Teddy
“Excuse me? How much is that?”
I jump at the customer’s voice. I had been deep in thought wondering why the spawn of Satan has continued to call me multiple
times out of the blue. Perhaps she had just butt-dialed me. Lord knows her butt is ample enough to have its own area code.
“I beg your pardon?”
I follow the woman’s manicured finger.
My mother’s Bakelite bracelet lives in a shadow box on the wall behind the front counter.
“Oh, that’s not for sale,” I say. “But all of the jewelry in the counter display is. Let me know if I can show you anything.”
I smile at the woman and return to styling a mannequin in the front window of Dorian Gay. In honor of Valentine’s Day and
Modernism Week, my front window is a tribute to TV legend, gay icon and former Palm Springs resident Lucille Ball and her
famed I Love Lucy chocolate factory episode.
Lucy and Ethel mannequins are standing before an assembly line of chocolates. Behind them, a big red heart fills the window,
like the logo from the TV show. Instead of being dressed in pink uniforms like in the famous episode, the two are dressed
head-to-toe in fabulous red frocks, heels and jewelry, vintage scarves tied in their hair.
Have a Ball this Month in Palm Springs! my sign reads.
“Name your price,” the woman presses. “My mom had a bracelet just like it. I don’t know what happened to it.”
I stop mid-motion.
“My mama did, too,” I say. “And I’m sorry, but it’s NFS.”
“I’ll pay any price you ask,” she answers with great confidence. “And you know what I always say? NFS simply means Not For
Sure.”
The woman stares at me, head held high.
Suddenly, I remember her face and her voice. I eye her carefully. I sold her the brightly colored geometric pattern caftan
and orange fruit salad earrings she is currently wearing. She spent a fortune here last year. So much, in fact, that I popped
a bottle of champagne.
Be kind, Teddy, though I know that’s a big ask.
I glance again at the Bakelite bracelet. It hovers like a UFO in an acrylic orange box against a backdrop of Brady Bunch wallpaper.
“See?” The woman laughs. “I can see the wheels turning. You’re not for sure, are you?”
Why am I holding on to this bracelet? What hold does it have on me?
I do not have amber-colored memories of my childhood like most kids. In fact, I try not to have any memories of my past at
all. I have locked them away, airtight, just like that bracelet.
Long before political division and social media and light-years before familial estrangement and the new normal of no contact,
the Copelands were the poster children for finger-pointing and hateful derision.
I should sell the bracelet.
The hands on the mid-century atomic starburst clock near the shadow box click.
My doctor’s appointment is in three hours.
I need the money more than I need this bracelet.
The woman continues to stare at me, smiling. I can almost hear her hiss like a cobra.
I open my mouth to spit out an exorbitant amount, but then my cell trills, and it is a selfie of Ron standing before Frank
Sinatra’s Twin Palms home. He is waving and smiling, happy to be a Modernism Week board member and docent, even though I know
he is still seething for having to clean up our mess this morning.
Ron is forgiving.
I think of his Church of Mary prayer.
This bracelet is my last connection.
My only remaining silk.
And when that is gone, what do I have left?
The woman moves toward the counter as if I have already decided.
Isn’t that why we watch reruns even though there is so much original content streaming today? Isn’t that why a show like The Golden Girls remains eternally popular?
We don’t watch an old TV show to return to a time that was perfect, but rather to return to a time that marked a turning point
in our lives.
The woman pulls the wallet from her bag.
What would it say about me if I sold the past—as I do in my business—but I did not believe in it? Wouldn’t I be just as big
a hypocrite as a family that waltzed into church every Sabbath in their Sunday best pretending to be perfect when they were
the epitome of the darkness and evil our pastor warned us about?
“I’m so sorry,” I finally say. “It’s really not for sale.”
The woman’s face falls. She’s not used to being told no.
I must make her laugh or risk losing even more money.
“You know, my mother was a farm girl,” I continue, taking Lucy’s wig and placing it on my own head. “Sturdy stock. From a
distance, her wrists looked like her calves. I used to joke that my mother didn’t ever buy new heels, she just got re-shoed
every few years. Her bracelet wouldn’t fit your petite wrist anyway.”
The woman roars.
I know how to turn the tables with wit and sarcasm.
“Follow me,” I say, stepping down from the window and grabbing her hand. “Be my Ethel for the day. Pretty please! Let me give
you a private trunk show so you can see the baubles I’ve been holding back for Modernism Week. I can sell those to you before
I ‘ten X’ the hell out of them.”
We head into the back room, where I keep my stock. I serve her champagne and one-liners, and she walks out an hour later,
tipsy, happy and a thousand dollars lighter.
If there’s one silk I retained from my mother, it’s her sense of humor.
My mother was damn funny.
We had to learn to laugh, or we would not have survived. Humor is the great connector and deflector. It has both saved my ass and kept people at a safe distance many times over my life.
If there’s one thing I know for certain about the world today versus when I was growing up, it’s that we’re too damn serious.
Was the world cruel to me? You’re damn right it was. Did I survive? You’re damn right I did.
I learned to be a fighter. I learned to be self-sufficient. I learned you can get spit on and have your head smashed into
a locker every single day and still hold your head high.
Should it be that way?
No.
But I learned if you don’t have a sense of self-deprecating humor, then you have no coping mechanisms. You take yourself too
seriously. You cannot laugh when the going gets tough. And it always gets tough, my dears.
Did I—and my Golden Gays—pave the way for so many today?
You bet your sweet asses we did.
With our bodies, blood and lives, so maybe say thank you on occasion instead of gagging when you see an older person at a bar for your gift of being able to walk around in the world today without being ashamed of who you are and identifying as you please.
Sadly, our society has the attention spans of gnats, so we forget our history, fooling ourselves into thinking the world has
become more accepting.
But we must always remember that when we take two steps forward, we take a mighty one back, and we must never be fooled: We
must always be ready to fight.
I check my watch.
I have an appointment with destiny.
Where is Patty?
I pick up my cell to call when she saunters in with her Starbucks.
“You’re late!”
Patty stops and touches her belly.
“How did you know?” she cries dramatically. “And, yes, the baby is yours! I know because it’s marked with the sign of the
beast.”
I shake my head. This is our routine.
“I’m having a late lunch with Barry to go over this month’s show,” I lie to Patty, my assistant and second mother who—by the
way—is not a woman but an eighty-five-year-old man named Hank who warms up the crowd before our show by performing as a drag
queen named Patty O’Furniture. “Can you watch the shop until I get back?”
Patty lifts one narrow, overly plucked Pamela Anderson brow to survey me with great skepticism.
“You never trust me even though you hired me,” she says.
“You steal my clothes and stuff dollar bills down your bra when customers pay in cash.” I point. “I have cameras.”
“I thought I was auditioning for RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Patty eyes me closely. “And I thought you had already planned this month’s show.”
Patty’s voice sounds as if she’s just smoked a carton of unfiltered Marlboro cigarettes and chased that with a gallon of gasoline. If Harvey Fierstein and Brenda Vaccaro had a child, Patty would have been it.
“Last-minute changes,” I say.
“Well, I have to be out of here by six,” Patty says. “I have my own show to get ready for tomorrow, remember?”
Patty has been doing the same exact act for the last six decades: song, joke, insult bachelorette parties, do a shot, repeat.
She used to open as Tina Turner performing “Proud Mary,” but two decades ago her knee snapped, last decade she got two hips
and three stents, and Patty had to switch to ballads. She is still pissed off about it.
But she can sing “Fancy” just like Reba. No lip-syncing either. Patty is old-school. She doesn’t make an entrance, sing a
couple of lines and immediately exit the stage to stuff dollars down her bra, no. Patty performs an entire number, start to
finish.
The dollars come to her.
“Where is this gig?” I ask.
“Vegas-adjacent,” she says with a wink of her butterfly lash.
Every gig outside Palm Springs that Patty does is Vegas-adjacent. Which means Reno.
Which means her audience will consist of inebriated cowboys who just lost their last dime at the blackjack table and women
sporting breast implants and oxygen machines.
“Just be back—and sober!—by next Saturday night for our gig,” I say. “I have enough to worry about without adding ‘find old, drunk drag queen’ to my list.”
Patty puts a hand over her mouth and feigns indignation at my insult.
“I’ll give you drunk, but old?” she gasps. “And drag queen? I’m a professional.”
“A professional what?” I quip.
She laughs and then hacks.
I stride toward the door.
“You’re still wearing a wig, by the way,” Patty calls.
“I feel like being Lucy today,” I say.
“Red doesn’t suit you,” Patty says. “That color turns your skin pink and makes you look like an alcoholic.” She stops. “Which you are, by the way.”
“No,” I say. “I’m a professional, too.” I look at Patty before I exit. “Professional drinker.”