Mallory's Camera

So, maybe 400 people turned out for the Gardiner demonstration?

More impressive than it sounds! The entire population of the village is only aound 4,000.

I went alone, but I did not stay alone. A sizeable contingent of Shwanagunk Dems showed up & as it turned out, I knew all the parade monitors from canvassing or campaigning:



Plus bonus celebrity sighting! Fourteen second mark on yr screen! Still got my People Magazine chops!



This is quite possibly the worst photo of me EVER TAKEN.

When you are fighting fascism, I remind myself, you must be fearless and eschew vanity.



On my way back to the casa, I stopped at the transfer station to drop off two weeks' worth of garbage & recyclables. (Icky, you may recall, does not believe in paying for garbage disposal). I passed Ellen walking her daughter's dog, so I stopped to chat.

Now, I haven't seen Ellen in two months or so.

And that was kind of strange because I'd been seeing Ellen regularly for months before that. In fact, Ellen is one of only two real friends I have in this area.

Was she mad at me? Had I done something to offend her? Something absolutely unforgivable? Though I couldn't remember doing something absolutely unforgivable, and generally, I'm quite good at identifying examples of my own obnoxious behavior (even when I don't agree they're obnoxious.)

I'd called her a couple of times: No traction. I'd left her a goofy little gift in her mailbox: campfire sparkles! (She likes doing bonfires.) A pro forma thank you text.

Well, I thought, it's too bad, but apparently Ellen doesn't like you anymore, and what was the one useful thing that Jack Kerouak ever said? Number 19 on his list of "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose"?

Accept loss forever

(Works great for missing earrings, too!)

###

One look at Ellen's face, and I could see: It wasn't me, it was her. She looked like one of the walking dead. Deeply, terminally depressed. Heavy bags under her eyes.

Ellen is one of those people who likes to pretend she doesn't have emotions, doesn't have an inner life. When I tried to hug her that time after she dug my car out of the ice, she waved me off, embarrassed.

Now, as it happens, the one & only time I have ever been inside Ellen's house was around the time she stopped talking to me. We'd been selling Duck Derby tickets together at the post office. (Small town boosterism! Never Enuff Weird!) I was about to go off & investigate the Sherpa Festival that had magically appeared in an abandoned meadow, except that it was a hot day, I'd been drinking lots & lots of water, & I really had to pee!

"Well, you can pee at my house," Ellen said. Ellen's house was about a mile away from the magical Sherpa festival.

When I went inside Ellen's house, I was shocked to see it was kind of a hoarder house. Rooms & rooms crammed with furniture that nobody used & this general sense of profound neglect. I imagined it had been that way since Ellen's husband died five years ago.

I didn't say anything. I hid my shock.

But when Ellen stopped talking to me, I did wonder whether it was connected to the fact that I'd been inside her house. Whether she was ashamed I'd seen too much.

Anyway, it was good to reconnect. Even in such a small way.

I was on my best banter! I made her laugh!

And after 10 minutes, I said, "Well, darlin', you have my number. Call if you feel like it. I always have your back."

'Cause really. What else could I say?

###

In the evening, I went to a D&D meetup.

My regular D&D group hasn't met in several weeks—ostensibly because the DM is getting married in a couple of months & his weekends are now occupied with wedding-related events, but really—according to the DM of last night's game—because he is a Trump supporter & disliked all the fringe types in the original group.

I didn't pick that up from the original DM at all, and I mean, really: If he is a Trump supporter, so what? It didn't affect the game—which was a kind of Viking wayfarer adventure.

And I didn't like last night's game. I went because I'm still learning how to tell the various dice apart, & when to throw them, & why—if I have 18 charisma points—I'm supposed to keep subtracting four.

Last night's DM was very big on underground crypts strewn with vomit, crusty scabs, & mummifying guts. Imagery that does not appeal to moi!

The other players were gay males. They were all very nice to me, tolerant of my blunders. One of them—pink Galadriel hair and fabulously manicured hands, each nail painted a different color—was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America party, so in between dice rolls, we talked politics, utterly boring the other players. Apparently, No Kings Day conflicted with many prescheduled local Pride Day events, and that's why so many No Kings events had been shunted to out-of-the-way locations. The primo locales had been booked in advance! There was some bad blood twixt the No King-ers and the Pridies!

Last night's DM is a very bitter guy. And dark—without knowing he is dark, somehow. Growing up gay in a Hudson Valley backwater 40 years ago was a very different experience than growing up gay, say, in Berkeley, California. More akin to growing up gay next door to Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wisconsin. The Taliban itself would approve of Wallkill's heteronormative standards!!!

Still, I found myself not liking the guy, which meant it was difficult to sympathize with him.

Terrible Oscars—female red carpet looks were dishwater dull, though some of the male looks were okay. Also Conan O'Brien is Not Funny, & I don't understand why he has a career.

But Tom & I snarked our way through it, which was the Big Fun, plus Anora won big, & I really loved Anora.

###

I went to the Oscars twice as People Magazine's Interactive Editor. 1997 & 1998. This was back when the Internet was still the red-headed stepchild that Hollywood ignored, so I had a hard time wrangling interviews.

The press had to dress up in full evening dress regalia so that we'd look like guests if we got caught on live camera. The whole evening was kinda like that—a lot of bored people lolling around, then turning on the juice when the cameras started whirring. I remember the canapes—they were not very good. I remember catching Ashley Judd smoking in the ladies' room: She leaned very far over the sink so as not to burn spark holes in a rather lovely nude gauze dress appliqued with white flowers, and we actually bantered, but this was not the kind of thing I could report on.

Before I worked for People, I used to give Oscar parties every year where I required all my guests to dress up in evening garb & smoke out in the backyard. When I went back to Monterey last Thanksgiving, several people remembered those parties fondly to me.

These days, I am mostly out of the gossip reporter mentality. The celebrities I followed all got old, and I wasn't at all interested in the celebrities that replaced them. The classic Corvette was manufactured in 1967. Who gives a fuck about any of the Corvette models manufactured in the years after?

One thing I do like to do still is thumb through those Where Are They Now pix of the Great Beauties of my youth. They were so unbelievably gorgeous then! Unreachably gorgeous! But now, I look better! Why I should get a ping out of that—Vanity, vanity, all is vanity—I do not know. But I do.

###

Before that, I went to the gym—where gasp! I noticed several guys checking me out. (I am back to having a perfect hourglass figure in leggings and teeshirt, and all those overhead presses have firmed up my bust noticeably.)

And after that, I went to a D&D meetup where I was the pet septuagenarian. The D&D group is mostly high school students, with one 50s-ish eccentric I kinda know from around town, and one amazingly handsome, eloquent guy in his 30s who is driving a schoolbus until his rock 'n' roll career takes off. The D&D meetup was the Big Fun, too! What I liked about the group was how absolutely unabashed everyone was about having an imagination and inviting other people in to explore it!!!

It almost doesn't matter how that imagination manifests!

It's just such a sweet, sweet thing in these grim, souless times, to be around genuine imagination!

###

All in all, a good day.

Thank you, Jaysus! I needed a good day. I was getting very tired of staring out that airplane window just so that plane would stay up in the sky on its flight to nowhere.