Has it been a rough week? Have your love affairs gone to pot? Does your bank account look like Conrad Black's been let loose on it? Do you feel black and mean inside, like Rosie O'Donnell? Are you crabby, pitiful, low and unloved? Well, take comfort: you are much less unloved than Gray Davis.
So let a smile be your umbrella, and turn that frown upside-down! I've been doing some thinking for you, and here's what I've thunk: you should start a blog! Why? Because there are not enough blogs!
Once you've got your blog rolling, you can become friends with other bloggers, or perhaps you could get your mom her own blog, so you can be a community of bloggers, and then you can have dinner at one blogger's house, and everybody can write about it on their blogs from their own perspective. It would be just like that Kurosawa film I've never seen but that supposedly shows the same event from many different viewpoints. What a fresh, new idea!
This week, procrastinating even more than usual, I spent time trawling for dates at Craig's List, and then when that got to be too many ugly people in too short a time, I hopped onto some blogs. It seems Cathy Seipp(of Buzz), Luke Ford(of porn), Heather Havrilesky (she's the coolest, formerly of Suck) and every one else had all gone to the Libertarian Reason Foundation's 35th gala (and I'm wondering why Alan Bock, The Orange County Register's evil, pulsing, disembodied brain, didn't invite me?) and all saw one another there and admired one another greatly! Then Ford had dinner at Seipp's house, and both of them wrote about it—in varying degrees of clever and amusing—on their blogs!
It would be very like if Clubbed!'s Mary Reilly came to my house for dinner and then I got crocked while she got tanked, and we passed out on the floor with the dog drooling over us and then had nothing to write about in our columns but whatever we could remember of what occurred in my very darling living room: that I have a drooly new dog, Lilo, and how I'm not a very good cooker—isn't that an adorable flaw? just like Bridget Jones!—and how much we admire each other (greatly!), which we do, but that's just to sweep under the rug our bitter envy.
At least mine is. How about you, Mary Reilly?
I have a new dog. Her name is Lilo. Hello, girl! Oh, you're a good girl! Yes you are!
Thursday, Nov. 13, I didn't want to cook dinner for my kid—I don't know if you know this, but I'm not a very good cooker—so I called my friend Kedric (see him in action on his blog, Riviera!) to find out what party would have lots of hors d'oeuvres instead. Ked invited me to a whoopdedoo at Traditional Jewelers in Fashion Island but said I'm not allowed to write about it because his blog sponsored the occasion and he thought I would be mean to the rich people!
I ask you: Would I ever do such a thing?
Oh, I would not!
Anyway, so I saddled up the kid and away we went! To the mall! On the way, the Stones came on the radio, and I quizzed the boy. He scratched his little brain and squeezed his little eyes. “Is it . . . Stinky Fingers?” he asked. Yes, son, that's exactly right. Oh, you're a good boy! Yes you are!
The party was packed with lots and lots of people, including old Dick Marconi of the Marconi Automotive Museum, who was kind and charming and told the kid he could come see lots and lots of Ferraris. There was one howlingly bad hors d'oeuvre of cold ricotta cheese sprinkled with dill that sat in our mouths like a swollen, severed thumb, but then the caviar came out, so the kid was pleased. Such a little sahib! Caviar, indeed. Does anyone know a good deprogrammer?
The people were very nice—they were mostly older folks, as Garys down the promenade had all the young people on the prowl—and one of the young ladies working the many, many jewelry counters let me try on a sapphire-and-diamond necklace that covered almost as much of me as a suit of sapphire-and-diamond armor. The price tag? If you have to ask, you can't afford it, so I asked. A cool $160,000.
Eeep.
We hit the road to Garys, where the ladies were mostly blond and Newporty yet still friendly, especially after the boy-model fashion show had begun, and they started howling with pent-up sexitude. The boy-models were delicious little snacks: one looked just like Johnny Depp, and then there were two who could have been brothers (mmmm, brothers!) and who were adorably full of themselves in a very sexy way, but then another guy came out and was full of himself in a less adorable way, and I said loudly, “He looks like he's a selfish lover!” and then all the women liked me.
Yayyy!
Does anyone know a good deprogrammer?
Saturday, my girls and I hit Avalon to see pretty Haley, but she wasn't there, and no one else would talk to us because we were neither 22 nor on drugs. It was very depressing.
Sunday we got a heads-up from Jon and Deb Webb that a progressive cocktail party would be perpetrating in one of Orange's Eichler tracts—those perfectly moderne '60s homes that were so very Carousel of Progress.
So after a vodka-and-diet-Squirt(very Tom Collinsy, and better than you'd think!), we were off! Dozens of neighbors came out to lookie-loo through the three chosen homes of the evening; it seems in the Eichler tracts there aren't a lot of children to waste one's energy upon, so everybody remodels instead! “I hear you've got quite a project going on,” 72 people said to Jon and Deb. Then they said it to all the other people who had projects going on, which was all of them. People carried hip flasks of scotch, which is so totally cool, and there were period snacks as well—though, sadly, no fish sticks dressed in slices of cheery Velveetaand pineapple rings.
The Orange County Museum of Art's Liz Armstrong and Irene Hofmann were in the house, as Irene lives in the tract. They didn't talk so much about remodeling, so that was nice.
Monday, Monday, Monday! Before dicking around on Craigs List for seven hours, I got to watch our new governor get sworn in! Did you also? No? You didn't miss much.
Except for this: Did you know one of the Schwarzenkinder has a mullet halfway down his back? What are Arnoldand Maria thinking?
Mr. Stan Atkinson emceed the event with a hideous jocularity, joking about Sacramento's sports teams while Maria gifted him with her patented icy glare. Then Maria stood and declaimed a loooong Maya Angelou poem in her unmodulated, unmelodious voice, beginning, “Into this morass of misery, a light shines. . . . Into this atmosphere of gloom and despair, light enters.”
Now, how do you suppose Gray and Sharon Davis, sitting there on the dais, felt about that?
Still, you know, it's cool she's keeping her maiden name. Hillary tried that for a while, too. It won't last.
And Arnold's speechwriters came up with a new “shining city on a hill”! California is now “the golden dream by the sea”!
Hmmm. As a professional blogger, I'll have to put in my pennies. And they are: No. Frilly, florid: bad poesy all around. My work here is done.
Now break out the caviar and send me a man!
Smile! 20************@ho*****.com">Co**********@ho*****.com.
