[lit-ideas] Re: Vanity Fair
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 06 Sep 2004 12:21:44 -0700
An extraordinary coincidence! I have just returned from Vanity Fair (San
Francisco). I found it hot, but the cool halls were my undoing.
Landed yester eve at Portland airport. Walked out, be-bagged and saggy.
Stood waiting for our ride to arrive. Heard bagpipes. Thought, of course,
that this was an after effect of so many bands, so many dances, so much hot
Scottishness but no. Somewhere in the parking structure, unrevealed,
refusing to come forward to acknowledge our applause, there lurked a pretty
good piper.
No--to answer a logical question--he didn't come off our plane; a case
containing pipes is pretty easy to spot.
San Francisco would have surprised Mark Twain--you know his line about the
coldest season he ever spent was a summer in SF. It was hot, even in the
city. We landed in Oakland, picked up a Fox Ford Focus--Fox is a car rental
company unique to California--met Laura's cousin who is Dean of Public
Health at Berkeley. Yes, I am almost related to a dean! She took us on a
tour, mostly for Emily's benefit, and did her utmost to put Emily off.
Certainly I would have been put off. We saw freshman lectures with people
sitting in the aisles listening to graduate students mutter incoherently
into microphones. The one professor we did see was from linguistics, a
planet I'm not fond of.
On to uninspired Chinese food that was enlivened by the fact that we had
been playing on the car's CD player Eric Idle singing, "I like Chinese."
http://www.geocities.com/johangambolputy/Song_ILikeChinese.html
You can imagine what it was like to walk, next day, through Chinatown with
one or other of the girls constantly humming the tune.
On, to the "Sheraton," which turned out to be a condo complex or an old set
of apartments that someone in Sheraton's acquisitions dept. thought, with a
little paint here and a nice mattress there, might be passed off as a luxury
hotel. Since we were there because Laura bid $70 on Priceline.com, we were
not overly bothered by the signs of crumminess, but if I'd paid even close
to rack rate, I would have been mightily annoyed. Overnight parking was $32
plus tax.
In Chinatown we got Julia a pretty fabulous dragon dress: red velvet with a
dragon in sequins running from shoulder to toe. The shopkeeper was a
caricature, speaking just like the white woman who plays a Chinese slave
trader in "Thoroughly Modern Milly." Very, "mysteries of the Olient":
"Special plice. You rucky day. Fifty dollar." She had no trouble with the
"l"s in dollar. I took Emily across the road and came back to find Laura
bargaining--something I've never seen her do--waving an empty wallet at the
lady and explaining that she had "no more dollar." I stepped back out of
the store; I was the one carrying the cash...which I subsequently spent on
one of those string screens that people used to hang in doorways. In my
humble view it's art: ceramic squares and circles with irridescent glaze.
Ten dollar. Special price.
Our trip to Alcatraz? An eerie, stinking place, with flies and gulls. The
gulls--apparently ordinary seagulls like the ones you see on any shore--are
in fact a protected species. People tread carefully around them, stepping
up the route thugs once walked. How odd is it that people flock to see a
place where once were incarcerated nightmarish humans? Like gulls.
Pleasanton has the oldest Highland Games on the West Coast--this year is
their 139th iteration. Also the biggest. Our introduction to what this
really means was on entering our room in the Hilton--the designated host
hotel-- and finding that, although we had reserved accommodation for four,
the hotel had given us three beds and was not interested in providing help
to solve the problem.
"Can you get us a roll away bed?"
"They're all gone."
"Can you move us to another room?"
"I'm not authorized."
"Who is authorized?"
"The manager."
"Can I speak with the manager?"
"He's at lunch."
"But it's eight o'clock at night. When will he be back?"
"I don't know."
"Can I speak with someone else who is authorized?"
"There is no one else."
"Are you telling me that if there was an emergency in the hotel you would
have no one to call?"
"I'll try to contact someone."
Eventually we persuaded them to remove a desk and a table from our room,
take a pull-out couch from another room and install it in ours. By then it
was ten pm.
Up at six am for dancing at eight thirty. Emily danced quite well and at
the end of the morning was awarded fourth place in her age group. Julia
didn't enter this competition. I enjoyed the combined band of the Marine
Corps and the Kings Own Scottish Borderers, and the air-conditioned halls
where stuff was being sold. (Did I mention an outside temp of ninety five
degrees?) In one of those cool halls, I lapsed...I bought a sword...and a
dirk...and a lochaber axe.
Why, after all these years of being on the wagon viz a viz edged weapons,
this sudden and significant lapse? I ran across a maker of replicas who was
a) skilled b) knew his stuff and c) not expensive, an extraordinary
combination. (His problem, of course, is that he has to compete with
cheaper sword-like things that are made in India and China.) The clincher
was that he is coming up to do a Renaissance Faire in Corvallis next weekend
and so he will deliver the weapons to my doorstep.
Did I mention that the sword is bigger than I am?
Also bigger than I am was the woman I met in the swimming pool. I
recognized her from the games program. Thanks to the web, you can see her
too:
http://www.shannonhartnett.com/posters_and_autographed_photos.htm
Her boyfriend was so top heavy, he could barely walk. Neither of them
seemed able to swim. The three of us later shared an elevator ride and
chatted away about how weak and fallible knees are. She was very pleasant.
Sunday was just hot, the sort of hot that makes you want to sit very still
and concentrate on breathing. Emily--and of course all the other kids in
her age group-- had to dance in the afternoon, wearing nylons and, for the
hornpipe, a polyester sailor's suit. She took a fourth and a fifth place
but at the end of the hornpipe's fourteen or so leaps, landed slightly
off-time and so was disqualified. It's a severe sport, on occasions
extreme, a metaphor for life in Vanity Fair?
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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