Mystery of the Missing Portrait

In 1969, a VCU freshman named Janet Johnson, who lived on the 8th floor of Johnson Hall, painted this picture, which amazed us all because she wasn't even an art major, so we took a picture of it.

She dropped out mid-semester because she never went to class. She got her days and nights mixed up and was up all night and slept all day. I think she was originally from Northern Virginia. She was very tall and liked to wear short, fluffy wigs. She also liked to party at Andy's, which was on Grace Street near the Mister Swiss, a few doors down from Lum's.

A few years later, someone told me they saw this painting for sale at Arts in the Park. That was almost 40 years ago. I wonder what happened to it.

Tears for Opus

I've been snuffling all day about the death of Opus. Some of you may say, no, he's not dead, he just went to spend eternity asleep on the last page of "Good Night, Moon," which is how he's drawn in his final panel (which can only be viewed via a Humane Society web page.)

But he looks dead to me, with the added clues of the text, "Goodnight Opus and goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere."

When you say goodnight to air, that's pretty dead.

It was hard enough on me that he knew weeks ago his end was coming and he had to get to the place where he wanted to spend eternity, but didn't know where, and then through a series of misfortunes, ended up in a cell at an animal shelter with a dog that had never known a home. (What an allegory for life! Isn't our whole journey about getting to the place where we want to spend eternity, but we don't know where or how and end up in the wrong place?)

And then it was hard enough that when a trio of Tahitian beauties came calling, looking for a pet to adopt and take home to their island paradise, he stepped aside and let the dog go. (Another allegory. Redemption through sacrifice.)

I was more a fan of Bloom County and Outland than this latest revival of the strip, but hats off to Berkeley Breathed for wringing me out emotionally over a cartoon penguin. I haven't been able to snap out of it all day.

New Ways to Cheat

I was stuck in a Hoth battle. Most of the time Legos Star Wars is easy to play. Death is forgiven with instant reincarnation, usually in the same spot where you died so you don't have to keep doing parts of a level over. When there's no obvious ways to exit a level, you start looking for all possibilities and the solutions are seldom too mentally taxing, or as in some games, something you would have never thought to do in a million years.

But the Hoth battle was proving perplexing. I had circled those walking mechanical things with tow ropes and brought them down and then shot them up, and they just kept coming. I dragged bombs out of a bomb house and dragged them on tow ropes, hurling them against various walls and enemies, and nothing changed. I did notice the big red wall had a flashing emblem of a tiefighter on it. I was not flying a tiefighter, so I had a suspicion this wall was not going to yield. I had also noticed a slit in a cave that had bars across it, but my efforts to shoot through the bars had produced nothing. I paused the game and went to the Internet to research "Legos Hoth battle."

As usual, I found message boards full of other frustrated people and obscenely cursing kids, various suggestions offered and complaints that the suggestions didn't work. Then I saw a link to a YouTube video. I clicked it and there was a video of the whole level played out, nearly perfectly. Yes, you must tow a bomb to that cave and hurl it at the bars. Within minutes, I was through the cave and combating bigger mechanical walkers on other levels and finally reaching a save point so I could quit for the night.

YouTube is saving my butt on video game after game. We pushed through the mind-twisting puzzles of Nintendo DS' "Professor Layton and the Curious Village" by watching videos kids had made of puzzle solutions. It's the new way to cheat. Or maybe it's just working as a team, which is always a good thing. I'll put it on my resume. "Excels at team work."

My Life at the Byrd

I see the Byrd Theatre is celebrating its 80th birthday on Oct. 18. As part of my job, I've taken a tour of the Byrd and seen the behind-the-scenes parts of it, upstairs, downstairs, under the stairs, behind the screen. I think there's actually a creek running through it on a lower level.

I don't go to the Byrd much because of the parking issue, and I don't go to movies much anyway, but I have three distinct memories of it.

The first memory is bad. I was there with a boyfriend watching -- I think -- a reissue of a Disney cartoon. He had his legs up against the back of the seat in front of us. He was over six feet tall and no one was sitting there, but this was in the very early 1970s and he had "hippie hair," so naturally the usher, an old man, had to come down the aisle and say something to him. And that started a squabble because the boyfriend, despite the hippie hair, was a two-year veteran of Vietnam combat and felt entitled, so there was ugliness and we were asked to leave. My first time in the Times-Dispatch was a letter to the editor complaining about the incident and defending my veteran boyfriend, who, it turned out, would pull stunts like this the whole time I knew him and it would become indefensible. We never went back there together.

The second memory is the first time I saw "Gone with the Wind," which was also in the early 1970s because my date was my son (spawn of that indefensible boyfriend who had since deserted) and he was a toddler. It's a long movie and he got bored and started crawling around on the floor, and much to my horror, I discovered he was eating the old candy he was finding on the floor. He came up from one crawl with Good & Plentys stuck in his hair. The rest of the time he actually watched the movie, especially in the beginning when Scarlet is getting dressed to go to parties. He piped up loud enough for everyone to hear, "She gots big underwear!"

The next memory was sitting through "Three Weddings and a Funeral" in a crowded theater in a state of shock. It was the first time in a year I was there without Frank. Pretty much all Frank and I did for the nine months we hung out together was go to the Byrd. We saw everything that played there, good or bad (mostly bad). I mean, everything. I vaguely remember the "Last of the Mohicans" and some movie with Sara Jessica Parker and Nicholas Cage and lots of Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas. Then Frank was gone. He found true love and that was the end of our friendship for all useful purposes, and I was numb with grief. My new drinking buddy Lisa and one of her one-night stands wanted to go to the Byrd and talked me into it, but being inside it without Frank was such a shock to my system, I could not focus on the movie. There was just this roaring of grief in my head the whole time. Years later, I finally "saw" "Three Weddings and a Funeral" on TV and didn't remember any of it. I don't remember ever going to see a film there again, even though my future husband and I lived two blocks from the theater for three years.

My Life with Paul Newman

As a little girl growing up in the 1950s, Paul Newman, or the movie roles he played anyway, infused my understanding of what a man was. He was the romantic ideal, despite the fact he was usually quite a rogue. This turned out not to be a good thing.

I grew up outside of Manhattan, which even in the 1950s, had more broadcast channels than most places, and those channels, for lack of programming, showed movies, so I saw "Somebody Up There Likes Me," (1956) and "The Long Hot Summer," (1958) repeatedly before I was old enough to actually go to cinemas and see his classics like "Cool Hand Luke," (1967) (not a favorite because it is so grim and masculine), "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," (1969) (again, a great film but not a favorite because once you make that trip to the grim ending, you're reluctant to make it again). My last odd favorite was "Sometimes a Great Notion." (1971)

My favorite Newman persona was the bad boy who is ultimately redeemed by the long-suffering love of a good and pure woman, although all through my life, as I try to duplicate that scenario, it doesn't turn out the way it did in the movies. My first husband, who I met when I was 15, was the personification of rogue and actually resembled Paul Newman back then, and that relationship impacted and damaged my future permanently. And I followed it up with yet another bad choice, based on the Frank Sinatra movie model of rogue lover who is redeemed by the love of a good and pure woman.

Not.

Newman did one Hollywood stunt, abandoning the wife and family of his youth to fall in love with an actress, and he paid the karmic debt for it when his only son died of drug and alcohol abuse. And then he redeemed himself by staying in that second marriage, despite it being a union of two actors, until he died. My hyper-religious sister used to insist that the secret of their success was they were both gay and the marriage was only a sham cover. Possible, but probably not. They had daughters, but stranger things have happened, and they stayed way under the radar. Even Newman's long, long battle with cancer was kept quiet. It was a very dignified way to have a sucessful Hollywood career.

Still, those early movies put a warp on my tender sensibilities, but I won't hold it against him. And some ancient quote of his about the success of his marriage is worth recalling, something about why grab hamburger when you have steak at home.

I Tivoed Newman this morning to celebrate his passing with a wallow through past performances and found only one film scheduled anywhere this week, 1998's "Twilight." I've never seen it, so I'll try it.

My George Carlin Story

George Carlin will be in this story. Wait for it.

In the early 1990s, I began my decade in limbo, divorced, between careers, and marginally employed. I did some freelance writing and worked part-time at the gift shop in what was then the Radisson on Canal Street.

The man renting the space was from India. Maybe he didn’t know American employment law…or maybe he did…but he paid us once a month in cash. He did not deduct any taxes. I never received a W-2 or even a W-9. I made $5 an hour and worked a variety of shifts. Some days I opened the shop in the morning, some days I closed it at night. There was no one else there, so you had to lock the shop to run to the bathroom and eat your lunch behind the counter.

Because the shop owner was behind in paying the bill, the newspaper distributor cut us off. Most of the six months I worked there, we didn’t have any newspapers or magazines. Imagine a hotel gift shop with no newspapers or magazines. We had some toiletries, some overpriced jewelry, food snacks, cigarettes, an assortment of Virginia is for Lovers souvenirs and shirts, and a vast assortment of cheap, cheesy, made in Taiwan toys and doodads that had nothing to do with Virginia and were not things you would ever need. Needless to say, we didn’t sell many of them.

The Radisson was where entertainers playing the Carpenter Center stayed. (See, we’re getting to the point of this story now.) They would wait in the lobby for the limo to take them to the theater or back to the airport. Sometimes I would see someone recognizable, like Carrot Top, sitting on top of his trunks and suitcases.

I learned from my father during my first celebrity encounter (actor Richard Jaeckel, Imperial Hotel lobby, Tokyo) that you did not bother famous people. If they caught you looking at them, you just gave them a discreet wave and turned away.

So there I was in the gift shop when George Carlin walked in. I could see out the window the limo that would drive him the three blocks to the Landmark was already pulling up. Carlin was wearing street clothes. His unclean hair was pulled back in a severe pony tail and he reeked…and I mean knock-you-over reeked…of cigarettes, as if he had spent the last eight hours rolling in an ashtray. He bought two bottles of grapefruit juice and paid cash. (We didn’t take credit cards. A hotel gift shop that didn’t take credit cards!) He kept his eyes down during the entire transaction and never looked at me. I never acknowledged he was George Carlin, even though I was old enough to remember when he was the Hippy Dippy Weatherman on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

So I am surprised he made it to 71 when he must have been a major smoker.

After his first wife died, his HBO specials were singularly unfunny to me, as if he had lost part of himself. He didn’t seem that focused in his sarcasm anymore. He was more bitter than funny. Before the first wife died, one of his HBO specials did make me laugh a great deal (and it’s still funny to me). It was the one with the bit about “stuff,” how we accumulate so much stuff in life, and we have to have bigger places to keep our stuff. When we travel, we take just a portable portion of our stuff. Why isn’t this portion all the stuff we ever need? He tells a story about going to Hawaii for a long vacation, and determining how much of his stuff he needed to take. Then while on the big island, he was invited to spend several days on a smaller island and had to subdivide his stuff again into an even more essential bundle of stuff.

The way he told it was hilarious. Then he followed it up with another hilarious story about his cat, which liked to present himself butt first, right in his face, like “check out my ass!” I have eight cats and to this day, as they regularly present themselves to me butt first to check out their ass, I hear George Carlin’s voice in my head. So that is his everlasting gift to me.

The Ecstacy of Poison Ivy

I'm completing week two of my poison ivy attack. I know better. People often told me I had poison ivy growing on the fence, so I steered clear of it. Then my mother-in-law decided she wanted to pull it off the fence and she didn't think it was really poison ivy. We suggested she not bother, but she did anyway. After awhile, I felt bad watching her so boldly pull possible poison ivy off my fence, so I helped her bag it up.

A couple of days later, we both had poison ivy. Mine took a nasty turn, jumping from one forearm to the other, spreading up the hands and armpits, across my neck and a cheek, and over my torso. The sores are fierce. The first doctor took a moderate approach. A six-pack of Prednisone and over the counter Benadryl for sleep. Daily coatings of Benadryl gel and Ivarest. Nothing made the slightest difference. The rash marched relentlessly across my body, giving me a leprous appearance. I went to another doctor and demanded serious medicine. I got a shot and an ointment and some antihistamine samples. It may have stopped spreading now, but I look like a very diseased person.

When the blisters started popping, I acquired an unexpected delight. Now in the shower, the feel of hot water on my scarred skin produces the most pleasurable sensation. It is like a skin orgasm that maintains its vibrant height of ecstatic feeling as long as the water hits it. It is almost unbearably pleasurable. The pleasure is centered at the worst blisters, so I lift my forearms into the pulsating water and become deeply entranced in ecstacy.