In Twilight Regalia

I had to go for jury duty last week, though I didn’t get selected. It was a fruitful experience inasmuch as it actually forced me to think differently about our justice system. There were even more subtleties to it than I’d imagined.

First let me qualify the whole thing by saying that I DETEST what I term “DMV” experiences. Duck, Mitigate, and Vacate. DMV experiences are the infrequent situational trap encounters with those who you would never, ever, under any other circumstances, be trapped, like being in traffic school on a beautiful Saturday morning, waiting in line in the DMV listening to gum pop, getting stuck in a subway car for an hour or more and sweltering in the stench, or maybe a social welfare line if you’re that unlucky, or sometimes even growling in the Christmas wrapping line at some department store, or maybe being herded into an election-voting line, and oh yeah, the entirety of gradeschool and highschool. It’s places where there is a grab-bag cross section of every kind of person, which inevitably creates difficulties in communication and leads to an uncomfortable mess. I contend politics are always what they are because of this tragic soup.

You’re destined and doomed to try to explain a difficult concept, or urge patience in such a situation, to a person named Argok, who doesn’t have enough English under his belt yet to have a clue, or maybe Jesse, who grew up in the projects and is fucking PISSED at everyone and would bust a cap just to get out of there, to Meg, homemaker in an all-white suburb in an all-white Christian churchgoing anti-abortion stance, to Stan, heavy metal bass player and part-time speed freak, to Jorge, who does landscaping and struggles to feed his four children and wife in their one-room apartment, to Sarah, high-powered attorney cum laude grad Ivy League loaded Jewish princess, etc. etc. etc. There’s just NO WAY you’re going to have a good result when you have that many people trying to arrive at some kind of decision, or even get them to argue intelligently for an hour. So I spend my time ducking (questions, usually), mitigating (calming others usually), and getting the fuck out of there as fast as I can.

I never liked group projects as a kid, and they were just a small microcosm of what I usually find going down in a DMV situation:

1) You are all four or five assigned to work together. You look at each other and think OH CHRIST.

2) You sit and try to talk over what you are going to do. A bright person bullies the rest, the others dig their heels in. Sometimes you’re the bully, sometimes not. It’s immediately corralled into something you had not expected; or, everyone looks at everyone else, and they all go DUHHHHHHHHhhhh I don’t know, what do you want to do?.

3) You arrive at a lameass plan which is a whittled down approach to something that might have once been a good idea, but has been attacked and revamped until unrecognizeable;

4) You are expected to equally do the work, but really only one or two people are going to be doing the work and the others are just going to bring in some tacky materials to work with or maybe they answered a question or two, and everyone knows this and are fine with it. They will do their utmost NOT to do anything if someone else is already running with the ball. Imbalance is a certainty.

5) You hand in your work or give your presentation, or someone does, and you get graded with their grade, or they get graded with yours. It is nonrepresentational by default, and you, sadly, no longer care.

A jury constituency is pretty much like that.

Now throw into that kind of sludgepot a young man with a blue shirt and a shaved head, with an hispanic family of maybe 11 — Mother and aunts, sisters and brother, nephews and nieces (notably, no father anywhere) — in the benches outside the bar looking frightened for him. Their brother, their son, their best friend, their boyfriend, is now too many months over the top of 18, and is charged with gang activity and attempted murder with a handgun, as an adult. He could be put in prison for 10 years or more, something that would change his life for the worse most likely. He will be taken away from them, and brought closer to more harsh people. Make him even less socialized, even less normal, even less adjusted, and even more sure of life’s low shaky deal of a future.

As the two attorneys asked us a number of voire dire questions, they schooled the prospective jury members (unculled as yet) in how their answers were to be determined under the law. They put definitions on “evidence.” They put definitions on “witness.” They put definitions on “testimony.” They defined “reasonable doubt” versus the “beyond any possible doubt” that we all wish for in a decision. As jurors, one attorney said, we had to be consciously adhering to the justice system’s idea, not our own, of reasonable doubt, based on fact, evidence and not circumstantial or hearsay. Our gut feelings had to be put aside in favor of not only factual evidence, but admissable evidence, and evidence deemed “thrown out” was no longer admissable.

If we did not think we could vote fairly based on that standard, we had to tell him.

I looked at the Vietnamese girl in the middle and thought, does she understand this? I don’t know…. She looked like she swallowed a large marshmallow, her mouth stuck shut, her eyes wide. They had already let the Mandarin speaking girl go. Who ME? her delicate face seemed to say.

A white guy who was (surprise!) a Quaker got cut. He couldn’t say he could ever do that. I was proud of him. I didn’t know Quakers wore jeans, either….

The lawyers asked about gang activity and how many people had seen graffiti in their neighborhoods, how many people might have met gang members, had experiences of violent crime, how many people owned a handgun?

Here another white guy, whose face I recognized but couldn’t place, surprised us. Where had I seen him? On TV? Was he a sports team owner? A director? I know I’d seen him. He was as white and uppercrust as they come, that kind of blank, casual, my-khakis-are-actually-made-of-cashmere-from-Morrocco-and-I-picked-them-up-outside-the-hotel-in-Monaco kind of understated wealth. Couldn’t quite place the face.

“I own a 9-milimeter Luger.” he said.

GYAAAAh.! I thought so. I knew it when he had asked for a sidebar with the judge and didn’t want to announce his occupation.

“Why is he going up there?” A little Armenian lady asked me, at my shoulder on the bench. Her name was A-something-something-luz-czyksomething, which meant “sunrise” and was for her unpronounce-ability rewarded with the name “Lucy” in English.
“He’s probably very wealthy and doesn’t want anyone to know,” I whispered.
“Oh — you mean, like doctor?”

I wanted to kiss Lucy right then, she was so precious. That was as wealthy as you got in Armenia. Scope here is just not scope there, is just not the same scope as Mr. 9-milimeter Luger’s, either.

They went on selecting people, all of them supposedly normal, average, and therefore fair; some who looked very upset, since they would not be earning a normal days’ wage with this obligation. How fair would that make their deliberation, I wondered?. They culled Mr. Wealthy, Ms. Loud-mouth Attorney, Ms. Black College-educated but living in the rough side of town with her mama, with gang members in her past.

The judge, Barbara, a faultlessly dignified black woman, was so even-tempered, cordial. She had Whoopi Goldberg locks, but her face was smooth as a stone and expression almost unreadable. She had it DOWN.

The new jurors were all asked to state their summons number, their area of town, their occupation, whether married or single, children or not, etc.

A youngish dark-haired man responded, “2538, Silverlake, um… I’m a screenwriter, single, 1 cat….”

“Name of Cat?,” Honorable Barbara asked, without even a twitch. We tittered.

“Whiffles”, he said, suddenly not sure he had done the right thing.

She smiled faintly so as to put him back at ease.

Finally she had the bailiff swear them all in, and I was not one of them. I had such mixed feelings about it at that moment, looking at the boy in the hot seat.

Were you evil? I wondered. Who knows?
Were you under gang pressure? Likely. From inside OR outside.
Were you in a rage? Possibly.
Were you just plain stupid to be there at that time? Maybe.
Did you say Yes to a false leader because your Daddy was not there to lead you?
Or had you been one of those boys that had chance after chance in small ways through life, and you ignored them, and finally, just finally, you got your ass caught for going the wrong way one time too many? Could be.
But I would not be able to help you that much, nor possibly even the jury. Because now you are in the justice system’s web. And they are all in a DMV soup swimming like flies trying to get out. Some will do their work, and some will not, and you will get a C-grade service at best. Who knows if you deserve that?

Because here, this way, we will never know the whole truth. Only you, shaved headed boy, will know that.

But THEY will decide where you go, what you see, who you see and cannot see, what you eat, what you wear, when you get to wash, when you get to eat, when you get a phone call, when you get to work and when you don’t, and when you get medicine and when you don’t, and when you get mail and when you don’t, when you can look at your girlfriend’s face again through a glass and not touch it, when your mom can talk to you and see your damned shame, when you can see your little brother’s wearing your old sweater he’s so big now, and when you can or can’t get help if someone is squeezing the air out of your throat against some tile wall. Because they will have you now.

As we began filing out, the happy discards of the day, I thought:
Well, amigo, at least you’ve got Honorable Barbara. And you’ve got this mixed bag.
At least it’s not communist China.

As I was going out the door, though, I didn’t want to vacate.
I felt like maybe I was needed, and they were making a big mistake.

Put me back. I’ll do it.

Too late… Too late for us both, shaved headed boy.

GORGEOUS RED-HAIRED BOYS AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE

So I actually did it, and I can’t believe it, but there were two, COUNT THEM, TWO people dressed in costume to see Harry Potter. A woman with a stupid looking crap outfit and storebought hat, and Me. The entire rest of the 400 or so people who went to the Burbank multiscreen where we like to go looked like the usual cheap and tacky L.A. teens to 20s I’ve come to expect from this place. There were two girls behind us in line in t-shirts that were humourously commemorative at least (”I solemnly swear I am up to no good”), and they were true nerd fans such as myself — and even THEY just wore their T-shirts. That was IT.

But the WORST:
A really little girl noticed me and said “Look mommy, someone wore their Halloween costume.”
I looked down my reading-glassed nose and managed to force a tepid smile, but truly, that was disheartening. That child in an earlier era would have been agog. Remember that word, agog? I like it. It gapes, as one should, with awe. This little child was already well poisoned with reality, all the fascination had been soundbitten out of her. Tsk, tsk.

L.A. is NO FUN. They are so afraid of not looking like people on TV. I miss San Francisco….. I really do…..

Of course my worries were forgotten once we got inside, sat down in the 6th row (wheeeee! I love being close up) and got past the 15 commercials and 5 or 6 trailers (I’m not kidding, it went on for at least a half hour).

Looks first: I HAVE to grab you and tell you, this film is utterly gorgeous. Visually, it topped even the last one by a longshot, and I was in love with the last one.

It’s easy to make wondrous things visually because they have so very many great locations: a wizarding tournament in an arena that tops Floston Paradise in 5th Element; a water-towers scene that looks cribbed from Myst, but who cares; it’s lovely. There are Great Hall scenes that are exuberantly overwhelmed with glitter and candles; rooms glutted with curious and ornate shiny objects, a lovely aerial castle snow scene; a harrowing dragonfight on a turret-top; a tall ship that majestically rises and submerges a la Baron von Munchausen; swooping hippogriffs; a vicious foggy green maze; a rather surreal Brazil-like courtroom scene; and two equally cool tents. I mean this film had scene change after scene change and EVERYTHING was dripping with beauty and extra care — even to the frosted or tarnished chromed opening-title font.

The costumes were great as usual, I wouldn’t have changed much. Even the stupid trainer-like suits the contestants wore for the goblet competition were tasteful, colorful and not that usual.

Now to content, however:

The beginning of the film seemed very terse on dialogue; and since the previous films are chatty and familiar, that felt like an odd shift. But given the amount of information and scenes that had to be crammed into 2 and a half hours, I’m not surprised certain things were clipped.

People who have not read the book will be a bit let down by the lack of development in all these characters, or even missing implications that really were not able to be touched on. It’s been noted that they might have dropped the Rita Skeeter character entirely (the reporter), but Miranda Richardson’s 20 or so lines are so rich with saccharine deception, it was worth it. She is an expert at anything she chooses. Maggie Smith is sterling as ever; Brendan Gleeson has both terrific punchy moments of comedy and frightening sternness as Mad-Eye Moody. Alan Rickman (Snape) can communicate more with an 8th-of-a-beat pause than most actors can in an entire film. However, Gary Oldman and Ralph Fiennes are somewhat wasted on this film in my opinion. Gary because he remains only a voice in the fire, and Ralph simply not being EVIL enough for how I had envisioned Voldemort.

As for the main star trio, our kids are growing so fast, and so attractively, it’s very refreshing to see them maturing. Daniel has grown sharp and stronger looking and is doing a credible job; Emma is looking thinner and appropriately sophisticated, but she still retains her annoying overmugging concern through most of it. Rupert’s longer locks and new and more sophisticated emotions give him an endearing Bill-and-Ted dorky teen persona. I think, of the three of them, I find him the most engaging because he simply seems the most real. I never tire of looking at the subtleties of his face, while I do of the other two. The Weasleys are in general more evident in this film; the twins Fred and George (James and Oliver Phelps) have a much bigger part than previously and they are as hilarious as they are charming. I think I have a crush on Oliver — what a smile! No, no maybe it’s James?. Hm. No I think it’s Oliver. What a pleasant quandry.

I think people who have not read the books will find a good number of flaws with it as a movie (particularly the rather abrupt wind-down ending) because you never find the character development required to bring out SO MANY characters, for lack of time. There is a great visual sense of build-up to certain scenes cinematically, but it overshoots the capabilities of the accompanying screenplay.

There are so many things that could not be shown or told, also because this book of Rowling’s was in particular dealing with the issue of pressure: mental strain and anxiety that Harry faces daily, which doesn’t translate to screen well. And there’s as much time spent on fledgling flirtations and growing up as there is on the dangers of wizardry, whereas there should have been a heavy emphasis on the terrors and threats, as it was in the book, for good reason. It ends feeling a bit unconvincing.

Oh well. I think I really must see it again; you go ahead and choose: Read the book and fill in the blanks. And/Or: Spend the bucks. It’s worth it just for the broomride.

I’ll be honest, I’ve had a bad week. If you dare, proceed.

This week I just feel ill at being myself because I’ve been slammed for being myself. I then noticed my self will never really fit with anyone, most likely.

I was taught all my life that nonconformity was uniquely valuable. Being outside the box, blah blah blah. So I became what I’ve become and NOW, I’m just like the underlined proper name or acronym in a Microsoft spellchecked document where I’m actually correct, but everyone can SEE that I am not like the other words. I am HIGHLIGHTED. I am standing noted where nothing can help me; a scapegoat or a protruding misfit peg to be hammered in.

I don’t look wierd anymore but somehow people know it. Maybe it’s my green contacts? Maybe I’m just in the wrong environment?

But they feel it, they smell an “otherness” on you. Weirdness is almost as hard to live out as being another color. People know. They don’t trust you.

Even before anything happens, they think you’re going to be some kind of goof off or some kind of loopy aging hippie or loose cannon who’s going to blow them up or self-destruct in their environs and make it look bad for them. They don’t really want you there, they kind of just want to squeeze all the Dark Crystal life out of you and harness it for their own needs. You, the real you, is a husk to throw away, or something they don’t want to think about.

The painful part is that it works on you all the time at other levels. You begin to worry that it’s noticeable as a bra-strap everywhere, even in places where it isn’t. You begin to erase and correct yourself constantly. And then you act strangely nervous and suddenly everyone knows, you’ve been damaged by someone in a higher power place than yourself and you’re acting like it instead of being normal. Even your good offerings are mistrusted because they sense the nervousness. There isn’t much help for you once you start doing it at this stage, it’s engraved on your soul.

I keep looking for a new kind of way to live my life that won’t end up like this — suggestions appreciated if you can work out anything beyond what I’ve arrived at…… because I don’t have any way to validate myself anymore. I don’t know how. There’s no one and nothing to do it with here. Every time in the past I tried it, I ended up being way too far off the map, even if I was happier.

That’s the saddest part: Ultimately no one understands your happiness either. They don’t understand what makes you tick at all. They have no idea what you’re talking about. This means that even if you please yourself as the person you are and are satisfied with you, you are doomed to never share it. Try to go back and assimilate into normalcy, and they will simply smell it on you like smoke.

I didn’t grow up wishing to be beyond the pale. I think if I’d been just a naiive poser, being set out here alone would have been fitting. But I truly wasn’t. I didn’t just choose this. It chose me.

In retort and some resignation, I have decided to come up with a list of people who simply couldn’t fit, and I love them for it, or in spite of it.

Joan of Arc — Of course, of course. I had to put her first.

Vincent Van Gogh — The most frustrated communicator on earth, ever, I think. And a truly pure soul.

Princess Diana — She might have been supremely normal — in any other level of society.

Oscar Wilde — For being the original hated smartass. Ok, after Socrates, maybe.

Woody Allen — Who said he’d done everything he’d ever wanted to do, but was still not happy.

Josephine Baker — You try dancing in nothing but a bunch of bananas, and telling the neighbors, yes, these two panthers really are my pets.

George Sand — Who managed to raise two children while running around in drag with Chopin and Liszt.

Morrissey — For turning whining into an artform.

Ross Perot — Terrible politics, but those colorful metaphors were so fun. He couldn’t help but mess up his image.

Leonardo da Vinci — For being ambiguous in an age far far before his time.

Robert Downey Jr. — We all have our demons, his is just being over the top — of that snowy mountain.

Ghandi — The guy who invented social guilt as a weapon, supremely knowing his own value, and everyone else’s value as well.

Tammy Faye Baker — She held up when her husband deserted her, her makeup failed and the entire planet decided she was awful.

The Marchesa Luisa Casati — She really DID just want to be art. She spent all her millions trying.

Einstein — For being my Dress-for-Success role model as well as his ability to make no one feel stupid.

Dorothy Parker — For being an acid wit.

Little Richard — For being his glittery in-your-face, gorgeously howling self.

Ellen DeGeneres — For being Out, but somehow managing to keep the world loving her. How’d she DO that?

Hide — Japanese J-Rocker who would have been iconoclastic in the US, but was a complete alien in his native Japan.

Margaret Cho — For being the first famous self-declared fag-hag, as well as the US’s first Korean commedienne.

Elizabeth I — Just consider the pressure of such a position. Consider inventing such a persona in the midst of it.

PeeWee Herman — For what can only be described as sheer PeeWee-ness.

Sylvia Plath — For being supremely aware of how human life could not please her.

Bonnie Raitt — For starting as daughter of an actor and ending as a black-blues, slide-guitar playing woman who can drink you under the table.

Steve Wozniak — The unsung nerd hero of Apple technology, who left an empire in favor of education.

Isadora Duncan — For living WAY too voraciously for her era.

Bjork — She looks like an elf, screams like a maniac, and wears dead swans to the Oscars. Fantastic!

Michael Jackson — I suspect he’s weirder than we even know, but he sure could dance.

Robin Williams — For never knowing when to stop, and living like the exuberant child we all should be.

My friend cut himself badly while cutting out screen for new windows the other day.
He thought to himself just afterwards: Wow, I remember cutting myself for sheer shock-fun-pain-release as a teen. Blood used to be something else for him. I once knew a number of people like that. I hope they’re all putting their own windows and places together today. They had some extreme edge-of-life things going on back then.

It reminded me of the nights we used to go dancing in San Francisco at Roderick’s Chamber (a VERY long time ago), a goth club held in a huge venue with lots of dancing space with people to go wild in.

I was so into it for the look, as well as music: We’d all get into our mesh shirts, spider-web corsets and black gowns and velvet stretch leggings and put on our Doc Martins or pointy black boots and take a good hour or three to paint our faces with ghost-white and eyeliner and click on pounds of heavy silver crosses and jewelry or leather stud-work, and create big hair that was not only monumentally scary, but simply monumental.

For a mouse-person with a tame and slightly sad past such as mine, it was a great change from the hiding masquerade of everyday life.

To someone who has never seen goth/industrial dancing in the past, (and I might add, OF the past, because it’s no longer what it was), suffice it to say there was a lot of movement around the floor (no one just bounced in place) and arm movement. It was more like watching a hundred fencing duels from the 1700s mixed with a medieval or minuet move here and there, and then combined with witch-like horror gestures, belly-dancing exotic moves, or modern thrashing-fisted jubilance. The industrial tunes brought out more flailing and stomping. Every dancer had their particular style, which you could spot from across the room instantly — but they had some things in common, one of which was the flowing — or in high-energy tunes, thrashing — hand and arm gestures that made large fluid arcs or waving shapes in the air, often complimented by a whirl or pirouhouette or a half-turn.

It was a feminine thing to do a full turn usually, unless in a frenzied high energy tune, and although it wasn’t a girl, I all too well remember the giant 6 foot something Queen of a guy who did his windmill whirl into my space one evening. I think we were really thrashing out to something like “Dominion” by Sisters of Mercy, and remember the pounds of jewelry and spikes? He spun round with a wild fling and I saw his fast glittering wrist flash before he clocked me squarely on the nose.

The room squished suddenly flat and left me all alone for a second in an unfamiliarly overtaking quiet wave of pain, and then it all expanded back like a sponge and the noise returned and he was standing over me all apologies, asking if I was alright. Yes yes, I’m fine, I said, not really knowing if I was at all. He danced off and I felt to see if my nose was broken?, no. And then I felt it underneath. Blood!

COOL!!!! was my first thought. I had never BLED!! before! (unless you count skinning a knee).

(You must understand I didn’t have a normal childhood. I had had no siblings. I had never been in a fist fight. I had never been allowed to get injured by anything, anywhere, because my upbringing had always inhibited my opportunities for such events… I had rarely been allowed to catch anything, go anywhere, or really do that much. )

And I suddenly felt, bleeding down the front of my lace and corset-tied bodice, as masculine as hell.
WHOOhOOOOO!!!.
Fight club adrenaline!
I was ALIVE!! and I wanted to go bash into someone else!!!

YAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!

I did wonder how to stop it after that surge wore off. I would have kept dancing, but I was worried about how my makeup looked. (I knew goths who would never even eat in public for ruining the makeup, besides cultivating the vampire-mystique. Makeup had to be perfect.) I had been such a good girl all my life and so disconnected, I hadn’t the slightest clue what to do with it to make it stop. My girly embarrassment returned, though I still felt elated. I really am turning goth liking my blood, I thought, how comic I am.

Heading for the bathroom, in the hallway outside I looked around, and I spotted a seriously mohawked, spiked-up punk.

Ah! I thought. An expert!
Sure enough, he told me how to stop a nosebleed, Thanks, no problem.

After that I began to get the urge to put in more piercings and wear some sharp objects and spikes. I did. I began to look more dangerous and wicked. Not much by most standards of the subculture. I truly am not punk. But it was attractive to feel more and more of an edge, and blood was part of that….and no, I never became obsessed with cutting myself. I had other releases. Dancing was the best, and I danced with more and more abandon after that. I changed my name after that. I had a better feeling about things. A feeling that I could be larger and darker and more strong and pain and blood would not matter. The past would not matter.

Today I just wanted to thank the prettiest queen on the floor for making me feel so very macho and shattering a long feeling of on-the-shelf-ness, instead of my nose.

There are days when you really, truly wonder what the heck your horoscope would have said, had you read it.
Some days just make you certain you are flung around in the karmic universe like a nicked dice.

KARMIC ACTIVITY LEVEL: 11
Yesterday I had the great fun of nearly being crushed by large truck in the morning (fortunately he just sort of mushed into the plastic flexible side of my driver’s side front door with an edge of his front right wheel well enough to mess up the car’s company name, which I leave undisclosed out of sheer embarrassment.).

The scariest thing was watching this huge truck very very slowly inching toward me while I desperately tried to find the damn side button things that worked my horn. What IDIOT decided to not have the horn in a normal, hand-slam-able place? I mean this is a PANIC situation and I can’t HONK???!!

So I then endured a beratement from the truckdriver for being there in the first place (HUH? I was standing stock still and he hit ME), exchanged info and went my way, rattled as hell, my front side panel in my trunk. In retrospect it would have made a funny movie scene if someone had been there videotaping over my shoulder — I opened my glove compartment and its malfunctioning door flew open and spilled the entire contents onto the floor. I couldn’t find a piece of paper to save my life, there were only registration and important things you don’t write on. When I finally noticed the newspaper in my back seat, I pulled the pen top off a pen I’d rummaged for in my purse, only to have the cap adhere firmly to the pen’s body and I pulled off the whole casement, leaving only a tube of ink flapping. It hit me afterwards that I was in at least psychological shock. I totally forgot to take pictures with my cameraphone. I was just eeeeeek!!ed. I had felt like I was in one of those Star Wars trash-compacter scenes for a moment.

KARMIC ACTIVITY LEVEL: .2
The midday was a complete doldrum. Virtually everyone had left the office either on business or medical appointment leave (our office is like Day of the Living Dead — it’s a parade of the walking wounded lately, as well as nasally and bronchially afflicted); so I was left doing all those things I had been dreading doing that were stupid little tangles. Halfway through I just gave up and started websurfing to cheer myself.

KARMIC ACTIVITY LEVEL: 9
The evening however, was a conviluted traffic packed ride to the Grove see MARGARET CHO, one of my favorite people on the planet, sign her books at the Barnes & Noble. There is nothing like seeing someone you respect in the flesh right next to you (or four feet away, most of the night). Margaret came in dressed in a cute skater-punkey arrangement of anti-war t-shirt and blacks, and something chiffony black lurking in the back — a sash?. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she looked like my friends do on their laundry days. I felt satisfyingly warmed by this.

She was so SMALL!! I knew how much weight she’d lost, but was surprised to see that she really is probably only 5′5′ or 5′6′ tops, and her little thin-ly boned hands were so long and elegant with a terrific black-fingernail manicure. I was SO JEALOUS of her manicured hands!

She read from her book — a section on Ann Coulter that made us bellylaugh — and answered a number of questions from the audience. A lot of what she writes on her blog comes out in the book, and what she answers in the ways of questions. It came to me that Margaret has what I value most in a person: The ability to be transparent. Margaret Cho does not lie, as far as I can tell, about herself or anyone else. She may tweak it a bit to funny it up; but she is 100% pure. And she is carefully professional at times to answer what she has thought over rather than being completely extemporaneous; something which I realized gives her space to be a little bit fragile. She knows the truth of her opinions and waves them like a flag, but I sense that she is practised at keeping her sensitive nature out of the limelight too much. There is a delicate and supremely gentle human being in there, who needs to be protected with her banners of issues and humour.

The surroundings were odd. Here were ALL THESE PEOPLE in the mall downstairs: and tons of them were Korean, too. L.A.’s Friday night at the mall is like going out to a Halloween parade night. The mall is actually an open-air small village with cobbled paths and a huge cheezy Las Vegas-style lit fountain. People are all eating in the sidewalk cafe-style restaurants under heat lamps in the chilly air with their pedigreed fufu dogs at their feet, toying with drinks that have names too embarrassing to say to my relatives, or are strolling around buying things from the accessory-cart vendors, swamping the movie theater, etc. A lot of it is just parading their new clothes around. And yet MARGARET CHO, VERY FAMOUS COMEDIENNE was only being attended by about 150 people in the one corner of the third floor of the HUMONGOUS glaringly lit Barnes & Noble. As Margaret gave her usual utterances about Bush and his minions (which are always colorful in language), a bunch of three year old kids were making noise loud enough to stop a train on the other side of a book-filled wall. Where were their mothers? Where was the manager? Somehow I didn’t think they were in Margaret’s audience. Where were the rest of her devotees?

Part of this may have been a somewhat purposeful lack of advertising (maybe they didn’t want to be swamped with screaming glitterqueen fans??) or it may have had something to do with the strange British-accented woman who ushered us through the signing like a barking pit bull, saying there was no time for pictures, move along, Did we understand there was NO TIME FOR PICTURES? and actually coming up to people in line and being all officious in their faces. I wanted to smack her on her badly-dyed black haired little skull. By the way: you’re not a “winter”, lady. You look shitty with black hair, and you totally ruined the mood for a number of us. I know we want Margaret to go home on time, but then just tell us Margaret needs to get somewhere by a certain time, please try to be brief, or SOMETHING. Have some damn tact. Or schedule the event with a limited number of people, or something. Don’t ruin it for us.

And so as I stood next to Margaret while she signed my two books trying to tell her I was married to a Korean guy who often didn’t understand her work and I wished he did, I realized she was more busy reading the little post-it notes that the black-haired pit bull had had us put in the left inside of each book jacket with our names spelled so Margaret could sign faster. Ah well, I thought. Celebrity is always taking a piece of your life away for every sparkle it adds to you. Go home and have a good Lebanese dinner Margaret, I thought, as I walked away. Have some space. Pat Gudrun and Ralph on their heads for me.

KARMIC ACTIVITY LEVEL: 4
Outside in the dark mall streets, like a boney dark carnival of anorexia, I got accosted by a guy selling snow. Yup it’s that powder in a box that turns into snow when you add water, and later returns to its crystalline state. I marvelled at it until he wanted to hard-sell me. I’ll come back later perhaps.

KARMIC ACTIVITY LEVEL: 5.5
Then I hit the Mac Store to get a swap on my iPod. Yes, it’s come to this. I have to relate the truth: My iPod is POSSESSED.

I had noticed that it was losing playing time, that the battery just kept draining, and when I pulled it out of my purse, it would be playing, with the HOLD button still on, on some tune I wasn’t previously listening to. Huh?

One night I actually saw it: since I plug it in to charge it at night and unplug it in the dark early morning, and I set it next to me while I’m doing my makeup.

>bink< The light comes on and it starts playing.

I wonder who’s possessing it? For a while I thought jovially, what a romantic idea…. I began wondering who was communicating with me. I watched the tunes each time I pulled it out, still running. I was hoping it would be someone cool, like the soul of an ancient Mongolian woman, or a dead J-rocker (there are a number of those available), or even my mom. No such luck.

One morning it was a Bhangra mix, the next it was Paul McCartney’s “Junk”, and on other days, other cheesier things that I only have on my iPod for others to hear in my car as background noise. I began to notice that the spirit haunting my iPod had really old-fashioned taste. I think I got somebody’s uncle. Someone who likes Ruby My Dear a little too much.

I decided to return it, since it’s on warranty, and I don’t want to pay a Buddhist exorcist guy to come and paste a sticky prayer paper thing on its little screen.

So my karma may change in five days when we do a swap-out (they were out of my color right then and they had to do an exact exchange). I wonder if it will have any effect on my driving luck? Strange day from top to bottom.

Well, sad to relate that most of the costumes I saw on the weekend were shamefully shabby. I just drove by most of them in my car, as I didn’t have much of a sense of what or where would be best and it seemed by Saturday I’d missed a lot of what I wanted to go to, anyway. I need to get in touch with the Costume Con crowd again. They will blow me out of the water no doubt. Should have done that. And I didn’t get out to the gay hangouts, I bet that would have been glitteriffic. See you guys at the Margaret Cho Booksigning at The Grove Barne’s & Noble’s, eh?. That’s happening on Friday the 4th.

Some insane costumes I have tackled in the past: Marie Antoinette (with paniers and hand-constructed wig), the horse and the mule for Don Quixote and Sancho in Man of La Mancha, (steel welded frames and leather patching), giant frog heads made of foam, a 15-minute rendition of Princess Leia that actually worked very well; a two-person Appalachian horse, and a pair of saguaro cactii, to name some… I want to see more of the marvellous….

Which brings to mind another costume I’d considered, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. However, I found I didn’t really adore this film as I wished I had. It just left me rather unmoved, and I keep trying to place why.

Is it that we’ve seen the Burton/Elfman formula too many times? (And it was that, right down to the skeleton sequence in the middle of the film, the music for which had none of the catchiness of Nightmare Before Christmas’s Oogie Boogie song.) I kept looking for things to like in this film. The few “funny” lines were not that humorous, and I couldn’t help wondering if they just needed some new blood in the script department. The trailer I’ve seen for Chicken Little was far better, which is a sad thing to say.

And if you say, But it wasn’t really meant to be that humourous, it was meant to be romantic, I counter with: So what’s the stupid maggot character need to be in there for? Boring. All in all I felt sad that it seemed Tim is in a confirmed slump and needs to get some fresh time away from work and then come back. The sets were all rendered beautifully and the characters were nicely done, but I just didn’t fall in love with them, because the script was just so thin on their humanity.

I felt Johnny Depp’s voice was only a so-so choice, and it should have been Hugh Grant. Helena Bonham Carter was a good choice for the bride, as was Emily Watson’s delicate Victoria. Albert Finney’s physical character looked strangely like James Earl Jones, and I wondered if he’d pulled out at the last minute and been subbed by Finney…… A happy postscript: I found it charming that they thought the maggot’s voice would have been best represented by Peter Lorre, had he been around to do it. The imitator they picked did a close second.

On the whole, I think I would have liked it if Tim had pushed the macabre aspect of the underworld a little more. I think audiences are ready for that, and if you look at Tim’s early sketches that spawned Nightmare, you’ll see some really pretty edgy grimness. I think he might need to return to that.

Tim also drives me crazy because it’s really difficult to make a great Halloween costume based on his characters’ figures. They are not forgiving to the human form, elongated and skeletal, with golf ball heads. I have seen a few people pull them off as costumes, but truly successfully only once, and that was a fellow who actually went around all night with a huge globe over his head and wore stilts. Hotcha!! That was grand.

Anyway, I am now over my lame and boring Halloween weekend which occurred largely because I don’t know anyone and don’t know where to go yet in this town as well as my boring rest of the weekend (three trick or treaters, count them, one two and three.) and on to being psyched about even lamer things like dressing in my costume for an IMAX Harry Potter showing. Which I WILL do. Yes. Just to make some deluded three year old believe the movie is actually real-er than their parents will admit. Why not?. Santa Claus is pretty commercialized out. Gotta have something to inspire them with. Or maybe it will just make them want to grow up and stand in line to watch fantasy films in costume. Life as art.

The other best thing about my Halloween weekend was watching Monsters, Inc. again. Forgot some wonderful bits. I am getting truly beyond help, can you tell? Come rescue me someone, please. I dare anyone to just show up at Doh Soon Eh restaurant and wait for me (we order out from there every other day it seems) and give me some better ideas. I dare anyone to FIND Doh Soon Eh restaurant anyway, hole in the wall that it is. But: best dueji bulgogi in town.

Oh and the Star 80s station I bumped into in the car, thanks for playing On the Metro. Missed that song a lot. Those were such great times, such happy go luckiness before 9/11 and all…. when “I remember hating you for loving me” made such sense to our smugly chic cocaine-and-Hagen Daaz selves. Now I’d grab that chick and smack her and tell her to get a grip, there are people drowning in hurricanes and stuff, and we can’t waste that kind of affection anymore, there are people with rubble on them trapped in Cashmere, and stuff, and we have a bodybuilder for a Governor that we have to elect out in a week at very least just because he has a wife that looks like a walking skeletal freakazoid, and MAN, I have REALLY had a lame and nonbrightening weekend.

Old Monty Python sketch: I need a new brain.

I’m off to administer some dark chocolate.