scary parade!

I don't normally sew, but I aim to make a baldachin for my edible-body-painting cart (which J and I will be picking up the lumber for this weekend). So this afternoon I shopped at the fabric district in downtown LA. It's blocks and blocks of cramped mazes stuffed with dizzying piles of fabric rolls, and can be exhausting if one attempts to cover too much ground in one day. The stores are all owned by dark foreigners, some Jewish and some other. One nicely answers their hungry greetings and ambles about trying to collect one's thoughts, perhaps continuing to be pestered, then thanks them and leaves or else makes a decision and then haggles with them. Some of them have such pronounced ethnic features that they seem like racially stereotypical caricatures. I didn't recognize the languages they spoke among themselves, other than Spanish. I had thought I might hear Hebrew, but I don't think I have. Anyway, I found a store with a promising selection of ornate and nicely draping baldachin fabrics, picked up enough 1$/yd fabric to make a test of the pattern, and also some pretty mesh which will be part of J's ice-cream server suit, to be sewn by someone with far more costuming skill than I have.



Later I saw a production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. O'Neill is apparently the only US playwright to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Granted, he got it for some other play, but it seems incredible that he could have exited the brain of someone who thought DUTE was in good taste long enough to write something nice. Whining can be very entertaining, as witnessed by so much literature being based on it. But despite the promising ways in which these characters' lives were messed up, their whining was annoying. It wasn't even as good as real people's on LJ, because it was mannered for the stage. Not well, in my opinion.



The best part of today was hanging out with my sister and having yummy Vietnamese roll-it-yourself rice-paper packages with herbs and pork.

It's posted.

The apartment manager was out by the mailboxes when I went to get the mail. He asked me whether I'd like some food -- it's a standing joke with him now, he thinks I've gotten pretty skinny and it must be a great trial to me. I said I couldn't trust his opinion, as he's Armenian.



And you may or may not know what that entails. In Russia there was a series of jokes about Armenian Radio. There were series of jokes about every nationality in the USSR. The Armenian Radio jokes went as questions from callers to the radio station followed by the station's answers. E.g.: Armenian Radio is asked: What percentage of men like fat women? Armenian Radio answers: Eighty percent of men like fat women. -- What do the other 20% like? -- Very fat women.



He said he is Romanian, not Armenian. I knew he's from Romania, but I thought he was an Armenian from Romania. He does look sort of Armenian, as does his wife. He said perhaps I thought this because of the story of his son's girlfriend, whose father was Armenian, and which was so sad that he wished he were Armenian himself.



She was Armenian. Her whole family was from Armenia. Her father was very old-fashioned and believed she ought to marry only another Armenian. The father's wife, mother, and other children were for the manager's son, so they continued to see each other. But when the father's mother suddenly died, there was no-one to put pressure on the father anymore; his wife could do nothing. The father insisted that the girl marry a certain Armenian who was 23 years older than her. She had no choice; she had to do it. She was 22 years old. No, this wasn't in the old country, but right here -- the manager has been by their house, and more recently saw the girl's mother briefly while he was driving in his car and she in hers.



His son was devastated by this. He was in love with her like that -- the manager waved his arms in the air above his head. He grieved for three years, and didn't date. Then he started dating, and eventually married and is very happy.



Then I remembered that I thought the manager was Armenian because that's what my mom told me. She's become a bit hard of hearing in the past few years, so she probably misheard him when he said "Romanian."

Kopi Luwak