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writegirl@altavista.com
This Week In Review
*An offer to work as a security guard at Wrigley Field this Saturday and Sunday, actually for all of the remaining games. Two of my friends (men) are doing it for a kick. Wear black pants, a white shirt, black tie…I think women don’t have to wear a tie. You get $7.50 an hour, which I think is the equivalent of minimum wage. And, NO, you do not get to carry a gun. This would be cool to stick on a resume and it would be great IF I was a baseball groupiegirl, but I think this is similar to the lifeguard gig I did. Beware ANY job title that includes the word “guard.” It means yelling person.
*A two-week road trip with P that begins October 15th. The itinerary includes Brown County, Indiana, Louisville, Kentucky and somewhere in North Carolina…oh Asheville, home of “Can’t Go Home Again” Tom Wolfe. P needs to get away, and his family doesn’t like road trips, and a few other snaggy details. Had to decline. Sorry. P come here for a day. We’ll have fun.
*An offer to see Midsummer Night’s Dream in October in Scotland from x21T. Sounds excruciatingly beautiful, I can see the stardust in the air, but no overseas trips in this edge-of-panic atmosphere.
Best line of the week: “Come and swim around in my brain. It needs a woman’s touch right now.”
*Best Thing: The vanGogh/Gaugain exhibit at the Art Institute. Twelve rooms of paintings. There are two! “Starry Nights.” There is even a life-size installation of their little house/studio in Arles. (This is where Van Gogh did the ear/hooker thing.) I liked the idea that they would paint the same thing. In the end vanGogh’s paintings became exhaustments, feverishly done some leaving huge open spaces on the canvas. Everything in the last paintings had auras, (animate AND inanimate objects! The chairs glowed!), as if he had pierced the veil! Incredibly powerful work. (Oh that was last week. Forgot to mention it then.)
* Sweetest scene: A outdoor-working man and his two little birds come into Luke’s Hot Dogs fifteen minutes before closing. He is gorgeous…great tan face, his dark brown hair bleached blonde by the sun, working-man clothes. His long, brown-haired girls bundled up in matching puffy, shiny lilac ski jackets, 4 and 3 , I would guess. Both kneeling on a stool at the order area, swinging a bit, Dad’s protective arm, arching around them. They order dogs and Dad says, “We need to wash up. We are dirty from picking up tree limbs.” The older one, the one with the face of a woman, jumps down to follow. The younger one, the rebel, says “Why? I didn’t touch any limbs Dad.” Both follow and they return to take seats at the counter. The older one says “Dad you be in the middle.” Lucky Dad, lucky girls.
*Two days later a friend relates this story a pal of his told him: “It’s better for me if I stay at work. I married a woman with two teenage girls. They have the house booby-trapped so I run into things. Each week I take a hundred out of my paycheck for me, and give the girls and my wife $300.00 for makeup. The rest goes for bills.”
* This seems to be a “Little Birds” week. A nice man brings me a copy of Anais Nin’s book. He reads stories to me. We laugh. I need comforting and he is wise.
*Off to the mountaintops for repair.
*WAIT..I just returned from a cocktail stop at El Moliano’s with M, the lawyer. A woman at the bar passed out. Her man asked someone to call 911 and all of the employee’s just stared. Don’t they know what 911 means? M froze. I told them to call an ambulance. It was taking a loooooooooooooong time. The man asked for ice and everyone froze up again. The woman was starting to turn blue. M fled the building. I still haven’t heard from him. I walked out the door (for better reception) and called 911 on my cell. I got Huntington Hills. They contacted Carpentersville emergency. They sent an ambulance immediately.
But here’s the crazy part: It seems that El Moliano’s is in Carpentersville’s emergency distinct. C-ville is poor, working class, mostly Hispanic. Huntington Hills, which my cell must be keyed to, is an old money, white-people-on-large-estates area. Service might be different in different areas. Hate to deal with that, especially after I just watched that PBS special on class.
And I learned my “friend?” would let someone die in a crunch. It was just a fucking phone call. What’s up with that?