until next week ... stay gay, OK? For more Jackie Beat visit www.jackiebeatrules.com.

Photos by Mario Diaz