Make Mine Mel

Recently, out of the blue, my cell phone rang, I answered it (stunning in and of itself, as I was in my studio working), and it was a voice, telling me a name, asking me if I remembered him. Well, YEA! (see photo) In the last half of my senior year of high school, when My Lovely Mother and I stayed in rural Nebraska [my grandmother was ill with and dying from uterine cancer], when my parents were divorcing and my dad and younger bros were in Phoenix, when I went from a Washington, D.C. high school with a graduating class of over 500 to a rural school with an entire K-12 population of under 80 ... there was Dan. The Mel Gibson of that rural town's senior class, leaving trails of melted females of every age group wherever he walked or went. Dan was in love with Deb. Deb's family moved to Texas about March of that year. Every female in a 300 mile radius lined up, hoping to become a glimmer in Dan's eye.

Dan glimmered MY way, if you can believe that. I didn't, but I'm not stupid now and I wasn't stupid then -- I stepped right up. I knew (again, not being stoopid) that I was filler, distraction, for him in the few weeks left before graduation. Once he graduated, that boy was torpedoing to Texas, and to Deb, and I knew it. But he needed distraction, and I needed distraction, and we distracted together pretty well I think. And get your little hinckty minds out of the gutter -- we mostly did a lot of car cruising and tipping back of brewskies, trying to put miles between us and our demons, or drown them out, talking. Ok, ok -- so there was some happy tussling in the car seat and a little window foggage. And once, at a dance up at the school, a slow dance with him wherein I was so blissed out I didn't give a shite who was watching, who being (literally) everybody in the junior and senior classes, all 23 of 'em. But Dan was one of the two people in that place whose faces and voices and presences and interactions penetrated what was pretty much otherwise a black hole of time in my life. To hear from him again whistled all that goodness back up and out of my memory yard.

Yesterday when I got home, a card from Dan, including this photo, was waiting for me. See, I'd told him as we talked that night how hot he was, what a heart breaker, how vital he'd been to me -- I told him I wanted a photo of him, then. And he sent it! That's the kind of guy he was, and clearly still IS. And now we can be in touch going forward, which is truly coming full circle. Life is so crazy-cool!

[Editor's Note: No, he did not marry Deb. He married DAWN (woot!) No, I don't, yet, know Dawn, but Deb wasn't high on my list o'favorites, ya know? Come May 1979, that wench diminished my distraction options completely.]