The Strawberry Blog

August 28, 2006

I have a small suitcase with three changes of clothes, all uncarefully packed around a scrapbook. I have my computer; my bag. That’s when I see him cycling aimlessly—really, it’s too aimless, unliterarily so—in a teeshirt. Around and around across the street from my house, at the edge of the park. I hate when he cycles in the dark. When he spots me he wheels over and we embrace until it feels like the stickiness of August won’t ever separate us.
There was never a time we had trouble saying anything. Words came easily, affection naturally. “Baby,” “sugar,” “sweetpea,” roll off the tongue like Italian. There are some people who, out of proximity and instinct, know they’ve got another soul to count on.
Flowers underscore our parting. The sweet olive is all but dormant so, like a dutiful understudy, the slightly overdone, nightblooming jasmine steps in. The stray brother cats loll in the front yard—the brave one slipping under the wrought iron fence watching us under the sodium lights at the curb where I wait for my ride.
I think about taking him with me. Every time I look back at the stray cats I think of taking him and them, with one front seat and no carriers for wild domestic animals. In thirty seconds I make up my mind: I run through all of the scenarios—unwarranted jailtime, unwarranted death.
There is everything to say and no time to say it, so we speak every word silently, and the embrace substitutes for what every other bone, muscle, and organ is helpless to communicate. I ask him to please go home. Safely. Without incident. Now. But to go home to his home safely and without incident is to ask a drug addict to go home via the dealer on the corner who’s open for business. His home is not without incident; I fear that, in his mother’s Section Eight state of mind, he might not make it. I take mental snapshots of my house and neighborhood, stray cats, trees, the stillness. His face. Everyone left hours before. I feel like I’ve overslept.
“Go home, baby. Please. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.” We look at each other a long time. I want to say it but I don’t want to worry him.
Then, as if a director cued the red truck, my ride appears. And August pries us apart.
***
One year ago tonight, he was eight and a half years old. We’ve spoken once since then and I wonder how he’s navigating Texas when all he told me in February was how much he missed home.
The other three boys who went to private school I can’t reach at all, no matter how many times I drive by their house. The girl across the park is gone—mom sold the house before Mardi Gras—and I don’t remember her name so I doubt that I’ll ever find her again. She had a hell of an arm; we liked playing football. The last time I saw her we got good and sweaty playing ball, then had the nerve to eat at the Night Out Against Crime picnic with caked on dirt and flushed faces.
One year anniversaries are hard whether it’s a tough first year at marriage or 365 days after death. What is it about a year, about marking time? On the one year anniversary of leaving, and closing in on the one year anniversary of the flood disaster, it doesn’t appear that places fare too much better than we do.

August 24, 2006

Because of my mother’s obsession with mine, friends know how much I love the derrière (various kinds, both genders), that I love a good set of sturdy shoulders (ibid.) and rippling leg muscles, and though I am not jaded when it comes to the human physique…I am embarrassed to admit that what I spied (wrong verb; you’ll see why) at THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay last night almost sent me for my camera. It wasn’t the rumpshaker at Rumjungle. While hers was nothing short of stunning, mere beauty does not send me packing. I reside most of the year in a town bursting with hotties and Beautiful People (though all I really want is to meet Gore Vidal). I appreciate it; I do not necessarily want to capture it for future consumption.

When it comes to excess, Vegas has a reputation to maintain. But imagine if you will, the size of an average to large watermelon. Now imagine a petite blond woman—say, about 5’2”— in a black tank top, shorts and heels. Now take two of those watermelons (I kid you not—why would I?), but in the recesses of your mind fashion them into breasts. Yes. And if you thought watermelons were an awkwardly sized fruit…people, you have never seen anything like this. Did it get her noticed? Yes. My male companion even suggested that, because I’m a woman, she probably would have allowed me a picture. But I resisted touristy temptation; resisted, in fact, anything that would have given her another reason (one wonders what the first was) to say, “Hey, these watermelons [for there is no actual corresponding bra size] were a great idea!” As you can imagine—and my male companion is unabashedly a Breast Man—they were so abnormally tremendous, such an offense to natural anatomy, geometry, physiology, harmony, and geography that even he said they were “ridiculous.”
We’d had this argument before. I say breasts should fit the form; he says the bigger the breast, the better the form. Frenchmen have told me that the perfect breast fits in a champagne flute (which explains why I have only been with one Frenchman). In a fit of sisterly and human concern, my first inclination was to have pity on her and not stare because I thought Watermelon Woman’s breasts, which defied all laws, gravity or aesthetic, were a congenital abnormality—and no one should be ridiculed or made fun of for that (yes, I was the girl in second grade who punched a boy for making fun of the handicapped student in class—that was tomboy-underdog-workin’-for-the-people me). This watermelon syndrome was a similar concern. But my male companion assured me that it was just fine to drop my jaw and gawk with the rest of ‘em. So I did. With subtlety, sympathy, and grace I widened my eyes and uttered something completely original like, “Do…you…see…the…those?”

I’m wondering, apart from specialized porn catering to the formerly formula-fed man with a fruit obsession, just what kind of work she gets. And what do people say to her when they meet her? It wouldn’t be easy. In my history of having breasts, I have a laundry list of incidences of men on Breast Watch while I’m giving them the time (an unclever ploy of the stranger on the street), or engaging in slightly more clever cocktail conversation. Fact is, this social problem was the entire raison d’etre for my baggy sweater/trenchcoat look I sported in high school—and variations thereof later. Ask any brainy, buxom woman if she has ever been thought of as “lesser” intellectually because of her breast fullness and, sadly, she will answer in the affirmative. Why anyone would want the kind of attention that comes from surgically attaching bizarre appendages which lure the eyes of even sensitive gals like me…I am at a loss. It baffles those of us who’ve considered breast reductions who’ve merely had full breasts, not mutant gourds residing in our chest cavity.

So, Vegas. Vegas and fruit. I guess it only makes sense that, with the unholy amount of anti-indigenous tropical foliage flown in here, there would have to be an equally false mammary residing here in the desert mirage, too. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just MY World, not THE World.

August 14, 2006

Considering my recent return to Hollywood from New Orleans, you were probably expecting the requisite entry on what it was like being back home in Louisiana after four months away.
Not so fast, buddy. We’re not that predictable.
Instead, waxing about visiting home is usurped by a Hollywood institution: a film. Ahem—a movie. Perhaps one of the most irredeemably awful movies I have ever seen. So bad it was…worse. Nothing to save it except as an excellent means for compare and contrast sessions in college film courses.
The steaming turd? Miami Vice. It’s a puzzler, this one. Though I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing it—it was another DGA screening so, though it took two hours of my life it didn’t take my money—I was up for a silly, flashy piece of light entertainment. It had all the elements of Collateral (incl. Jamie Foxx and and director Michael Mann), yet absolutely none of its success. It had name recognition, yet chose to muddle the Miami palette. No displays of sleek, Art Deco chrome and sculpted derrières beachside. Where were the pastels and sundrenched mojito bars? Instead, we got white supremacists in dark, dingy trailer parks that looked like Ohio. The only time I knew I was somewhere was when we were obviously in Cuba and South America. Otherwise, it may as well have been called Cleveland Vice.
And as for the jittery handheld camera/ Michael Mann trademark? How about using it for a reason, an artistic call, as character psychology—as they did in Collateral. Here it was just annoying. Dark, muddy, and reverberatingly hand held now just equals I Grow Weary of This Filmmaker.
Despite the production design misfire, I was hoping for some witty repartée, or at least some good looking male leads being good looking and snappy. Instead, what we got were a couple of la-con-ic actors saying some of the worst lines heard on screen since I sat at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre for Titanic, audibly groaning. This audience (mostly SAG actors) laughed aloud at unintentionally funny lines. I’d like to say that the women were strong but they weren’t; they were just one-note angry in that cartoonish fuming-from-the-orifices sort of way. And you couldn’t understand half of what the Japanese woman said. Therefore, I hated her.
Midway through this torture, I finally realized why Colin Ferrell’s character seemed so ill at ease. Wouldn’t you feel out of place in the 21st century…in a mullet? Jamie Foxx, well after delivering the funniest line in a sex scene (replete with let-me-lick-you-up-and-down contemporary R & B) also delivered the most unintentionally funny line of the whole, painful evening:
“Let’s take it to the limit…one more time.” The audience half expected Glen Frey to cut in for a solo. Patently ridiculous. But it gave us the first reason to be freely uproarious.
Colin Ferrel got the other line. With zero irony, he cocked his gun and said, “Let’s do this thing.”
Nobody says that. Not even in a movie.

August 2006

I don’t know. Sub-zero or 4-star hotel…Vegas is just inherently depressing to me, I think. Not all of it, but certainly the interiors where poorly to exceptionally poorly dressed American families and single men tend to congregate—lobbies, halls, dens of monetary inequity—especially those. Casinos. It’s the A/C on overdrive and the buzz and ring of would-be bling—of Bling! far removed, yet…”just over there, Penny. Let’s go!” And The House of Blues ensconced in a gold palace. Aawww, The House of Blues tries so hard to just be a down home ramshackle jook joint. But each time it pops up with voodoo masks on faux wood, it’s just another reminder of corporate takeover (that said, the one in New Orleans has good greens and a killer turkey burger and sweet potato fries).
Why can’t I escape the pleated khaki? They are terribly out of place here at THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay, this homage to everything serenely paletted and divinely understated (except for the THE). The Khaki Mafia hound me. What next? Sleep with the fishes at Shark Reef?
However, that low, sinking, Vegas Interior feeling lifts as soon as I hit THE beach, out of doors, in search of THE wave pool.
And quickly lowers once more when one of the janitorial staff informs me that someone has just thrown up in it. And that last week someone left a little…“Miami Vice,” shall we say? We both grimaced, then she directed me to the clean pool where I surveyed it, deeming it safe. Clean. Serene. Mine. No floating turds, no last night’s meal on full display. Apart from foul play at aqua central, I feel very much at home here (from now on we’ll just refer to it as MY Hotel).
But where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and ignorance is bliss…where does that leave too much knowledge? Too much knowledge of wave pools might just keep this swimmer in her suite tonight watching Spike’s “Levees”—reminded once more that last year’s fallen water is sadder and bluer than any resort pool debris could ever be.