Resume

Amazing, the things you find when you move. This is a state-of-the-art digital photograph from 1982, of me and my best friend and next-door neighbor from childhood, Teri.

I also found the poem she wrote and gave me, right before she moved away forever.

There was some laying on the floor and remembering, for a time. There may have been a few tears.

After more digging, I found these:

Which are vintage mid-eighties bangles, collected by yours truly, and worn, along with boots with chains around them that changed the TV channel when I walked, and a gathered yellow nightgown over a black nightgown, to go dancing at Santa Monica’s illustrious and now dearly remembered 321 nightclub.

It was an eighteen-and-over club, and I was all of about fourteen, but they didn’t care. If you were a girl, they let you in. Five dollar cover.

One of our parents drove us. We brought eight dollars each: five for the cover, and three for a Coke midway through the night. Sometimes we met boys, but mostly we just danced for hours on end, to C-Bank, Animotion, Wham-UK, Madonna, Prince. I still have all that music on vinyl.

Then it started changing. Our parents became more estranged. Wendy and I became more lonely and unguided. And my drinking, which previously was of the two-or-three-glasses-of-wine-stolen-at-Thanksgiving-and-Christmas variety, and consumed out of sight, became more mainstream.

I started sneaking a flask into 321. I started dating a boy who drank and did drugs. I started drinking with my friends and tapping my dad’s box of wine, which sat on our back porch countertop. And we all know where that went.

I found those bangles while putting things away in my studio, and thinking about my long pause, and how to resume work again, to find more meaning in it.

And I thought about bangles and nightgowns and yellow and rosemary and yellow dock.

And I started warping my loom.