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Location: Home.
Listening: "Ashes In The Brittle Air" ~ black tape for a blue girl.

Almost twilight.

I haven't written for a few days and, consequently, feel a compulsion to go back and try to chronicle everything that has happened during that lapsed time. I will likely return to one or two of these events later to flesh them out, so be patient--I'm taking everything a little slower now.

Monday night, Peter and I attended a gathering that Jenn invited us to at the home of Lisette, a friend of her friend, Mary Anne. This is the self-same Mary Anne mentioned earlier--the author/poet who edited Aqua Erotica and whose online journal I've been reading since 1995. When I asked Jenn if she would ask Mary Anne to autograph my copy of the anthology, she went one step beyond and asked us to dinner with Mary Anne herself. Needless to say, I was thrilled--and incredibly nervous. As previously mentioned, I regard Mary Anne as something of a celebrity and the chance to meet her was something I hadn't expected to receive. This threw me into a brief collision of anticipation and dread, the latter brought about by the intense shyness that I've done a fairly good job of supressing for several years, but that occasionally re-visits with a vengeance. I had no idea how to handle myself and so, Monday evening, felt very much like hiding under the bed rather than shopping at Bristol Farm for wine and dessert for the potluck meal.

When we finally arrived at Lisette's, armed with a Coppola Merlot (which, I'll admit, I had bought after quickly re-scanning Mary Anne's page for clues to her wine taste), a Chardonnay (from my favorite California winery Zaca Mesa), a Wild Horse Cabernet (for those like me who don't drink Merlot or white) and a raspberry-chocolate torte, I had determined not to be overwhelmed. I had the normal pre-gathering jitters (fussing with my hair, smoothing down the silk dress that Peter gave me, adjusting my glasses, etc.), but took comfort in the fact that Jenn would be there--and I could always hide behind her if necessary. Turns out, by the end of the evening, I hadn't considered hiding once.

The gathering was, in short, wonderful. Not only did I get to meet Mary Anne, who was slipping in and out of various conversations in a wine-colored dress with a braid in her long hair, but I also met Lisette, an elegantly tough blonde who had somehow managed to acquire my entire CD collection. Lisette exclaimed over the wine, which put me immediately at ease, and, from there, the night moved on into conversations about D&D (the group had been up until 4AM the night before gaming), musicals (Lisette agreed that the three best have to be Jesus Christ Superstar, Chess and Les Miserables), cooking (Peter managed to get a recipe from Mary Anne after falling in love with her bruschetta and fruit salad--I was nose-first in her vegetable lasagna in the meantime), writing and journals. Four journallers were present in the apartment--Mary Anne, Jenn, Peter and myself--and so the interaction between us took on the quality of distant cousins who have heard years of reports on each others' lives, but have never actually met. Lisette commented on the pictures in Peter's journal and was hence also draw into the circle of people who, I suddenly realized, knew much more about me at the initial meeting than any "strangers" ever had (and than many others who have known me for years do now). My resulting reaction to this was a mixture of self-consciousness and pleasure--it's very difficult, after all, to be displeased when two beautiful women are complimenting your writing and "modelling"--which enabled me to settle into getting to know them better in return. The wine didn't hurt, either.

And so it went. I drank and smoked and laughed and talked quietly in corners and on the balcony with Dave (a charming screenwriter who cooks for homeless kids at the Gay and Lesbian Center), Brett (a producer who attended NYU and tipped us off that Elizabeth Hurley is dating Mick Jagger), Wendy (a makeup technician who lives across the hall from Lisette and who just started a 17-day film shoot), Victor (a friendly young actor who broke out into song while discussing Moulin Rouge and who generally exuded a readiness for anything), Ztorm (fellow gamer with whom I swapped stories about ill-fated adventuring parties and inept rouge-thief-wizard types), Jay (another gamer who enjoyed accosting me with a non-sequitur comment or abrupt question each time I drifted from kitchen to living room and back again) and Jenn. Lisette was at once ubiquitous and elusive--I would look for her and she was nowhere to be found, yet when I would look up again, there she was. We traded handfuls of sentences and seemed to agree on an uncanny number of things from wine to music to animal behavior (she has two cats and an amusing bird named Scout, who enjoyed perching on Peter's fingers and head). If I had to choose one word to describe her, it would be "powerful". She is obviously physically in excellent shape, has the gift of knowing how to immediately command the attention from a room, and has had the fortitude to withstand the chaos of living as an actress in Los Angeles. While I have no doubt that she has her softer spots and her darker moods (I've never met an artist yet who wasn't, at base, more vulnerable than the average bear--hence, the elaborate defenses we build through our art), she radiates a fierce charisma that seems to defy any threat to her or the world she's created for herself.

Mary Anne posesses a different brand of power, a quieter, but not any less remarkable ability to put others at ease and draw them into sharing their stories with her. She's subtle and sensual and sweet and approachable, even to a shy fangirl. I felt almost guilty having read her journal for so long before knowing her--as if I had been spying on her or knew more than was polite, somehow. I found myself alternately wanting to pick her brain and not wanting to disturb the peaceful atmosphere she had gathered around her. From reading her journal, I know that she's been working through some very difficult processes over the past month or so, but at the party she seemed tranquil and centred and the time I spent talking with her was comfortable and fun. Few women can move me to talk to them on more than a very superficial level and it was very satisfying to know that she's one of them (Jenn, of course, is another, but Peter had prepped me for how easygoing and generally cool she would be before we first spoke--with Mary Anne, all I had to go on was text). In the end, I put my shyness aside and asked her to sign my anthology. She inscribed it to Peter and I and mentioned that she would like him to photograph her if ever possible.

It was one of the best evenings I've spent in a long time.