Lethal Dose

From the LAT:

Sadly, the embedded code doesn’t work, but go here:
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The horseshoe for luck! Helen’s hair in the corner!
Priceless:

Olga: “They gonna lock you up!”

An attorney for a septuagenarian woman charged with murder in the staged hit-and-run killings of two homeless men told jurors Monday that his client was framed by her daughter, who was motivated by “intense hatred toward her mother.”

Roger Jon Diamond, who had delayed his opening statement until the prosecution completed its case in the double murder trial, told the jury that Kenneth McDavid’s death was clearly a homicide. But he said Kecia Golay, 44, was at the wheel of the Mercury Sable station wagon that killed him, not her mother, Helen Golay, 77.

Prosecutors said a tow record places Helen Golay at the homicide scene.

“That is the question: Who did this dastardly act, not how was it done,” Diamond told jurors.

The bouffant killers are on trial - oh, the one time I’d want to be on a jury! They must be miserable:

During the preliminary hearings, Helen Golay’s attorney asked the judge if his client could pluck her eyebrows and wear makeup at trial, but the request was denied.

Helen: ” … an aggressive landlord who often called police over minor parking and noise complaints. She once sued a woman for allegedly stealing leather skirts from her, and a health club after she got hurt on an exercise machine.”

Olga: “She has an expired electrolysis license, but it is unclear if she ever worked in hair removal. Rutterschmidt once sued Ralphs supermarket, saying stacked boxes fell on her, and often threatened to sue others.”

Now they’re being called “The Poor Gabors”! Wish I came up with that one.

Yesterday my friend and I took a little walk on the wild side for signage (photos coming.) On the way, we stopped for pepper spray for me, first aid supplies for her (she’s a red cross volunteer), finished off by cupcakes across the street from a casket company (!) … now today, I’m paying for it. Why? I forgot my friend is a diabetic (which is why I’m not outing her.) After collapsing in a fit of sugar giggles while photographing the “no smoking within 20 feet of the entrance!” signs on the door of the casket company and trying to track down the origin of a squawking parrot in a church bell tower, we reminisced about childhood beating instruments (her mother: a blue avon hairbrush; mine: a yardstick that said “QUIRK” in blue ink - fitting, eh?)

Driving to work this morning the “aura” came on … no, not ghosts, silly, but the migraine aura, the likes of which I’ve never felt before. My skin began to crawl, I got odd chills and that familiar pain in my head, this time in an almost vertical line down my forehead. I’ve been keeping a small bag of dog food in my car for a homeless woman and her pup who beg underneath a bridge I pass every day on the way to work. She seems to alternate shifts with an angrier, drunken man and I haven’t seen her for awhile. Today she came to my car and I handed her the dog food.

“It’s food for your dog.”
“Oh. I thought it was for ME!”
I noticed her hands were covered with silver jewelry - some of it nice.
“Got any water?”
I handed her a bottle and she walked off.

When I got to work I dropped a bag of frozen bagels all over the floor in the kitchen and gave up trying to make some toast. Now I’m at my desk, so nauseous I’m afraid to move lest I puke in my wastebasket. My sweet coworker had left me a chocolate bunny as a gift, but she didn’t know that I’m scared of giant bunnies so I had to put it back on her desk facing the other way.

Monday night Marky and I went to a swanky Hollywood thing and I wore big hair:

The weird thing about going to these events - whether it’s as a spectator or if I’m covering it for a “legit” blog that I write for … is when you’re walking in. People on the sidewalk turn and look at you in anticipation, then as you get closer, they turn away. The other night, a photographer started to reach for his camera then realized Mark and I were “nobodies” (except in our own minds, of course). It makes you realize how easy it is to go insane out here - imagine if you were famous once, then became a nobody and had people physically turn away after your star fell?

It’s a strange world.

PS. Today I got asked to play a nun on TV. That freaked me out b/c my mother was a former nun (she left before she took her vows.) Nuns freak me out. Not as much as giant bunnies or Peeps, but they still give me chills. Sadly, I didn’t get to do it.

I used to write a regular blog about my building and neighborhood. There’s just something about it that’s so very David Lynch. It’s a vortex of some kind that attracts the bizarre. Add the picture-perfect setting and there you have it.

There’s a faux-tribesman who lives here and I’d love to blog about him but I’m sure he googles himself ad nauseum and I don’t need him knocking at the door. Suffice to say, it’s a small town and we’re not the first building to be graced with his presence, or creepy comments to the female tenants. I heard that when the tweaker first laid eyes on him, he ran inside to get a baseball bat.

The eastern-european bachelors who barbecue (I love how they’ve taken on Americanism with such zeal: they barbecue almost every day and drink only Sam Adams!) are now sunbathing alongside the building, covered in baby oil and using paper towel rolls for pillows.

“I’d put something else down on that grass - all the dogs pee there,” I tried to warn them.

“Ok, that’s okay, we’re fine,” the bald one w/the gold chains reassured me. Well, I tried.

Walking with my neighbor yesterday, we caught up on the building gossip.

“I never see you,” she says.

I got out of the habit of never going past the mailbox to the other half of the building when I first moved in, when our building was dominated by a perverted building manager, a drunken Hungarian who would have a planting war with another crazy neighbor. I caught him one morning when the pup had an emergency run, at 5:30 am, crouched over, shovel in hand.

“Um, someone was digging up the plants, I have to put them back in.” Whatever.

Anyway, he’s long gone but my habit of avoiding the front of the building remains, so after my neighbor moved to a bigger apartment, I never saw her.

“This building is something else, girl! How did I end up here?” she mused.

“Well, you lost everything in a hurricane and had nowhere else to go.”

Which is true. She and her husband and two tiny kids and another on the way, and a dog who would follow via a shelter rescue flight all landed here, just like the Wizard of Oz. I told her my theory that it’s the edge of the continent and there’s just nowhere else to go. If you tilt a checkerboard or one of those little hand-held pinball games with the tiny metal ball, you get the idea. Tilt the continent and it all slides down or across.

That’s the only sense I can make of it, anyway.

As we walked, a man on a bike rode by and she waved.

“There’s the guy upstairs,” she said.

“I don’t recognize him. Where does he live?”

She squinted. “Fuck, I don’t have my glasses … that’s not him!”

The guy stopped his bike and moved in our direction.

“I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else - our neighbor,” she yelled.

“I am that someone else! I am your neighbor!” he yelled back. But he wasn’t. Luckily I had the pup so he moved along.

I had an unexpected lunch with Pat Boone, complimented Tippi Hedren on her gorgeous boots, and had Mr. Blackwell run his fingers through my hair, while assuring me I’d never make his (worst-dressed) list.

All in one day. Read about it here.

More proof of a godless world: Vampira dies yet Mickey Rooney continues to outlive everyone!

PS. Top right: Vampira in “The Beat Generation,” lower right: Lisa Marie as Vampira in “Ed Wood.”