Reading: Blind Assassin

Moving: that old lopey dance

Listening: Phish

Watching: crust form in my own eyes

28 September 2000: Foggy, rather groggy

Top indicators that lisa had a late night:

• Glasses not contacts. This is not a sure-fire sign, though, because I wear contacts only three or maybe four days a week.
• Wet hair. This indicates that I had to wash my hair right then, which means I was around smoke.
• Wet hair in a bun. This probably means that I slept as long as possible and left time only to shower but not to dry my hair or braid it.
• Wet hair, even though it's morning, because I was too tired when I got home to shower and wash it before I went to bed.
• My beloved big houndstooth dress, because it requires the least effort of any garment I own. No waist, long skirt, one-piece dressing. I have had to doff the dress to don a bra (which didn't happen this morning).

Any of these things individually might mean nothing. All of them plus bloodshot eyes mean nothing but a night out and insufficient sleep. I am so old. Demi Moore moment: "I never thought I'd feel so old at only 22." Yeah well check out 32. I can get along with seven hours of sleep, go to bed at 11 and get up at 6, but not if I went to Phish the night before. Yesterday was my birthday, yes indeedy. It's usually in May but this time it was yesterday.

When I got home yesterday afternoon I was bemoaning my lack of concert wardrobe. I have no Doc Martens, but I am thinking of getting a pair for this winter. I have two pairs of blue jeans (one pair five years old, the other 14), fleece pants, and a pair of khakis. I have no sexy little trousers to wear with a clingy top. I am Uncool, as well as chunky. I had been thinking of fleece from to bottomus, because all last week was cold with snow over the weekend, but happily this week has warmed up. Bean Bluchers, with the laces wound in that way I hope I can figure out for my next pair, Levi's, a cotton sweater. Ungainly, uncool, and furthermore I'd probably be tossed out for being too old.

At least I had my Bear's Choice earrings too. These I bought in Philadelphia (nyyaaah, I heard "Unbroken Chain" dragged back into circulation) and wore to Highgate. JGW had brought glow-in-the-dark stars which we applied everywhere we could think of on ourselves. One small star remains on my trackball from where I took it off the tummy of one bear; the other bear still has a star on its belly, because the Highgate show was two weeks before we got married. We had Sneetches made of Filo polymer clay on our wedding cake, one star-bellied and the other plain. My bears are similarly star- and plain-bellied.

I didn't get kicked out. As Haitch and I worked our way to Fiddler's Green, I was surprised at the Grateful Dead influence on Phish culture. I know the audiences overlap a lot, but the crowd was mostly college-aged and Jerry's been dead five years. These people were in high school and cannot have toured too much before 1995, unless I'm woefully naïve about how much fun everyone other than I had as a teenager, which I probably am. Naive and sheltered and timid. Anyway, lots of hair--and a lot of that in dreadlocks--lots of tie-dye, lots of patchwork pants and dresses. I felt right at home. There were a couple walking back and forth in lamé, one in a gold cape and the other in a silver one with wings, who looked more like ravers than like phreaks. Haitch said the costumes might be for people on ecstasy, whose sense of touch has been racheted up. Ah.

New assimilations I hadn't seen before: the Northface logo with its three horizontal bars reading "Steal Your Face" instead of "The North Face," which I really liked; the USA Today newspaper logo altered to read "Use Today." Also one I didn't get, a t-shirt whose front read "Will work for Hood" and whose back read "You can feel good." I asked Haitch about that and she didn't get it, but she'd never heard of Hood ice cream at all. It must be only an eastern brand. I told her the slogan was "You can feel good, good about Hood" but I couldn't figure out its context here. Later I saw, in a collection of bumperstickers a fellow was selling, a bumpersticker of the Hood logo, the red oval with "Hood" in white, so it had to mean something and not just be this one individual's wardrobe. When I got home I asked RDC and he said it might mean a hit of acid. Ah.

Haitch and I've been to Fiddler's together before, in the summer of 1998 for Lilith Fair, but I guess then I didn't point out how evil the building of Hateful, Inc., is. Fiddler's Green, an outdoor amphitheatre, faces west. From the top, you can see out across much of the southern metropolitan area. Directly west of Fiddler's, though, is that building, which is just a little higher than the mountains from that perspective. Depending on where you sit, and what time of year it is, the sun sets behind the building rather than behind the mountains, which is no fun. But another building has gone up just to the south, which blocks the view of Pike's Peak if there ever was one, and it looks like the lot between Fiddler's and Hateful Inc. is being cleared for another, closer building, which will kill the view even more depending on how tall it is. Sigh.

At one of the Furthur shows RDC and I went to there, the band were playing "Scarlet Begonias" and then started changing the song into something else, as the Dead so often did. I called it: "Fire on the Mountain!" RDC said no, they wouldn't do the old segues and it didn't sound like "Fire on the Mountain" anyway. I went to six Dead shows [counts on fingers Buffalo Philly DC Boston Philly Highgate yep six] and bowed to his superior, lost-count- at-100+ shows, knowledge. He didn't expect a "Scarlet~~>Fire," as the hipster knowing Deadheads call that pairing. A few minutes later the tune had clearly become "Fire on the Mountain," a fact I have not stopped lording over him years later. The other nifty thing was that they had timed the song for sunset, and they drew out the song far as long as the high summer, lingering sun lit up the sky and the mountains.

Getting there, Hao had said that two old friends of hers might be there and wondered if we'd see them. She's seen one a few times this year; the other she's seen only a couple of times in the five years she's been in Denver. I, the wet blanket, suggested she not get her hopes up to see two people in a crowd of 19,000. I'm really subtle with my foreshadowing, am I not? After three ticket-checks (and hearing an attendant ask another attendant what their quota for forgeries was, implying they had to harass a minimum number of people) and no cavity search ("Damn! I should have brought the camera!") and not even the frisking I'd expected, we got in, peed, and climbed the stairs to the top, back wall, descended a grassy knoll, spread out my blanket (Mexican weave, and Haitch doesn't believe that I had it before I started dating a Deadhead), and sat. And immediately were greeted by the rarer of the two ex-boyfriends.

People-watching was rewarding as usual. In addition to the t-shirts and the ecstasy lame people, another group we kept seeing even though they were boring was one of several men, who along with me brought the average age up several years. I figured they were all college friends and wondered if they'd all gone to UVM together and so knew Phish from way back in Burlington, but after sunset one put on a Georgetown sweatshirt.

When Phish started, I mostly watched the band. Then something caught my eye. It was one of the men in front of us. Could it be? Oh yes, it was.

No Deadhead nor, as I learned last night, any Phish phan will ever be known for choreography or rhythm. There's spinning and there's "A Charlie Brown Christmas" dancing and not too much else. But this, this was extreme. The man jerked spasmodically. He kicked. I was transfixed for but a moment then seized Haitch's shoulder, pointed her in the right direction, and hissed in her ear, "Elaine!"

Unlike some who despite their many other sterling qualities do not watch enough television to follow all my allusions, Haitch is a "Seinfeld" connoisseur. For me to have spotted not just a bad dancer but a bad dancer bad in all the ways Elaine was bad amused us thoroughly.

This also led me to tell her about the crane incident. At the zoo there is a chart demonstrating how to dance like a crane, which I don't think I ever noticed before. It had diagrams of the key poses and necessary moves. I exclaimed to Jessie, "Oh, remember when Ed bought Ruthanne her gravesite and they danced on--no, no, I mean, remember the time Ed got Chris to help him teach the crane how to dance so she could attract a mate?" Except Jessie didn't get it. So when I offered her my KBHR coffee cup for her orange juice, maybe she was only being polite when she said "Cool."

I didn't bring a pen, but it's not as if I know the titles of many of their songs, not from the five albums I know and certainly not from two most recent ones that I don't. They opened with "Sample in a Jar" and somewhere in there was "Picture of Nectar," "Split Open and Melt," and the mango song, which is what I wanted to hear: "Your hands and feet are mangos, you're going to be a genius anyway." Which is why I didn't think the encore was one of their own songs. Haitch has seen them sing "The Wheels on the Bus," so really it could have been anything. Last night the encore was something about a loving cup, "Just one drink, and I fall down drunk," which sounded like a Neil Young or Tom Petty concept to me,* not a Phish one, and furthermore made a sort of sense (a trite and clichéd one) which few Phish songs do. (They tell good stories but they're outlandish and dreamlike.) Despite not knowing a lot of the newer tunes, I really enjoyed the show because of the palpable joy and affection of the crowd and because Phish got innovatively jammy. RDC hasn't said this yet (because he was mostly asleep when I got home) but he'll probably say something about how Phish never uses a predefined setlist, as the Cowboy Junkies so disappointingly did in May.

*Um, the Denver Post said it was a Rolling Stones song.

As we left, HAO said something about a grilled cheese sandwich, which reminded me of the supper I hadn't yet eaten, the supper that a slice of bad concession stand pizza wasn't. I haven't yet been to the White Spot, which is a diner on Broadway that looks to me like the one in which Janeane Garofalo and Winona Ryder ate in "Reality Bites," and another, scarier diner on Colfax where Vince and Jules belong (except I said "Jules and Vern," which amused Haitch). I had us pointed to the White Spot before I remembered Denny's, which is definitely open 24 hours and which definitely serves grilled cheese, neither point of which I was sure about diner-wise. So midnight found us eating grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches on white bread, the best midnight snack I've had in a long time.

Ha! Especially since RDC ate all the rest of the pancakes. When I got home Tuesday I was all stoked to have pancakes for supper, but the tupperware with the batter wasn't in the fridge. I figured RDC had dumped it, since it was nearly two days old and we've been really leery of tainted food since we suffered our bouts of intestinal disorder. But he'd had them for lunch, "since there wasn't enough left for both of us for supper." Hmph.

---

So this morning as I stumbled toward the door in my big untailored dress and damp hair wound into the world's least flattering bun, I checked the mail. Our mailbox is built into the house, which is the coolest possible way to get your mail. I always wanted to live somewhere with a traveling mailman, and now I do. Plus there's usually something interesting, even in these days of email and direct billing. I love getting the mail. So I opened the little slot and immediately my heart raced. The topmost envelope featured a handwriting I will never forget.

EKH.

My heart raced to fuel my hand shooting into the chute and ripping the envelope open and my head chanting her name which is how I'm going to start my email to her. I am so glad I sent her a change of address postcard (back in June, but who's counting). I sent it to her parents' house, since she's had at least seven addresses since she graduated over a decade ago. But now her address is settled, because she bought a house too. And she's healthy (she has a chronic disease that can flare up) and employed and her cat Annie (Dillard) is still around, and she enclosed a photograph of her daughter! I think the last time I heard from her was almost three years ago, at the time of her daughter's first Christmas. I am so pleased. Her little girl is over three now and the picture is the aftermath of a fingerpainting incident.

The weekend of TJZ's wedding is going to be a reunion of sorts at Charenton. I have to ask Nisou whether I can call EKH--1997 was the Year of Nieces for me, and at least one other three-year-old girl will be there. Nisou and HEBD both would like to see EKH and meet her daughter, I know.

Hearing from her warmed the cockles of my heart until I got to work. I wanted a bagel and a carton of orange juice from the convenience store downstairs. I spent all my cash at lovely Denny's last night, and their phone lines didn't work so I couldn't use my debit card. A meal eaten at midnight does not count as breakfast even if it is consumed on the next day. I am ravenous.

Boy I'd love to see EKH. It's not everyone who'll tell you to your face not to be a tit.