Mardith: it's not a baby triangle! it's purple but it might as well be pink!
Mardith has a triangle on her forehead where her third eye should be. it's a regular triangle. she is finished for the day taking her classes a block from the apartments at the Obec Youth Centre. Karate By Sunset is the name of her class. the crones take it and take it in, too:
Gladyce: my favorite part is when we all line up on one foot on the wooden poles by the shore and watch the waves crash as we hold our position and stare at the sun cooling itself dipping into the sea. all the pinks and warm oranges in the sky. like some force of magic dust from across the world came to our shores.
Doryce: my favorite part is when our instructor checks each of us to make sure we're straight on the pole. and then i go to the part of the studio that's only accessible with a door key...i look out but the sun is a moon and all the water is black...
Mardith: that's not funny. there are countless accounts of yoga gurus sexually abusing their students under the guise of "getting downward dog right".
cat familiars: too right. touch-starved is not a signal for unwanted touching.
Mardith: don't call me precocious. cos i'm a tween. for that matter don't call me a tween. i'm a queen. i'm on the scene. but i ain't no queen. i'm a queen from birth. i'm on the scene but i ain't no scenester.
Doryce: Mardith. that's the PERFECT name for a witch!
Mardith is Madame Pons's new student. as usual Pons is late...
Pons: sorry! how was it?
Mardith: am i under your wing? cos all i smelled all day was a guy's fugly armpit. don't tell me you're dating that loser again.
Pons: Dirg is dating me. one-sidedly. if he's gonna stick around at least i can glean as much research out of him as possible to understand these strange creatures called men.
Doryce: Dirg? that's more like diagnosing a sick brown cow.
Pons: we went to Kinokuniya. i said okay and relented cos it was a bookstore. turns out it's the bookshop from the anime Love Hina and the whole time he argued with the bookkeeper about how to get laid equally in a harem, how much time for each girl.
Mardith: i'm not getting it. i did what you showed me, i did it at 6AM sharp each day, sunrise. but he says it's all wrong.
Pons: i wish i could teach you at the house but...i'm busy...oh shit there you go again, Pons, coming up with the carefully-crafted convenient covid excuses. i must do better. for you. not for me. i will find time. i will find the time i promise. let's go home.
Doryce: how was it for you?
Gladyce: oh dear it was fine. that dacha was lovely. we had a long time to just sit in there together without a bed and think. but we kept getting those dirty looks from passersby peering into our window.
Doryce: yeah. i mean just cos something's Soviet-era doesn't mean it's not nice.
Gladyce: each presenting the communal Russian grit. they told me in passing that they were Chernobyl survivors, they laughed and scoffed in a Russian accent at covid.
Julia Ioffe: i'm the only American who can sigh internally in Russian.
Doryce: how was The Store?
Gladyce: made the long trek cos this thing ain't franchised.
Doryce: you have to admit, you also have the check every can in The Store to see what the recipe on the label is that uses the items in the can. if it's garbanzo beans you gotta see that hummus recipe, how many dots of green sprig are used on top.
Gladyce: i don't get it. they have Cheetos Popcorn but ONLY in the hot flavor! not everything is good hot! except our love. i need my tongue for other things! like.........to cast spells properly. i was running out of money so i had to put the bag down.
Doryce: you ain't missin' nothin', dear. that Cheetos Popcorn is just Cheetos cut into little balls...that you can suck off the dust...oh that sounds delightful!...
Doryce: hey you want the last of my banana? want in on my slow boat? bananas aren't actually fruit, they're herbs. i'm smoking one right now to prove the point...
Gladyce: bananas are good for the gut. solve the gut solve all health. you're able to protect your spells without spilling droplets. most importantly you lose weight...for flying brooms...
Doryce: for liver health...be a liver lover...eat more livers...
at the Red Circle Table in the lobby:
Tyzik: Robot Chicken is all we got left of the Mad Magazine aesthetic!
Eye Luggage: hey don't blame me if Macy's goes under! i was their most loyal customer!
Pons: thanks, dear, i always saw you at the mall LUSH...
Mardith: i love you, Jada, but...
Dirg: right? ya SEE!? you can't blame me this time! Jada what were you thinking!!! everything, this whole Red Circle, is a sham! a hoax!
Djokovic: a witch hunt! who knew i was a Republican?...
Djokovic: SPORTS IS BACK TODAY???! oh, it's just soccer...…...a supreme talisman!...
Dirg: what happened to no secrets? i mean how do you conveniently FORGET you had an affair? come on! you and Will ARE swingers after all! you kick a man when he's down? right after Will got n-worded by the Philly cops? life's not a theme song you know.
Jada: why is your apartment room plastered in Toshio Saeki?
Dirg: you were in my room? damn i missed it. just got back from Gravy Seals. Toshio is a sick artist!
Jada: yeah, both meanings.
at The Treehouse, Madame Pons's workstation home computer is COMPLETELY covered in littered empty paper oyster-pails and sticky brown cases of cardboard food and strewn straws and half-open sauce-packets and thumb-stained styrofoam cups. Taki like a ghost DMs Pons on her open screen:
Pons: don't worry, sis, they were all vegetables. fried vegetables but vegetables.
Taki: what's this all about? you were never a messy eater before. you were never a messy person before. do you know what i do EACH night when you fall asleep!? i pick up each and every BIT of trash, recycle where proper, and wash my ghost hands four times before it's through!!! the job takes five hours, i'm dead tired after! but i can't complain, i can NEVER complain, cos you're the one paying the deed on this house. you can do whatever you want. is it a man?
Pons: Dirg? *laughs* nah. it's a girl. Mardith needs my help and i'm not sure i can provide it for her. i'm ill-equipped to help her. research only goes so far. Mardith needs more. turns out it's not all in the wrist.
Taki: you'll help her, dear. it just takes time. is that her i hear coming in?
Pons: yeah.
Mardith races upstairs the wood stairs to her room, trailing off as she rants to herself...
Mardith: why? why! why did J.K. Rowling do it? why would she risk her millions? she didn't have to do it yet she did! she didn't have to open her mouth at all!...
Eye: what were we talking about again?
Tyzik: would you go to Australia with Brie Larson?
Eye: only if she screeches up to my curb, looks in my eyes, and says drop the taco, get in the car...
Pat: looking forward to that Grilled Cheese Burrito from Taco Bell...
Laertus: what have you, tu, been up to to occupy your time, my man?
Pat: oh i was in a a mob that took down and defaced the Woodrow Wilson statue from Princeton. interestingly, buried underneath the statue were President Bump's forged SATs to Penn...
Dirg: funny you should use the word occupy...
Eye: how is my soul family this week? soul family. i love that, soul family is a more beautiful way of saying friends...
Dirg: soul fam...
Dirg: go easy on President Bump, he has a learning disability. Mary Kay, can't say i didn't see this coming...she made teacher-crushes forever different...that dude didn't know his place, that dude didn't realize how lucky he had it and should go back to the country...
Eye: Mary Kay, i've always said cosmetics can make anything pretty. she somehow against all odds made it work. while keeping her Republican values. she died of a broken heart of course, the divorce did her in. men have no patience, they're always searching for their next turn now.
Pons: Mary Kay makes a mean charcoal mask. i love the soft velvet bag it comes in with the delicate eyelashes.
Tyzik: commercials?
Eye: that one with Amy Poehler and the wireless internet/tv and internet-tv service with 5G. and a building with just corner offices, which not even I.M. Pei could have achieved. they're birdwatchers---female birdwatchers thank you very much---and they peer into the window of a guy's family, snug suburban house, a warm place. guy turns around and i swear that guy is an adult Trent Reznor...
Laertus: i'm telling you, Trent Reznor is Father Knows Best now, house in the middle of the cornfields...
Dirg: have you ever IM'd I.M.? he never responds. rude. I'M shocked, stunned, and brave. Lily from AT&T is back!!! and her tits have googly-eyes!!! Jill Clayburgh's tits are cute pancakes...
Eye: An Unmarried Woman and go. thank you Kate & Allie!!!...
Dirg: dangerous message for young girls...…...no i just mean sleeping around, you know, communicable diseases...sexual freedom leads to sexual slavery which leads to ritual slavery.
Eye: and here i am just wanting to escape the church rites and be a sex slave in the mold of Prince.
Mardith: i related to Patti in this but don't read too much into that.
Dirg: Jill Clayburgh was an unruly child. she had TOO much energy. too much of that showbiz energy. it unleashed on her poor parents in the most unfortunate ways.
Laertus: this is a brilliant time capsule. you have to remember this is 1978, and i have a soft spot for that year cos it's my dad's birth year. these were the last two years of unfettered sexual freedom, when it was okay to sleep around and have any sexual adventure you wanted with any stranger you wanted and not contract anything. no contracts in those days. free love was about to come to a devastating end...
Dirg: the halt and the halitosis. don't blame me and my Jack Tripper ways, blame them.
Eye: this was quite the international scandal! casting a GASP older woman!!! in the lead role. that was unheard of in Hollywood. and having her prance around in her panties, well, that was beyond the beyond. they were actually gonna show 30-year-old tits!? an old woman who was still sexual?
Dirg: that's when they ARE sexual, trust me...
Laertus: yeah but looking back, i mean Jill was in her thirties. 30 is old in Hollywood. if it were a 40-year-old woman, that would have been something...
Laertus: and we open with the most magical place ever to be: 1970s New York City. The City. and the music is...Carpenters! "Close To You"! sounds like it anyway...
Dirg: okay Jill, i see you, cute flat butt in jogging pants...
Eye: when Jill says the line dog shit, you know you're in for something here. it's just so unnatural coming off those classically-trained studious regal lips.
Dirg: those are trained lips alright. her mouth is weird, it looks funny...like a flappy mango...her smile is not quite right...
Laertus: strangely, dog shit will play a MAJOR role in this film...
Laertus: okay, best line in this entire film:
did the earth move?
that's brilliant from the girl. perfect. precocious girl. sorry, Mardith.
Eye: the earth moving, that is so '70s. i wish i were in Greenpeace. so is the concept of "making a pass".
Laertus: okay miss thang, we see you! we hear you! Jill Clayburgh with the pitch-perfect secret British accent no one knew she had! she had to have been a dancer before, right? those ballet moves are impeccable, this is where Black Swan came from.
Dirg: and Claymore. and Casshern Sins.
Laertus: see. you can be an old woman and still flexible!
Dirg: giving all NYC windowwashers an eyeful. in my headcanon Jill's panties are Gummi Bears...
Eye: the best part, of course, is before the dance. when Jill snaps those panties back into place over that magnificent 30-year-old butt of hers.
Laertus: we have to give props where props are due, this is the original Sex and the City! right? four girl friends out on the town...
Eye: i love these four gals! wish i was strong as these four gals! but i love Pat Quinn the best! with that deadpan worldweary style of line delivery. she's seen it all many years ago...
Dirg: Cynthia Nixon will never admit it, but even she secretly thanks God that Cuomo is in charge.
Eye: fuck. the line fuck! there it is, babe!
Laertus: hahahahahahahah
Dirg: eye massage, i need me one of those. i look at internet porn all day and all the eyedrops at Walgreens On A Hill are now hand sanitizer! do they do those at LUSH?
Mardith: i like how Patti talks of her boyfriend reviewing the film as "flawed". sounds like a couple of guys and a valley doll i know...
Dirg: okay what shit is this! be a man, man! this scene is so damn WEIRD. the guy starts crying in the middle of the street, but it's so silly it's like this is meant to be played for laughs, not be taken seriously. and how long did Jill keep brown paste in her mouth as she walks aimlessly from corner to corner of the city before expelling it as vomit thirty minutes later?...
Eye: Bloomingdales. the place to have affairs. when people still had affairs. not Macy's. there's so much meaning in a sweater, just ask Kurt Cobain. they never show "the other woman". in my headcanon, she's a yoga instructor, Cuomo's wife.
Dirg: paper shrimp. you know, paper shrimps. shrimps and white wine. beyond the beyond. beyond the pale. beyond the paper oyster pail. don't touch her, she's touch-starved!!! car accident waiting to happen! i don't get it, the doctor makes a pass at Jill, why didn't she immediately scoop up that doctor money!!! a doctor's a doctor, spiritual doctor or doctor doctor...
Dirg: okay i know nobody's gonna stand up for my man the greasy slimeball Charlie so ONCE AGAIN it's up to me to defend white men. look, Charlie wasn't that bad. he even admits after the fucking that he loves Jill despite his protests that he's an unattached swinger, a good-time charlie. that's a subconscious surrender! Charlie asks Jill to stay for breakfast, he wants something more with her...
Eye: okay that beautiful therapist! with the Byzantine blue eyes! those Russians cast a spell on you!
Pat: i know.
Laertus: you know i know Penelope Russianoff. subconsciously. yeah i've seen her before. on the tv, she was a guest on Oprah and Sally Jessy Raphael and Donahue in the '80s, my dad has the old tapes. doing her New Age psychology thing, her remnants of the hippies.
crones: she would make a fabulous witch! she's got the look!
Dirg: she looks like a slash Herman Munster. and that scene is weird. Jill's therapy session...it goes on forever...that scene is a LONG twenty minutes...of mostly improvised silence...i've asked my psychiatrist the same question:
will you live my life for me?
Eye: so Dr. Drew.
Dirg: but they missed the most important question with her! she's a hoax, a sham! how could Tanya Therapy tell Jill to try new men when she herself had given up on men! she was with a woman at the party! i want to know more about the sex in THAT relationship, i wanna watch THAT movie, her girlfriend was a shortie, she was short, how does the giantess/smurf dynamic work?...is there Gargamel cosplay involved?...
Laertus: ha! just slough off Barbra and Jane Fonda, newbies!!! i felt bad when they mentioned Claire Trevor, her son died in a plane crash shortly after this film...
Laertus: Alan Bates holds his own against slimy Charlie. Jill says that Charlie actually is a talented artist so i don't see where the jealousy comes from.
Eye: some men can pull off the scruffy beard, some can't...
Laertus: Charlie is just Roy Scheider with shoe-polish...
Dirg: Alan Bates. a few questions. are you a serial killer? or related to one? why are you obsessed with pickled herring? he should have said in that scene,
Alan: i am tickled pink. i mean i'm a pickled twink. the reason you didn't get any satisfaction from anonymous sex with me is i'm not the man you think i am...i like men, i'm not just an artist...
Eye: you've got to let go of your bias, dude. just cos you hear an erudite British accent doesn't mean he's gay.
Dirg: and what's with his painting style? that's not art. that is literally dude pouring different-colored paint on a white canvas and watching them swirl. that's it. that's a Benjamin store.
Laertus: to think none of this would have happened if that diver had been short. the hot-sauce-in-the-eggs scene. symbolic. like the red swirls of paint on the white canvas of the eggs...
Dirg: those strong hip '70s black women with the berets over their fros who talk jive scare me. the ones who started the whole Playgirl Magazine Movement with the beads and the tight beige leather jeans. WHAT THE FUCK. abortions in NY are just passed around willy-nilly like tic-tacs? it's not the willy's fault. 200 bucks? 200 fucking bucks for an abortion!!!? everyone chips in like it's a birthday party...
Eye: nyuk nyuk. and then the doctor sticks his tongue down the poor girl's throat after...…...i'm thinking that doctor was the same doctor as Jill's doctor...
Dirg: in the end they just had vanilla ice cream. symbolic. see? Jill's friend, liberation is not good, liberation just leads to lithium. what kid WANTS to go to summer school?
Eye: that giant painting she walks with at the end was hilarious! what was that supposed to be? what did it look like?
Dirg: it's supposed to be pickled herring i think. but it just looks like a giant apricot slice. like James and the Peach but a rip-off.
Laertus: WHOA! look at the credits! all that matters now is what part did Andy Warhol play in all this! yeah see, those art-gallery parties were supposed to be imitating Warhol parties!
Eye: reminds me of the art-gallery party from 9 1/2 Weeks.
Laertus: you know what this film is? it's an American version of a French existentialist film...
Dirg: yeah, no. nah. existentialist, that's one way to put it. yeah this one didn't do it for me, i don't take seriously films directed by atheists. g'night, folks.
by the doorsill of Mardith's new room...
Mardith: the Treehouse was getting cramped. so she did help me in a way. what am i gonna do? this world sucks. how am i to find a mate in it? i mean it didn't even work out for Hannah Spearritt and Andrew-Lee Potts! that was the PERFECT opportunity for fate! they date each other when they're both very young and then years later find themselves together on the Primeval set!!! you don't mess with karma that good! but the OTP marriage didn't last...
Germane: don't be so rigid. be unattached to time. you know each morning by the time i shave and brush my teeth and eat breakfast and feed the familiars and get dressed and read the paper paper and exercise and take a nap, it's already fucking 4PM!!! i can't do anything now! it's 4PM! when am i gonna have time to write!!!
Mardith: i wish i had time to write down each of my thoughts. you can only ever hope to be a shamanic spiritualist online if you're a babe. i mean you're a drop-dead-gorgeous babe, you live in Miami, surrounded on all sides by blue water, no wonder you're a spiritual empath!!!
Dirg: the future of energy is coal.
Pons: the future of energy is empath energy. hi. do you have something to tell me? i can take it. no not you, Dirg.
Mardith: i mean...it's like...you're dating a youtube star, she's got a trillion followers, she plays the electric violin in a dubstep band...but you hate her music...what do you do?...
Madame Pons: i wish i could lift my little finger and...
Madame Mardith lifts her own little finger.
Mardith: it's done. the sign is changed. i did it in thin air with chalk way on the other side of town at LUSH. i opened the locked doorknob with my wrist.
Pons: i see it! that's brilliant! you're a wonderful witch! a beautiful young thang! i mean you go miss thang!
the two hug.
Mardith: now selling at LUSH......masks made of soap...something parents have wanted to do to their kids for generations...now it's the kids' turn!...
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