Heavy People, Aunt Beasts, and Dramatis Personnae
I have often said that my life has no meaning until I tell it to at least two of my friends. These are some of the people who give my life meaning. Because I haven't permission from all (or any, actually) of them to use their full names, I shall refer to them (and everything else I can) as I do in my journal: by their initials. Some of those pesky married women who now have four initials (or five; you know who you are)....
So named because our first dance was to Animotion's "Obsession."
CLB was the first nonwork, nonschool person I met in Denver, and I am grateful for that. Whenever I work downtown I take the bus, and at the time I didn't think my own corner warranted any downtown bus without the transfers that frightened a newbie like me, so I walked a half mile to get to one that takes a long circuitous route through another neighborhood before arriving. So it was only by being on a bus for twice as long as I needed to be that I met this woman, who has the most alluring voice and sloe eyes you'd ever wish to encounter. On the bus I usually listen to books, because reading the printed page in a moving vehicle makes me ill, and so there I was listening and looking around people watching, and there was this woman reading the new Rosamund Pilcher, which I hadn't got to yet. So I pounced. And it turned out we have a lot of books and movies in common, particularly those made from Jane Austen's novels.
CGK was the first person I met in Denver whom I felt immediate affinity with. At a party for the new grad students, there she was, and of course I wondered if she was a real Cynthia or just one of those fake ones made in the enterprise zone of an obscure and exploited country. She was real: with a real laugh, and real vibrancy, and honest eyes. She let me play with her hair, which is thick and lustrous and curly, by the end of the night. In January 1997 I got to listen to her squeal when I told her Margaret Atwood would be at the Tattered Cover in five days and there I met her younger sister. I want to get CGK and HAO and their younger sisters together with me and CLH so we can see if CLH's younger-sister theory works.
She uses her nipples as a fashion accessory and knows Watership Down as well as I do. She dressed as Spousal Abuse Barbie for one Halloween and one of three Satanic Charlie's Angels the next. Plus she likes to shop and she thinks I'm bright, plus she continues to like me even after I dragged her out on a fool's errand of lunacy one evening. Grudgingly a pseudonym instead of a name, from a Halloween costume: "Spousal Abuse Barbie."
HAOBecause Someone has just complained that this is certainly a short bio of her, considering the inner sanctum (someone else's description) we share, I have decided to expand it.
I met HAO at the same party I met CGK at, but a year later. RDC had helped her with HTML and she had her web site up before the party, so I checked it out and from its content looked forward to meeting her. She alleges (and I believe although I don't remember) that my first words to her were, "That baby over there looks like Tweety Bird." I believe it because I remember that the baby did look like Tweety Bird and because that is exactly the kind of thing I would say to test someone's waters. A while later I invited myself over to toss my Aerobie with her, and that, awkward as it was, would be the start of a beautiful friendship.
This is the original incomplete thing I said about HAO: She puts up with my yammering comments from work almost every day, and that's enough to warrant my undying gratitude, but we've also shared black-and-tan desserts from the Wynkoop, afternoons of movies and Aerobie, and smoky evenings our friends' bizarre and retro music.
He watches "The X-Files" and he is the chain-smokingest of our acquaintance. He likes '70s music and, slightly, '80s music. I refer to his girlfriend as "Clove" because that's what she occasionally smoked before him; now she chain-smokes tobacco too. An evening at the Smoking Man is likely to include "Billy, Don't Be a Hero," "Summer Lovin'", "Come Sail Away," and songs by Journey you wish you could forget but haven't and secretly enjoy. Later: Clove has quit smoking, hooray, mostly. She'a social smoker now. She's also a social catalyst, coyly suggesting RDC and I host Thanksgiving and asking for backrubs at parites.
KMJ's not only heard of the Cowboy Junkies but also loves them as much as I do and can quote from them. She says their lyrics send her running for the dictionary: she had no idea what a "copse" of trees was. Naturally my next question was whether she'd read Watership Down (she hadn't) because if she had, she'd've picked that word up. KKJ also makes this great dessert and brings them to your party and you eat them and you like them and then she tells you they were Nancy Reagan's favorite recipe.
KRS and her sister are named for Ayn Rand heroines. Whatever drug her parents
were on throughout their childbearing and -naming years seems not to have affected
their daughters, thankfully, other than to render them physically similar to
their namesakes: tall, thin, blonde, blue-eyed, angular, lovely. A copy of The
Fountainhead blatantly at the end of KMJ's bookshelf
sparked the Rand connection and led to a discovery of our common guilty pleasure
or pleasant guilt in V.C. Andrews.
I have grudgingly decided to call KRS "Sabrina" in my journal entries.
I like my initials and using them I shall always remember who someone
is. This pseudonym she earned by playing a Satanic Charlie's Angel for Halloween
1997.
ECD temped where I work for a spell, including filling in for me while I was on vacation. We have seen each other only once after that for an evening of coffee, books, and chat at the Tattered Cover but I felt that same immediate affinity. Good to know I can still meet people and love them just as much right from the first, just as in college; bad that I don't pursue it.
One of the nicest fellows you're ever likely to meet. He even gives you sips of his Starbucks mocha frappuccino. Another grad student at DU, a fishing buddy of RDC's, married to JMJ in a lovely ceremony at the Phipps mansion in Denver, owns a cat that likes RDC (a feeling that is, bizarrely, mutual), and an excellent travel guide to Santa Fe.
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Last modified 23 October 1999
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