This Afternoon In Drama

One Bunny Dies, Another Takes Us On The Tour Of The Grotto

So because Kat's in House Bunny, we went to the Playboy Mansion Wednesday night for the premiere after-party, and now I can confirm that the grotto really is incredibly gross.  It's not that anyone was performing, you know, oral on the rocks-- heyyyyyy, remember that seminal Neil Diamond song?-- because this was supposed to be a classy event and Demi Moore was walking around with her children.

It's just that the grotto is incredibly hot and moist (I guess the word for that is humid) to the point of being unbreathable, so I can't imagine how you'd have sex in there without needing a jug of Gatorade a quarter of the way through.  Or why you'd want to.  Yesterday I went to the "Body Worlds" exhibit where they have the corpses preserved in uncomfortable positions, and this display card explained that the plastination process involves boiling the bodies at a low temperature and then impregnating them with liquid plastic.  Well, it's kind of like the same thing happens to you in the grotto, except instead of the liquid plastic your cells are busy soaking up Pauly Shore's vaporized sperm.

(By the way, if any of the Girl Scouts I gave a career talk to last week have decided to check out the blog, maybe you should just come back next week.)

We were given a tour of the grotto and the rest of the grounds by Athena, former Playmate, except she was in a Diane Von Furstenbergy wrap dress and not an official bunny outfit, putting the tiniest damper on the mansion twinkle.  Even she looked pretty disgusted when showing us the carpet in the game house guest bedroom, which was, not exaggerating, at least six inches thick, made of some kind of alien foam substance, and the color of fallopian tubes from the seventies.  Also, it didn't really help that there were boxes of Kleenex on every edge in the room.  Not even nice boxes of Kleenex, though, and I know nice boxes of Kleenex because over the past year I've been delighted many times by the introduction of the company's newest designs, particularly the metallics they bring out during the holiday season.  But these were those low-lying tissues boxes that used to be at my pediatrician's, who was similarly a wood-paneling enthusiast.

When I got home later I discovered that Geoff had supplied me with some naked photos of Athena, which were actually really rewarding, since I love a good "Before & After."

Athena also took us through the mansion zoo, and from the way they were behaving, you would think that monkey's don't (!) like Notorious B.I.G. blasted into their cages in combination with rapid fire strobe lights.  That, or else all that agitated swinging around on the bars and vines was just them jumping on the super popular Strip Aerobics craze.  Honestly, my favorite part of the whole property was the front of the house, which had a very gingerbready charm and was strung with small, white lights.  After being served a rum and coke by a bartender who told me, "I can tell you're my type of woman because you refused the straw," I left Geoff and George and went back to the lights and spent some time there, just thinking.

I guess what struck me most about the whole Playboy party fantasy was the surprising fragility of the bunny personas.  I already knew, from watching shitloads of reality TV, that the Playboy enterprise is intensely specific about the appearance of the girls, down to the amount of fluff on and placement of their tails.  So I'd also assumed that an equally rigid code of characterization would have been imposed upon them on party nights.  But it wasn't like that at all.  Beyond their costumes, the bunnies mostly looked as if they didn't know what do with themselves or how to be.  A number fell into pairs, clutching onto each other self-consciously and then hitting the dance floor in very innocent faux-lesbian giddiness that I haven't seen all that much of since I went to a bar or bat mitzvah every other weekend in 1993.

Athena, especially, as she was without ears and bustier, seemed to be floating unpolished, unsure of her role.  When Geoff asked her if she lived in the mansion and she said no, in that moment I could actually picture, really picture, her apartment and her blinds on the windows and her hand soap pump in the bathroom, and even if I was so wrong and homegirl has curtains, I immediately had the thought that the whole idea of the bunny is supposed to be that your imagination can't penetrate her life.  But there were such gigantic cracks in all the bunnies' armors, to the point of them not feeling armored at all, that I found myself envisioning them making stuff in their microwaves.

R.I.P.

Scooter
1999-2008

Loving Lauren

I've been on a search to find a chair to sit beside the one I discovered at a Santa Clarita optometrist's office.  Every time I came close to committing to a chair, a breeze would blow through my place and whisper, "Rallllllllllllllllllph Lauuuuuuuren."  Just as some people fetishize India, bringing sari curtains and elephant footstools into their homes despite having very little immediate conception of the life, just as some people fetishize a generalized notion of some Chinese-Japanese supernation, sticking bamboo sticks in pots and loading up on rice paper screens, I've had a really bad WASP fetish for a really long time.

Being raised middle class JAP (JAM?) I may have no inkling of what it means to live the Ralph Lauren lifestyle, but I'd argue that an understanding is irrelevant anyway since the brand is aspirational.  Does anyone ever get to where that life actually exists?  No, not even the bona fide WASPS, who, if I'm correctly grasping what Cheever has to communicate from the inside, are too lost in alcohol, buried anger, and hateful children to really appreciate a good tartan throw.

Where did my love of tufting, plaid, Sotheby used as a first not last name, small, embroidered horses, Princeton, and dark wood detailing come from?  A fantasy in my heart, obviously, but also from this picture in my head that I might have even been born with, and in it there's a quiet library, tones so deep and rich that even when I feel myself to be completely insubstantial and without meaning, they insist upon the possibility of romance in the world.

As I rejected perfectly fine chair after chair, I realized that mine had to be Ralph Lauren and it had to be a plaid or a tailored stripe or I would hate myself for compromising the next morning, then hate the chair for not being what I'd imagined.  I'd spent time gazing lovingly at Ralph's current collection of chairs online, but as the cheapest one started around $2200 with the cheapest (not patterned) possible upholstery, I didn't see one of those beauties coming home with me anytime soon.

In a moment of attempting to will the universe to come to me, I did a search for Ralph Lauren and chair and Los Angeles and I landed upon this woman, Laurie, who was selling an originally $4000 Ralph Lauren club chair for an incredibly reasonable price in hopes of raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma society; she was going to run the San Francisco marathon for a four-year-old with Leukemia.  You may or may not know that my dad is in Lymphoma remission and continues to get chemo, so on top of loving the chair, I began to think about its purchase as a nod to him and his continued wellness right in my home.

Here I am in the chair in all my Ralph Lauren glory.  The bathrobe, Ralph Lauren.  The shoes, Lauren by Ralph Lauren.  The chair, Ralph Lauren home.  The bag, a Ralph Lauren doctor's satchel with horse bit detailing.  The thing draped over my arm, a pillow sham from my Ralph Lauren Jamaican Ombre bedding set.  The dog, Ralph Laureny in spirit.

But here's the thing. I am so in love with this chair and am so grateful for it that I feel like I need to repay Laurie over and above the purchase price.  When I was helping her unload it from her car, she said that she hoped to raise $3200 and was nowhere near her goal.  This chair should have been $3200 alone.  I want to help her get there, not only because she did me one solid by making a classical-stripe-dream reality, but because she's running for a foundation that looks to cure what my dad fights.

I've been trying to think what I can offer, and this is what I came up with: If you go to Laurie's fundraising page and pledge at least $50, sending me your email receipt, I'll use your first name for a minor character in my next book.  If you pledge at least $150, I'll use your first name along with a personal detail, selected by you.  For example, if your name is John-John and you have a mole shaped like a pineapple, I will write, "John-John, who had a mole shaped like a pineapple, waved to us from across the street" so you're recognizable to yourself in the story.  If you pledge at least $300, I'll put in your full name along with a personal detail in the form of a character.  The offers will stand until Laurie's met her goal (there are only so many names I can drop into a story until the story's just a list of names).  I mean, I know I'm not even close to being a big name or author, so it's not like I can send out signed panties or baggies of clippings from next time I go in for a haircut, but I figure being able to find yourself in publishable form might be fun, even if you don't particularly like my work or care about me. You'll be able to take someone you're trying to get to sleep with you into Barnes and Noble, flip to your page, and say, "Hey, this character was written for me."

All donations $50 or over will also get thanked in the back of the book by full name and city.  And even if Laurie makes it to $3200 and the character naming option is gone, and even if you can't afford $50 but you can do $5, please donate anyway, just because.

Remember, all donations are tax deductible.

Click here to give.