![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What a treat! A five-page handwritten letter from T.
I’ve had a comfortable, low-level crush on T for about a decade now, sustained by rare phone calls and frequent social media interactions. We share tastes in books, movies, politics and whimsy; we’re both good at the odd turn of phrase; and we both LUV to banter. “Crush” is perhaps too strong a word; it’s more like that pan of potpourri simmering on the back burner: a nice fragrance. Since we live more than a thousand miles away from each other, it’s unlikely the crush will ever amount to anything.
Still.
Yesterday, I ended up standing on a longish line at Stewart’s where I’d gone to buy cream.
Ten feet in front of me, the geezers were pawing over their lotto tickets.
I whipped out my phone and started snapping pix.
I am obsessed with geezers congregating publicly!
You know. Those ancient photographs, circa 1900, of old men standing in front of pickle barrels in some ancient court square in some dusty Southern town.
Fast-forward, and they’re still congregating though mostly in convenience stores.
I wanted to get a picture of the little-boy excitement on their wrinkled, paunchy faces: This could be the Lotto that wins me the big bucks!
But I failed.
The little clerk—who would have been a hipster had he happened to have had the energy to move to Brooklyn—understood exactly what I was trying to do and shot me the sweetest, most sympathetic smile.
The other people standing on line thought I was nuts, though.
T would understand what I’m trying to do! I thought.
A thought out of nowhere.
So it was nice to go home and find a letter from him..
###
Else?
Watched the very disturbing Michael Jackson perv documentary.
Gotta say: I used to be a huge Michael Jackson fan. Never Can Say Goodbye is one of my favorite all-time songs: At the height of the ménage-a-trois that ate up a huge chunk of my early 20s, Suzanne and I choreographed an elaborate dance routine to Never Can Say Goodbye, which we’d perform every now and then for our Texas tugboat dynasty kazillionaire heir. (In the 1970s, people had much better senses of humor about ménages-a-trois than they do today!)
It's impossible to remain a Michael Jackson fan, though, after watching that documentary.
And as a parent, it’s difficult to wrap my head around how Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck’s parents could have allowed that to happen.
I mean. I do get the intoxication of celebrity glamour.
I’ve been around celebrities for big chunks of my life—the whole Max’s Kansas City scene when I was modeling; interviews when I worked for People; business meetings when I worked for ICM.
And it is true that celebrities have a paralyzing effect.
A very, very famous movie star once read something I’d written and liked it. And stalked me for 48 hours.
He began by calling me up, telling me how brilliant I was, telling me how much he wanted to “work” with me—
“Work” with me? What did that even mean? Was I gonna be rich beyond my wildest dreams of avarice? Was I gonna be able to afford to buy a house in the Hollywood Hills with swimming pools in the shape of internal body organs and win an Oscar and give condescending interviews?
Oh, those phone calls!
He wanted a photo of me, so I emailed him a few, and then bam! I never heard from him again.
Well. I mean—I’m not ugly. Mirrors don’t crack when I walk into a room or anything. In fact, I managed to put myself through college and nursing school, and subsidized quite a bit of travel to exotic locations by exploiting the way I look.
But the very, very famous movie star didn’t like the way I looked, apparently.
No riches beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. No kidney-shaped pool.
It was a palpable feeling of despair. Zeus had found me wanting. My life henceforth would be very, very ordinary; very, very boring; filled with mundane hardships and struggle.
I tell this story only to show that I get what was being dangled in front of those parents.
But I guess on account of my own miserable upbringing in the House of Usher and my own absolute determination to break that karmic curse, I took parenting very, very seriously.
I had two exceptionally beautiful boys, and I would never have allowed either of them to spend five minutes in the company of something like Michael Jackson.
I’ve had a comfortable, low-level crush on T for about a decade now, sustained by rare phone calls and frequent social media interactions. We share tastes in books, movies, politics and whimsy; we’re both good at the odd turn of phrase; and we both LUV to banter. “Crush” is perhaps too strong a word; it’s more like that pan of potpourri simmering on the back burner: a nice fragrance. Since we live more than a thousand miles away from each other, it’s unlikely the crush will ever amount to anything.
Still.
Yesterday, I ended up standing on a longish line at Stewart’s where I’d gone to buy cream.
Ten feet in front of me, the geezers were pawing over their lotto tickets.
I whipped out my phone and started snapping pix.
I am obsessed with geezers congregating publicly!
You know. Those ancient photographs, circa 1900, of old men standing in front of pickle barrels in some ancient court square in some dusty Southern town.
Fast-forward, and they’re still congregating though mostly in convenience stores.
I wanted to get a picture of the little-boy excitement on their wrinkled, paunchy faces: This could be the Lotto that wins me the big bucks!
But I failed.
The little clerk—who would have been a hipster had he happened to have had the energy to move to Brooklyn—understood exactly what I was trying to do and shot me the sweetest, most sympathetic smile.
The other people standing on line thought I was nuts, though.
T would understand what I’m trying to do! I thought.
A thought out of nowhere.
So it was nice to go home and find a letter from him..
###
Else?
Watched the very disturbing Michael Jackson perv documentary.
Gotta say: I used to be a huge Michael Jackson fan. Never Can Say Goodbye is one of my favorite all-time songs: At the height of the ménage-a-trois that ate up a huge chunk of my early 20s, Suzanne and I choreographed an elaborate dance routine to Never Can Say Goodbye, which we’d perform every now and then for our Texas tugboat dynasty kazillionaire heir. (In the 1970s, people had much better senses of humor about ménages-a-trois than they do today!)
It's impossible to remain a Michael Jackson fan, though, after watching that documentary.
And as a parent, it’s difficult to wrap my head around how Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck’s parents could have allowed that to happen.
I mean. I do get the intoxication of celebrity glamour.
I’ve been around celebrities for big chunks of my life—the whole Max’s Kansas City scene when I was modeling; interviews when I worked for People; business meetings when I worked for ICM.
And it is true that celebrities have a paralyzing effect.
A very, very famous movie star once read something I’d written and liked it. And stalked me for 48 hours.
He began by calling me up, telling me how brilliant I was, telling me how much he wanted to “work” with me—
“Work” with me? What did that even mean? Was I gonna be rich beyond my wildest dreams of avarice? Was I gonna be able to afford to buy a house in the Hollywood Hills with swimming pools in the shape of internal body organs and win an Oscar and give condescending interviews?
Oh, those phone calls!
He wanted a photo of me, so I emailed him a few, and then bam! I never heard from him again.
Well. I mean—I’m not ugly. Mirrors don’t crack when I walk into a room or anything. In fact, I managed to put myself through college and nursing school, and subsidized quite a bit of travel to exotic locations by exploiting the way I look.
But the very, very famous movie star didn’t like the way I looked, apparently.
No riches beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. No kidney-shaped pool.
It was a palpable feeling of despair. Zeus had found me wanting. My life henceforth would be very, very ordinary; very, very boring; filled with mundane hardships and struggle.
I tell this story only to show that I get what was being dangled in front of those parents.
But I guess on account of my own miserable upbringing in the House of Usher and my own absolute determination to break that karmic curse, I took parenting very, very seriously.
I had two exceptionally beautiful boys, and I would never have allowed either of them to spend five minutes in the company of something like Michael Jackson.
