Newsweek’s list of “What You Need To Read” what it calls ” a literary road map to the most important stories.” It includes “Staying True” the book I wrote with Jenny Sanford, calling it, “A first-rate act of revenge. The former first lady of South Carolina holds nothing back in describing her husband’s affair, and it makes for delicious reading.
Last month, I was in Rhode Island to watch my son Ben compete in his first triathlon.
photo by Lili Feinstein
And, despite the fact that, after he finished, he looked like a dead man, he was inspiring to me.
photo by Lili Feinstein
A few years back I did the AIDSlifecycle ride, a nearly 600-mile bike ride to raise money to care for people with AIDS, in memory of my best friend Scott Riklin who died of AIDS. Then I got sick and couldn’t ride. My son took up the challenge and rode two years in a row. On our trip back from Rhode Island, we decided to do the ride together next year.
So Friday, I set off on my first training ride along the decayed industrial waterfront near where I live. 
I guess I was more out of practice than I knew because when I saw these tracks, I didn’t angle the bike correctly.
I fell over the bicycle with all my body weight onto my right shoulder, my sunglasses wedged into my eye socket. I have never been so grateful for my helmet.
A passing contractor stopped. He threw the bicycle into the back of the truck and brought me home. He was so charmed by where I live, he hung out here for a while and I took down his phone number so that he can attend the next bash here. Then my brother arrived to take me to lunch at The Ramp.
When the waiter got a good look at me,
He asked, “What the hell happened to you?” I told him. He responded, “Would you like a Vicodin?”
When my glass of wine came, it had along side it some pain relief. As the waiter set down the frosty glass and the welcome little pill he was looking at the sky, singing, “This isn’t happening. I’m not doing this. I don’t know how this got here.”
Almost instantly I felt much better, and have been better every day since, except the day I tried to get back on the bike. I’m going to have to wait another week, I think.
Sometimes I’m a little sorry I started this self-improvement campaign.
We headed to the edge of the bay, with the bride and groom first.
They had completely different wedding outfits than they’d donned for the ceremony in City Hall on Thursday. Rose’s headdress was remarkable.
The Vardo pushed over land
Guests jostled for position because there were more people who wanted to push the Vardo than there were places for their hands. You can see in this photo that wearing platform shoes, a cream silk dress, mink stole and cloche hat is not an excuse for not pushing with all your might.
The wedding procession two-hundred long.
The wedding has an atmosphere of a carnival. There was the sword swallower/knife throwing act.
Molotov, the sword swallower
He downs a 10-inch blade
Part of his patter was to declare to the crowd, “I’m not a masochist!”
The woman standing behind me yelled out, “He sure is. I used to date him. I should know.”
And there was the human-powered Ferris wheel for two. Find someone of roughly equal weight. Both start pedaling and the Ferris wheel spins you both around.
But the hands down favorite was the Boiler Bar. The only drink offered there was a boilermaker. The beer was IPA right from the tap, but the bourbon was specially prepared. The bartender took cheap bourbon and inserted a Jacobs Ladder that carried 15000 volts of electricity.
“This separates the hydrogen from the oxygen molecules and aerates the whiskey,” the man in the bowler hat said. “It can make terrible whiskey taste like single barrel bourbon.” I agreed.
Every crowd has it’s in jokes and nicknames that serve to draw a line between those who have been around for a while and those who aspire to get in. The crowd that produced this wedding was no different. They never made me feel unwelcome, but there was a level at which they were communicating that I sensed I’d never penetrate.
Hey, I’m a charming gal, a professional communicator, a writer who finds other people’s stories fascinating. These abilities usually get me past the first barriers to friendship pretty fast. But none of my old tricks worked on these people.
This became apparent to me when we were working to put up the tent. I figured if I worked alongside the crew that was making this event happen, I’d get to know a few people and I’d be more comfortable during the party. I never made much of an in road. My Barn-mate Michael said, “One word sweetheart: age.” Michael is a decade older than me and explains many things that happen to him with that one word. But I didn’t feel that much older than the people around me, five or ten years at most, and there appeared to be several of my contemporaries around too.
As I got to know some people better, I got a sense of the reason for the gap. One man told me the only thing I needed to explain this to me was Crude Awakening. “I’m not even going to explain Crude Awakening to you,” Kelly said. “Look it up on the net.”
During one of my breaks from the party, I came to my room and looked Crude Awakening up on YouTube. Crude Awakening Fireball.
In 2007, this crew decided their presentation for Burning Man would be a 50-foot tall oil derrick in the middle of the desert built strong enough that the revelers could climb inside and use it as an observation platform. At the end of the week, when they burn the Man, they’d pump thousands of gallons of liquid propane through the structure and set off a massive fire ball in the night sky.
In order to do this, they had to plan very carefully. All the pieces had to be pre-cut here and loaded on trucks to be carried to the desert. They had to anticipate every tool and screw they’d need to build it. Then a dedicated bunch lived in the desert for four weeks before the festival began erecting the structure. Ah August in the desert! Baking heat, blistering sun and sand storms. The structure was a huge success and the the conclusion was a massive mushroom-shaped fireball cheered by a huge crowd.
These people have been pulling off impossible stunts like that for twenty years. When you work on a project like complicated, you bond in a way that goes beyond language. No matter how clever I was, or charming, I’d never be able to crack through that deep kind of association, the kind of bonding that comes at the end of a play you’ve worked on or, for me, a huge deadline story. People who have worked in those kinds of projects have fought hard, gotten drunk, rescued each other and betrayed each other. They know each other in the many dimensions of their characters and, they’re still around.
It would have taken much more than a hand, crafted corset and a matching parasol to get me in!
What to wear isn’t I question I’ve spent a lot of time pondering since I moved to this dusty room at the edge of town. People wear torn and shabby clothes and dressing up means putting on a clean t-shirt. I’ve got about three pairs of pants and five shirts that are in constant rotation, so I figured wearing better pants and shirt would be enough of an upgrade. That was until I saw the Bride and Groom going off to get married in City Hall in vintage ensembles with very well thought out accessories.
I settled on a dancing dress with a handkerchief hem and had struggled into it when I saw some of the other guests walking down the hill to The Barn. The woman on the left here is the bartender, but that wasn’t my first guess when I saw her long legs in striped stockings peaking out from the slits in her skirt. You can’t see from this photo, but she’s also wearing six-inch high white platform shoes. They were quite a sight when she was trying to load in ice on the wobbly stairs. When she was trying to keep the unruly crowd in her tent in line, she’d reach under the bar table and bring out her air rifle, which she fired at anything she fancied. It had a way of calming things down.
In all her splendor!
This was another wedding guest who made me re-think my look. She said she did some performances pieces with the erotic columnist Annie Sprinkle. During that, she got to know Annie’s corset maker and commissioned one for herself. This corset is a remarkable piece of engineering. The way it supports this woman’s considerable breasts presents them to the passersby as if they were on a shelf, ripe and ready.
So I ended up wearing the kind of pants you have to take to the dry cleaners and a shirt that needed the same kind of care. Still, I wasn’t part of the crowd and, soon after the wedding began, I could see the reasons why I never would be.
The Friday before the wedding, about forty people showed up to help get the party space ready. I pitched in too. We raised a colorful tent that was about twenty feet in diameter, a project that took about twenty-five helpers and a lot of head scratching to tie all the pieces together just right. We set up a few other structures too, and some tables and chairs. As I walked back to The Barn, a separate crew had arrived and opened up a portable stage.
The portable stage, big as a box car.
The next morning when I got up around dawn, the field was ready for the guests
. Friday afternoon, we had pushed the Vardo out of the parking lot and down the rocky pathway toward the bay. That was easy. The tough part was pushing it onto the high ground, which was about at about our shoulder level. Halfway down the path we found dip in the earth rutted with tire tracks. Four people at the back and four more at the front bar thrust the Vardo up the incline and pulled it to the side of the wedding tent.
To get the legal stuff out of the way, Rose and Mark decided to marry before the wedding with a group of close friends at a ceremony at City Hall. I got to photograph them as they were leaving the Barn.
The Styling Couple
In the wedding coach
They met five years ago when they found themselves face to face on a steaming apron of asphalt in the barren town of Shafter, off I-5. They were both part of the Cyclcide crew on their way to the music festival at Coachella. The bus threw the transmission and stranded between the 7-11 and one sad little palm tree, love bloomed.
The other task was constructing a Vardo, a gypsy caravan, in which the bride and groom will be transported to the place by the bay where they will exchange their vows.
The Vardo, in the raw
My contribution was to sew the canopy, for which I unearthed my great grandmother’s pinking shears. Classics, right down to the box they came in.
Gigi's pinking sheers
Yesterday, when they stapled the canopy into place, the Vardo was complete. It took five people at the front bar and five more with their shoulders at the back, to push the Vardo up onto the back land. It’s a beautiful sight.
The Vardo, wrapped in the canopy