Luncheon, then Photo Shoot

From 11-Oct-1980

This is a complex restaurant setting. I am there on my lunch hour with two women friends. I'm having tea and crumpets, although I don't know what `crumpets' are. The waitress isn't taking my order anyway.

I walk about tables and intricate glassware. One of the women is the better friend, and she has gone. I decide I won't pay.

I have been left with the friend-of-the-friend, and neither of us are happy about that. I am calling for a ride; she waits in an adjoining room, stiffly. I call work as well.

I am driven in a convertible around a residential circle, one of those long drivway U tracks like in romance novels. The driver up front has his lady with him, and they're only acquaintences of mine. He drives very fast in reverse but it's all right. He stops and I step down. I traipse uphill on a road they drive away over in the other direction.

Here is an arcade, a wharf of old whitewashed cavernous brittle flaking concrete. I know where I am. I can be back to work with a long walk through an extended "L" course.

I try and call work again. (I had asked the lady in waiting, I remember now, and she told me it was 1:15 and I've been trying to call work since.) A pay phone fails to connect me. I pass among dowdy rustic fishers, Italians, one plays an accordion, nobody pays me any mind.

I lie down, and I'm in attendance at a Linda Rondstadt concert. I am in the second row, and I have on a Stetson, smiling, and all around they are preparing to go onstage for a photo sequence.

I am not designated, but in the neighborhood of those who are. It's a benefit for an unfortunate, the photo series will tell a story with speaking parts and group shots with the audeince and crew behind Linda. I wonder if my voice will desert me onstage.

Linda warns participants about mugging or "showing your teeth with a hand at your throat." This is, I understand, a cartoon expression of anxious war vets. It will all go to Governor Brown (her strange boyfriend) eventually as some sort of petition. I lay there in my Stetson.

The woman to the right of me goes forward. I don't.