Your Stage Name

Saw a very thin young woman in a t-shirt the other day, one with a set of ribs painted on it. You, no doubt, could see her ribs through her skin as well and she smoked in the summer heat, to kill hunger pains, I imagined, always the fiction writer. An older woman passed her on the street, thin as a Dachau victim, looking wretched and sick, an image of the future had the girl been paying attention. How strange, I thought, to wear the inside brokenness on the outside, but then again, not really. Our pain is often written on the body whether by choice or nature.

I once saw a television show where a woman mutilated herself with thumb tacks. "I am forbidden to go into Office Max," she said. "It's my trigger. I start to feel faint if I pass one." All those tacks waiting and whatnot! So much mystery in the ways pain finds us. I was once in a bar where a very drunk woman in an old-looking wedding gown sat down next to me, Blanche DuBois come to life. "My marriage is over," she said. "I should have stayed with my first husband. The second is a disaster." She couldn't remember anything so the conversation kept circling around the predictable loops. She gave me a fake name, Marissa, and told me it wasn't real. "Your stage name," I said. I looked around the bar, but there was nobody around. Like so many plays, the audience seemed to have left, leaving the actors still performing their lines as if it were a full house.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence." Man Ray

Cocktail Hour
Drinking summer cocktail suggestion:

Silver Cloud Room

Lemonade
Two shots of vodka
Strawberry puree
Serve over ice.

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Monday!