Let's Hear It For the Boy!

[mallorys_camera]

RTT didn't last very long as a chin rest. Maybe less than a year. We picked him up Friday night at the San Francisco airport, a long drive through a night so foggy that the billboard spots along the way cast sulfur haloes, lighthouses in hell, and he was two whole inches taller when the United steward led him off that plane. Also wired to the gills so the long drive back was a protracted wisecracking session. Some of the wisecracks were even funny.

I actually bought the latest Vanity Fair because I've been a huge Shia LeBouef fan ever since Holes (one of my top ten movies of all time.)

"You want to be famous, kid?" I asked Robin the next morning. "Read this article. Here's the blueprint. It'll work two more times, and it might as well work for you."

But Robin lacks ambition. Robin is never going to get on that phone cold calling agents and disguising his voice.

Uncle Lew – a veteran of the Mark Burnett reality show casting process (he got this close to being in the last Survivor) – thinks Robin is a natural for some new kid-based reality series, Lord of the Flies for the television cameras. Robin certainly has the requisite out-going personality. He'll do anything for a laugh.

He's off to surfing camp today. Drop off is in Santa Cruz which will give me a chance to visit Annie.

Meanwhile the Little Store had only a so-so July. This is irksome – number 1 in terms of revenue flow but number 2 because if the Little Store only does well with me hovering close by, it's your basic dancehall business model propelled by the strength of my personality. It has no chance of succeeding on its own merits.

Little Store has been doing fine since I got back although I have to say I'd forgotten there are so many stupid people in the world. Rediscovering has been kind of a bummer.

Like yesterday this obnoxious woman in a wheelchair parks herself and her four children in front of Homer, and despite ample signage – DON'T TOUCH! – the kids keep prodding and pushing. She's in a wheelchair because she must weigh six hundred pounds, and I'm looking at her and thinking, Why aren't you home waiting for the National Enquirer news team to photograph you being removed from a burning building with the Jaws of Life? Why are you here with your disgusting brats manhandling my Homer?

The fourth time I go out with my huge fake smile – "Please don't touch Homer, he's very fragile – the woman snaps, "We heard you the first time."

And I'm thinking, if you heard me the first time, then why are you still allowing your children to do it, you dumb bitch?

The Gods of Retail – alas! – frown on rude rejoinders to people in wheelchairs.

Also I'm redoing the front windows into an exhibit on mask making, mounted photographs and the masks themselves. Kinda fun.

Comments

[wailaki.livejournal.com]

I want to be that woman, making masks in that gorgeous room. And please keep up with the travelogue. I am enjoying it, and later, you will have all that great reference material.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Maybe we should open up a mask business together. About a billion years ago, I used to make masks. Great fun and oddly fulfilling.

Yes, reference material... Gotta have it!