Thoughts by Kat

Apparently, Adrienne was serious about our text exchange of a couple of weeks back.

Because she had an extra ticket for a Shadowlands production of the musical Waitress, & she invited me-ee-eee. For free!

She wants me to feel befriended.

###

Shadowlands is a 1920s vaudville theater, built when Ellenville was at the height of its Borscht Belt glory.

It was scheduled to be demolished in 1985 until a group of theater people pooled their funds & bought the building. A lot of NYC theater luminaries have summer homes in these parts.

Dunno what I was expecting exactly. Shadowlands is the kind of theater that attracts actors who got their Actors Equity union card 'cause their grandfathers are the dentists who work on Hugh Jackman's veneers. Talent is a consideration. But not a big one.

I enjoyed the production, though.

Indifferent score but witty lyrics & libretto. Performers could sing, but they couldn't phrase.

On the plus side, it's a small theater, so you got to get up close & personal with the performers, which is always a lot of fun.

###

We got to Ellenville early, so we explored this dynamite thrift store—which meant I got to stalk around & take ArtPhotos™!!!!!!!









Adrienne & I will never be besties, but I like her well enough when she's not running hard for political office. She's such a Queens girl! Shrewd & tough. And I know the reason she's running hard for political office is because she lost her husband a year & a half ago & is keeping herself distracted by filling up every single minute of every single day.

Adrienne's husband died a particularly awful death. Liver cancer. And he died at home where she was taking care of him.

###

We'd avoided it throughout most of the evening, but on the drive home, we began talking politics.

"Not that I give a shit about John Bolton, you understand," I said. "Creepy guy, creepy policies. But, you know. Setting the FBI on political enemies. Bad portent."

"Not good," Adrienne said.

"The National Guard in D.C. is just performative right now. But it's gonna get real when Trump's minions lose the 2026 midterm elections, & he ends up declaring martial law. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna plan for that? 'Cause you know. It's a civil war."

"I agree 100 percent," Adrienne said. "If I had an incurable disease, the answer would be clear: Get as close as you can; take as many of them out as you can get. But I don't have an incurable disease."

It actually shocked me to hear Adrienne talking like this.

Though not in a bad way necessarily.

Yesterday's high point was a two-hour gab fest via phone with my beloved Barbara Angell.

We mostly chattered about the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce-like legal case Barbara has been embroiled with for the past (I kid you not) 50 years.

Barbara's family history is a bit d'Urbervilles-ish: She and her four sisters and two first cousins are the scions of a one-time rich & powerful San Francisco tugboat dynasty.

Their last remaining land holding is the Petrified Forest in Calistoga.

Two of the sisters and the two first cousins just want to sell it to some real estate developer & bank the Big Buck$.

Barbara wants to sell it to a nonprofit who will preserve its environmental value.

One of the sisters is dead. (Barbara inherited her share of the forest.)

One of the sisters couldn't care less about the forest, but wants to go after one of the lawyers who forged her signature on one of the innumerable pieces of paper this familial dispute has generated. (Although, almost certainly, the statute of limitations on that one has passed.)

The other lawyers are raking in approximately $2.4 million a year.

###

Here are Barbara & me when we were young & gorgeous:



Other than that, I Remunerated, grocery-shopped, worked out at the gym, dashed off another 500 words on the Brian novel—

As an example of Mimi's vituperative tendencies, I want to cite one of the text exchanges she had with guys who were—rather innocently, in my opinion—trying to flirt with her. She posts them all on Facebook! So, naturally, the temptation is to plagiarize! But That would be Wrong.

—and watched endless episodes of White Collar.

How did I miss this show when it first came out a million years ago?

It is utterly delightful!

And stars Matt Bomer, who must be the most handsome male human ever to be spawned and who, moreover, can do this thing with his eyes, make them get all enormous or squinty, without moving his eyebrows at all!

So, all in all, a pur-ty good day.

Drove up to Brian's house yesterday to say goodbye to Daria who is red-eyeing it back to California tonight.

GPS decided to take me on an exciting tour of the eastern Catskills. It was a lovely day, so not unpleasant.

Thing about GPS in the Catskills is that there is no cell coverage. Like nil, nada, niente. And the narrow roads have unexpected forks that GPS does not account for, and the unexpected forks always seem more attractive than the straight & narrow path—do we all see the metaphor here?—so it is very, very easy to get completely lost, especially for people like me who were born with no sense of direction.

When that happens, one must simply trust that GPS will make the necessary adjustments, and that eventually, one will get where one wanted to go.

GPS, in other words, is a lot like the Judeo-Christian God.

###

Brian's old house was having a Prius convention.

'Cause the one unifying characteristic of Brian's sister wives—let's call it like it is!—seems to be that we all drive hybrids.

Daria, Flavia, & Mimi were there, of course. And also Frigg—who, before she retired, wrote every single developmental disability regulation currently extant in the state of New York. Frigg is a rather lovely person, soft-spoken, & as we are both policy wonks, I was immediately drawn to her.

###

I would have invited myself up for a sleepover this week if it had been only Flavia & Daria up at the house.

But I will confess to having a hard time with Mimi, who is a bitter person though it's kinda hard to separate that out from the rest of her bipolar diagnosis. Mimi does not take meds for her bipolar diagnosis; she self-medicates by smoking copious quantities of weed.



I try not to be judgy about that, though naturally, I don't succeed 'cause c'mon: When am I not judgy?

I do know the standard pharmaceutical cocktail for bipolar disease is very, very hard on the body.

But I kinda have to wonder whether Mimi's self-medicating is actually working.

For one thing, she continues to make a lot of really bad executive decisions that have a negative impact on her life.

For another, she is constantly erupting into torrents of the most vituperative rage against people whose transgressions seem pretty minor to moi.

For example: Two of Brian's X-lovers came to Brian-Palooza. They'd stopped wanting to have sex with him—hey! that happens!—one of them because she wanted to invest more energy into her marriage, the other because of some random Ick Factor. We've all experienced that random Ick Factor. One day you wake up, and this person with whom you've been having the hottest sex imaginable just isn't doing it for you anymore. Who knows why? I mean, yeah, sure, there are proximal causes if you care to spend the time analyzing. But why bother? The salient thing is you don't want to fuck them anymore!

Brian was upset by these two rejections.

Brian cried; the sister wives comforted & distracted.

Brian got over it.

At the time of his death, he was great friends with these two X-lovers—Cathy & Kathy as they are! 😀—so why Mimi decided to stalk around in a black cloud, making dramatic proclamations like, How dare those cunts show their faces? is a great mystery to me.

###

"She tried to come up to me," Mimi said as we were all sitting on Brian's porch.

She was talking about Kathy—who is actually a very nice woman if a bit woo-woo even for my rarified woo-woo sensibilities. When she isn't practicing astral projection, Kathy is an educational consultant. She recently set up a computing, code-writing camp for underprivileged girls in Alabama, so I'd say the net impact of Kathy has on this planet is a positive one.

Vinnie had shoved a bag with about fifty cucumber & chicken salad sandwiches at me as I departed from the Palooza the day before. I'd brought about a dozen up to the Catskills; they were sitting on a plate in the middle of the porch. Nobody wanted to eat them.

"She wanted to bond," Mimi said. "I just turned my back. Turned my back! And if she had kept it up, I would have turned around and screamed at her—"

No, you would not, I thought. Because had you, I would have taken you by the scruff of your neck and booted you out the door.

Brian's memorial was an event that I had organized. There isn't any of that at my events.

But no need to waste energy over things that never happened! So, I went on smiling serenely while shooting the sandwiches some nervous side-eye.

Surely, I wouldn't have to take the sandwiches home again! Or would I?

Then Mimi wanted to read us a long drawn out text exchange from somebody named Ruth who had not been at the event yesterday and whose connection to Brian seemed tenuous at best.

"Whoa! This is some real-life Housewives shit!" said Lindsey.

Lindsey is Flavia's cousin and a real-life reality TV producer. She'd shown up half an hour after I had. She does not drive a Prius.

I fell instantly in love with Lindsey after discovering that she, too, had been urging Flavia to watch The Real Housewives of Miami.

"I keep telling her," Lindsey said to me, "Miami this season is everything!"

"OmyGAWD!" I said. "Larsa & Lisa!"

"She won't stop following my X-boyfriend on Instagram!!!" we crowed in unison.

###

Daria had slipped off the porch and into the house to sort more through Brian's books.

In the car afterwards, she confided to me that she had issues with Mimi, too. "This is the fourth time she's told that Ruth story, and it gets longer every time."

Daria is an extremely beautiful & intriguing woman. Kind of an Anaïs Nin prototype:



She was born in Mexico City. Her father was a Basque priest who fled from Franco's Spain! She speaks five languages!

And she's just immensely charming. Seductive, one might say.

We want to be friends because we were both so close to Brian, and I think we have the potential to be friends. But, of course, there has to be a basis for friendship other than the fact that we both loved Brian. And it is that basis we are trying to discover.

Should we do a writers group together? Daria asked.

Well, I would guess that I am a much better writer than Daria. No puffing or posturing there: Writing happens to be the one thing I do exceptionally well.

And writing is one of the few things I take very seriously. I suspect more seriously than Daria.

So I suspect if we do the writing group thing and the writing group falls apart really fast because neither of us is particularly invested in the other's actual writing, it might actually be deleterious to our burgeoning friendship.

So, I think instead, I am going to join her Finnegan's Wake reading group. It meets once a week on Zoom.

And we will grow the intimacy from there.

In the meantime, we tromped around a weird little Ukrainian summer camp and shared backstories:



Gotta say, Daria's backstory may even be more interesting than mine!

And I have an interesting backstory.