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This story is for entertainment purposes only and copy written by the author. Reproduction in any form of this text is forbidden.
GOSSIP FROM THE GRAVE ©02/2007 by: Mare
CHAPTER 3
Valerie Boulanger was exactly the same age as Katya. During the Ymanja shoot they had forged a fast friendship. Valerie lived with her father, Houngan Valentin across the two-house cul-de-sac from the Orsinis. After supper the girls went outdoors to whack a giant badminton birdie around. Indoors, James Alvarado delighted Martin Ruff – at five already a gadget junkie – with his new calculator. Designed for math beginners, it posed as well as solved math problems with musical reinforcement. Rosita had just fed its program stirring phrases from Roxie’s classical collection: Cascading piano chords from Grieg’s “Piano Concerto in A Minor,” ominous organ bars from Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” the cheer in Act 1 of “Aida” and the opening fanfare of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra used in 2001: a Space Odyssey.
Emma Alvarado and Dave Ruff were testing the various keys of the household, those Alfonso could trust them with, on doors, old armoires and desks, and one lofty grandfather clock that needed a big iron key to wind it (and had kept its own version of time for the past century or so). Hoisting Emma on his shoulder Robbie let her slowly wind away. Then there were the car keys and car remotes. Robbie and Emily supervised in the driveway. They were anticipating and practicing for their own family.
Meanwhile Spence was on long distance with Muriel. As he had attended Gigawest’s Austin concert he could testify on the backstage scene. Never had he witnessed a single groupie on W-cubed’s lap, never mind his bed, he told Muriel. And one romantic song had been dedicated to “my Muriel.” At length the frost melted. Muriel promised, “Yes, I’ll meet you in L.A. Don’t tell him, I’ll surprise him. Where?”
“We booked eight rooms...let’s see...Antoine’s in 476, you two will be in 474, west wing. If you check in before us ask for Sal Maldonaro at the desk, he’s daytime, I’ll call and tell them you’re with us.” That done, Spencer went out for a run down Fontainebleau Drive.
Houngan Valentin was an long-time family friend of both Sofie’s Bernaise family. As a Houngan, one of several in NOLA, he lived an itinerant life; rather like a Circuit Court judge; Alfonso noted, with clients throughout the South and as far west as Utah.
Introduced at the Orsini home to Jack and Rosita, Valentin sensed the residual emotional turmoil evoked by their daughter’s close call. Emma’s parents couldn’t delete the image of that wheel inches from her head.
Valentin suggested they make contact with their ancestors and request special vigilance.
Valentin, Roxana, Sofie and Antoine planned to make a small service at the Bernaise family mausoleum. “Come with us, light some white candles, make libations and call your ancestors for help. You’ll see, they love you and they want to protect your children.”
So just after sunset a group of six set off briskly north to Greenwood Cemetery. The evening was cool but not rainy, low clouds rolling eastward. Roxie brought a small sports-oxygen bottle in case she got winded. Antoine and Jack carried tote bags heavy with food, fine cornmeal for drawing Veves, and bottles of water, small goblets and wooden bowls, and peacock plumes. Sofie’s mother’s family had raised peacocks and had never let a shed feather go to waste.
Jozey had lingered in New Orleans to snoop. Literally phoning in her work product she surreptitiously sought intelligence on a number of entertainers currently in the Crescent City, particularly Ruffrox, the Alvarados and the newlywed Abbots.
Before night fell she drove her rental for the fourth time that day towards Alfonso’s tall old house. Surprised and exultant at the sight of the sidewalk procession, she trailed along at a cautious distance swigging from the flask she kept in her purse. Antoine, Roxie and the Alvarados she recognized. The tall brunette white woman and the other imposing black man, she did not. Jozey wondered what the bags held.
When at last they filed in to one of the city’s strange antique cemeteries Jozey pulled her rented car to the curb. A statue of a stag overlooked the graves, and the spire of a Civil War monument. Greenwood was dedicated in 1852 by the firemen of NOLA. It covered a huge expanse of lawns dotted with crypts. Beautiful sculptures, cast-metal figures and bas reliefs abounded in this sacred space.
Jozey had to dodge from tomb to tomb while her quarries wended their way to a white sepulcher that was their trip’s destination. BERNAISE was chiseled in to its façade. Bobbing over and under the top of a block of marble with a lovely little angel on top, Jozey watched as candles were lit and apparent grave gifts were laid out on the Bernaise mausoleum. She saw some cupcakes with colored icing. Drums – a wonderful irresistible rhythm – suddenly throbbed from nowhere. An iPod, she assumed. By turn the six poured libations. Sofie and Roxie waved peacock plumes to the beat. Swaying and dipping in the confining space the group chanted in hushed syllables Jozey couldn’t hear, though she caught the repeated names “Maman Brigitte” and “Baron” somebody.
She was disappointed. She had hoped for more salacious dancing, nudity, snake-brandishing, dramatic bloody ritual. This was so...rather reverent and gently joyous. Crouching low, striking a match to light a cigarette Jozey spied a bottle in a carved niche below the angel, in a black bag. As her flask was empty now she snatched the bottle and untied its velvet bag, noting beaded patterns of a thick cross and a heart design. The green-glass bottle bore an unfamiliar foreign label. But she spotted the word RHUM. Its cap was not sealed so she twisted it off. An aroma redolent of cinnamon, clove and ginger hit her nose; a spiced cocktail rum. She could dig that. Carefully she poured some in to her flask.
Replacing the bottle she toasted the angel. “Excuse me,” she whispered, “no offense but it’s cold and I’m thirsty.” The angel’s sweet expression seemed to change, a trick of low light. Lifting her flask she took a swig – and choked and gasped. Hot, hot peppers, God Almighty hot!
A sound like gravel rolling under waves made her freeze. What – shadows moved by themselves. Someone else creeping among the crypts? Behind her the crunch of footfalls.
“Gaz lakrimojen Ayisyan – Haitian tear gas,” a bass voice rumbled. Then the deep echoing chuckle like a rockslide. Jozey’s head jerked around, her knees locking. A man’s silhouette loomed above the sepulchers. A very tall, broad-shouldered man in – unbelievably – a top hat and long black mourning coat. Like you’d see marching in funeral processions here, representing undertakers or Death? She wasn’t sure. He grinned broadly at her discomfort. The smile was eerily luminescent as he raised a lit pipe to his lips...it illuminated his face in a red glow from its burning bowl, glinting off the lens of his dark spectacles, but just one lens – the other eye was a vacant black hole. With his left arm he swung a baton at groin level, like a giant phallus. That hoarse bass chuckle engulfed her. Jozey cringed, rigid, shutting her eyes tight, terrified.
Everything went suddenly silent. No drums or chanting now. Daring to open her eyes she found only night where the big black man had been. She was shaking seismically.
After a few minutes normal voices spoke. Roxana’s group turned flashlights on the narrow path between the above-ground graves. The six strolled past without seeing her. When she straightened, still trembling, she saw that their candles in glass jars were still burning. At the arched gate she saw the group get into two cars. One had Spence at the wheel.
It seemed to take her ages to get back to her car. The sidewalk, where there was one, was uneven, crumbling. And her feet were stumbling. Her mind, as well. She told herself the man in mourning coat was not an apparition. There were actors involved, after all, and they had punked her...hadn’t they? She was simply spooked. New Orleans at this point in its history seemed full of ghosts, the air gloomy with recent tragedy. All that water oppressing the city from every side, pressing on the levees -- lake, river, canals and bayous. Water demanding entry, determined to obliterate the land. At first charmed by the now rare sight of a ship moving past at a level above her feet, she now felt the threat. She would get a seat on the next plane flying west. But first she wanted to find a bookstore with a guide to Vodou in it.
The Hollywood premiere of Ymanja was coming up soon. And the Academy Awards. Press opportunities galore. Did she ever have questions to throw at that little pagan! If Ruffrox again ignored her she would get her intern to pose her questions. Meanwhile, as soon as her nerves recovered, she had one hell of a Markswell Tells to write!
Reaching for the flask in her purse, she drew up, remembering. Damn! She’d left it in that scary cemetery. What was in it was undrinkable anyway. Smart, that. Theft prevention. But her flask held evidence.
She returned to her hotel trying to compose her piece and herself as she drove.
“You know what,” Rosita murmured to Roxie as they rode back to the house, “I do feel better. I think my grandmas are smiling. And my grandpas are on alert.”
After a late dessert of warm fruit compote, and a nightcap for the grown-ups, Spence drove the Alvarados back to the Fairmont. “Remember,” he told them, “Alfonso and the firm are ready to rock any time you need to sue the bastards.”
Ancestor service always affected Roxana the same way: revving her homemaking transmission to a higher gear. Thanks to a decade of hard work Cressida had domesticated Spence as much as that was possible. Roxie saluted Cressida daily, awed by her.
Deep in a settling-down mood, and a procreating one, Roxana got Spence to bed early.
He still sported the beard from Webster Slaughter. That role’s strenuous action had left him leaner and lithe. Locking legs around him she delighted in the feel of him, the strength, the energy and tenderness combined in his loving, the attention to every detail of her body and her needs.
Together they did an inventive remake of that piston-engine documentary.
Jozey, after a visit to the hotel bar slept in fits haunted by the big black man in the top hat and tails. In one dream he danced a sort of samba with a bosomy blonde in a purple dress with long open sleeves and ankle-length skirt. Other couples appeared. Spence and Roxie were suddenly there, doing a sexy tango nude. Jozey was eager to interview them. She burned with acid queries. But enormous snakes slithered swiftly across the grass between Jozey and the dancers, preventing her from reaching them. In the magic manner of dreams a camera materialized in her hands. Yet when she aimed it at the naked pair all she saw in the viewfinder was the frowning face of that marble angel...
~*~
For the trip to Lalaland the Ruffrox RV wouldn’t do; a road trip was too time-consuming. So the RV would return to Austin steered by two hired ex-cons of Alfonso’s acquaintance.
“Don’t worry, they’re reliable. They got busted for blurting...let’s just say, irate things about the President in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not sincere threats but...”
“Nothing two-thirds of American citizens haven’t said in private.” Sofie’s tone was bitter.
Roxie left her cats behind for this trip. Since they would linger in L.A. for a Leno appearance, then the Awards show, it was too much to ask of Baron and Brigitte to abide more time in a hotel. Besides, there were no ducks at that hotel. Aflac and Quackback fascinated the felines.
Before heading to the airport the Ruffrox and Alvarado kids insisted on crossing the Crescent City Connection bridge twice. From its height before Katrina one would have seen the mighty Mississippi busy with boats and ships of every description. Now the river looked neglected. At least its shores weren’t like Lake Pontchartrain’s piled with wrecked pleasure boats, their hulls like the white bellies of dead fish. But lumps rose in the adults’ throats as they left the wounded old Cajun Dame on Interstate 10.
~*~
Friday noon W-cubed joined the party in L.A. Unlocking his room he let out a happy hoot as Muriel pounced out of the bathroom. Downstairs over lunch James Alvarado welcomed Wayne with the Bach organ bit.
“Guess what that is!”
“Ummm...Elvis Presley, ‘Blue Suede Shoes?’”
“Noooo! Guess again.”
“Well, of course, it’s Pink, ‘Stupid Girls!’”
James groaned. “Try again.”
“Hey, I got it: it’s me!”
James laughed uproariously.
Typically, Dave Ruff’s greeting to both W-cubed and Muriel was, “Hi. Can I see your keys?” The group spent the afternoon gaping at skeletal Pleistocene fauna, flora and burping, steaming malodorous tar at Rancho La Brea.. Antoine was as dazzled as the children by the immense Columbian mammoths, dire wolves, giant Harlan’s ground sloths and the awesome jaws of sabertooth cats. More than three million well preserved fossils had been recovered from the asphalt. The families peered at exhibits in the Page Museum and collected at the Pit 91 Observation Station in Hancock Park.
~*~
By email Spencer received the first fruits of his hired investigation. He excerpted the best portions to the Couvier-clone computer. Roxie, with a vague notion of what he was doing, passed on the scandalous tidbit she had learned from her Austin nurse.
~*~
In her Friday column Jozey exposed Roxana and Antoine as: “HOLLYWOOD HEATHENS !! THIS REPORTER WITNESSED THEIR LURID LICENTIOUS RITES IN A GHASTLY GRAVEYARD!! I watched offerings to ancestors and pagan deities, bodies entranced by crazed drumming, chanting to raise sinister spirits! It was a SHOCKING experience I have not yet recovered from. And these HOLLYWOOD HEATHENS are trying to recruit JACK and ROSITA, too! With mesmerizing drums and a psychedelic brew called ‘Haitian Tear Gas’ new members are seduced: will the Alvarados succumb? And what about the children? WHAT KIND OF MOTHER IS ROXIE? WHY DOES SPENCE EXPOSE HIS SONS TO A PAGAN CULT LIFESTYLE? Has Roxie CAST A SPELL on him?”
Jozey herself found it ludicrous. But it was calculated to appeal to that “lowest common denominator” of society. And she was scooping everybody!
Tad O’Malley immediately broadened the gulf between truth and reportage. “Sources say Spencer Ruff has hired a de-programmer to help Roxie kick her cult habit. But the insidious snares of the Hoodoo cult are as hard to break as the nicotine habit Spence himself just recently shed. While Roxie battles her demons, authorities should rescue her daughter. And Ruff should keep her away from his two boys.” Tad faced the TV camera earnestly, the concerned father with a photo of his own son perched on his desk.
It irked Jozey that O’Malley had thought of de-programming first. In her Monday column she would call for an intervention by child protective services. She had debated with herself on including in her piece her vision of the scary man among the tombs who still grinned at her in dreams. If he was an actor in a punk job, she’d be ridiculed for taking fright at him. If solely she had seen him – or the party she’d stalked pretended he wasn’t real – she would sound like a lunatic.
Appalled, Roxana, Antoine and Sofie collaborated on a statement issued through the law firm. Alfonso checked it first.
“Like many Catholics from Haiti and New Orleans, Mr. L’Ètrange, Ms. Orsini and other family members show respect to their ancestors and to certain Lwa, in the Vodou tradition. The Lwa are not ‘deities’ but spiritual beings comparable to angels or saints, from African and Haitian traditions. ‘Hoodoo’ and Vodou are quite distinct from each other. Vodou is an old religion practiced on at least four continents. It has naturally evolved to embrace the facts of medicine, psychology and chemistry. Today’s Vodou Mambos and Houngans do not spend their hours poking dolls with pins or commanding zombie armies to assault suburbia. They attend to the spiritual needs of adherents. Vodouisants can be found from Massachusetts to Monterey, from Germany to Haiti.”
Several radio and TV news channels put cult experts on air to dispute the relegation of Vodou to cult status.
“A cult,” one cult-book author explained, “is typically the creation of one charismatic leader, sometimes a small cadre of them. The cult is exclusive, requiring abandonment of a member’s former lifestyle, often of his family. A cult may prescribe sex partners or lack of them, the dissolution of marriages and new arranged marriages, diet, even clothing, strict adherence to the command of the leader, total submission and sometimes radical acts to test and prove one’s convictions and dedication to the group and to the leader’s will. Vodou is not a cult, it’s a religion, and an increasingly inclusive one. Actually, some evangelical Christian groups fit the definition of ‘cult’ much better than Vodou does.”
Perhaps it was that remark which prompted a local evangelist to post pickets outside the hotel housing Ruffrox and Antoine. Placards read,
“PAGANS BURN IN HELL!” “THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER A WITCH TO LIVE!” “VODOU = DAMNATION!” “SORCERY IS SIN!”
W-cubed groaned. “What’s happening to this country? In Texas Governor Perry announced publicly that him as ain’t a born-again Christian goes to hell. Like a time warp is sending us back to the Spanish fuckin’ Inquisition!”
Reading the signs from a window of his suite Spencer’s brow furrowed. His eyes fired up like spark plugs.
“Ecco, Caro,” Roxie soothed. “Let the legal eagles deal with them.” She was imagining his fists punching through placards, pummeling protesters. And being cuffed by cops.
Spence took some deep breaths and felt calmer as she rubbed his back. Affecting an extreme outback voice, he asked, “Crikey, Honey Buns, since you’re a bloody sorceress, and we’ve shared a root or two, am I now a wizard?”
“No, Bunny Butt. But I’m now a Sheila by injection.”
Albeit Jozey had hoped for an international uproar, that never happened. Vodou was protected by the Constitution. It seemed to be everywhere. Haitian cabdrivers in Boston held Kanzo in western Massachusetts; West African students had altars in an Indiana college; Las Vegas had a Houngan and a Mambo; Americans of various backgrounds recognized old Vodou as New Age. From Wiccans in California to Santerians in New Jersey and Candombleros in South Carolina, Americans protested the hyperbole of Jozey’s polemic.
Compared to the bizarre galactic mythology of Thetans and engrams created by L. Ron Hubbard, or Kabbalah, or for that matter “Rapture” and the Antichrist, Vodou devotions came off uncontroversial.
Jozey amused coworkers by stomping around her office cursing the First Amendment’s insistence on religious tolerance.
Her intern Cindy inquired, “When’s the last time you darkened the doorstep of a church or synagogue or temple or mosque?”
“I put my belief on the freedom of the press! I worship the First Amendment!” Then catching herself, as the others laughed, she sputtered, “I mean the free press part.”
“Let me get this straight,” Bill the book critic drawled, “you should be free to practice defamation, but they shouldn’t be free to practice their faith?”
Jozey stalked out in quest of fresh scandal.
As for the assertions that de-programming was underway and that children were imperiled, they entered the Gordieva-Orsini firm’s filings against both Mrs. Markswell and Mr. O’Malley.
On Saturday morning a pack of paparazzi vied for camera angles outside the hotel where Ruffrox, Antoine, Wayne, Muriel and the Abbots stayed. A cry went up as Spence and Robbie took Martha out for a lope around the hotel grounds. An approaching SUV with lenses thrust out windows braked hard and reversed fast just as a photographer dashed off the far curb to cross the street. Hit hard, he went under the rear wheels. It took the ambulance several extra minutes to carve a path through the haphazardly parked pap cruisers. A second casualty occurred when a sidewalk scuffle culminated in contact between a bulky wristwatch and an eye. That wasn’t fatal but the rundown was.
~*~
The premiere was well attended. Monica Matthews went with two girlfriends. They approached Guy Drake, and as he leaned to them with microphone proffered, on camera they recoiled, grimaced and histrionically exclaimed, “Ooh, Gross! Ever hear of mouthwash?”
“What on Earth have you been eating?”
“Deodorant’s cheap, you know. Invest in some roll-on, Guy!”
Drake’s jaw dropped. Then it clamped shut. He remained speechless for a while, people staring and smirking. Finally he ducked in to the press lounge sniffing his underarms and looking for breath mints.
Eager to find new muck to hurl against Ruffrox and anyone else, Anastasia Dark had come west from New York. Jozey resented Dark’s intrusion on her Hollywood beat. The two exchanged silent glares.
Ruffrox posed for pictures but discouraged questions that veered off from the movie. One voice whose source was a small man barely visible in the crowd repeatedly shouted at Spence, “Did Roxie sacrifice dogs in New Orleans?”
Spence managed a casual smile with clenched teeth. “No, she baked cupcakes.” Other intrusive queries were quickly interrupted with, “Questions about the film, please. Next?”
~*~
On Sunday, March 2nd, Guy Drake’s page in Sunday Scenes and Sounds skipped slights on Ruffrox parenting and the Vodou issue in general. His latest specious spasm was headlined, “ROSITA TELLS JACK: HE’S NOT YOUR BABY!!” This Drake attributed to the apparent keen eavesdropping of “a former employee of the Alvarado household.”
Sunday night in California but Monday morning in Hay-on-Wye, a new site hit the worldwide web. Its title was flashed in ads on every major ISP’s home page: Gossip Hags and Tabloid Bitches. “Find out the truth behind the tabloid tales – and behind the tellers!” the ads invited. Unlovely pictures of columnists and on-air defamers were captioned with their names. The byline under the site’s title bar was: “Unnamed Source, Secret Informant, Our Insider, Friend Close to, Anonymous Witness, and Obvious Liar: Meet Us Here!”
Spencer and Robbie called the latter’s sister Marcy, widow of Kent and a computer science college professor, who had designed and launched the site to the men’s specifications. “Looks good. Are you getting many hits over there?”
“More every hour. I’m thinking of posting that nettle beer recipe...”
“Forebear, Sweet Sister Super-Geek! That swill could add ten year’s to Em’s sentence.”
To Drake’s bastard bash, Joe himself was Jack’s best rebuttal. On the Gossip Hags and Tabloid Bitches site high-quality portraits of father and son made obvious their shared genes, from the shape of their ears, eyes and brows to the curve of their smiles.
The factual version of the crash that had killed Robbie Abbot’s brother-in-law was quoted from the actual Constable’s report. Identifying the teenaged photo-faker and his sisters – the girls shown smiling and the boy shamefaced – Hags and Bitches put the original hospital-entrance image beside the doctored and relocated one on the website’s opening page.
A variety of slander victims set their records straight.
“I wasn’t at Mardi Gras – I was in Germany; they don’t have it there.”
“My lawyer made his lawyer shut him up. But he has never apologized, the weasel.”
“For God’s sake I don’t even own a cow!”
Readers were encouraged to contribute casual shots of tabloid corps members. Further, the contributors submitting the best examples of press prevarications would win free tickets and a teeshirt silk-screened with the site’s icon: “The Flaming Arse.” “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire” was the slogan beneath this emblem of a pear-shaped gender-unspecific figure with flaming posterior.
Contestants’ entries must be 100% true and properly documented.
A line from Rudyard Kipling’s “If” bordered the bottoms of each of Hags and Bitches’ pages: “...Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies...”
~*~
On Monday afternoon Jozey got a phone call in her office from a woman who said, “I used to work for Anastasia Dark. The bitch fired me so I’m giving you this: your husband Marvin is at the DeKuyper Hotel with a woman he calls Gwen. They go there a lot. And Anastasia is headed there now with a photographer. If you get a move on fast you’ll beat them there. But hurry. Room 326.” The connection clicked off. Jozey dashed out.
At the DeKuyper she demanded a key to 326. Denied that by the concierge, she went first to the bar and gulped down a whiskey sour. Out of the corner of her eye she caught an image that struck her cold: a big black man in a top hat and one-lensed sunglasses. Whirling, she found she faced a mirror. Jozey bolted from the bar. Finding the elevators she froze again – there he was, just a glimpse of him in a lift car as doors rolled shut!
“Damn it!” Jozey hissed out loud. “It’s just nerves. Get a goddamn grip!”
A secreted camera caught Jozey rapping on the door to room 326. Another snap when a slender brunette answered the knock. The 326 door was quickly slammed shut. Jozey waited, pacing and fuming, until her scowling husband emerged.
Marvin was slim, straight and well groomed, even dapper. He was normally as orderly and imperturbable as Jozey was disorderly and excitable. At this moment he was almost disheveled.
He tried to maintain dignity. With Jozey railing at him and Gwen sobbing behind him, that was not possible.
Marvin had wed Jozey assuming that her proximity to the entertainment scene would give him some caché there. But her place in that scene was adversarial. And her despised dishonesty embarrassed him. Now, he had embarrassed her and had lost the ethical high ground.
He resigned himself to a disgraceful divorce.
From somewhere over her shoulder a flashbulb flared but by the time Jozey turned, room 327's door had closed. The Markswells descended the elevator together snarling at each other.
Expecting to meet Anastasia Dark in the lobby, Jozey insisted that Marvin sit with her there and order drinks. They would face down that virago united. Looking united, anyway. Morosely Marvin ordered beer and sat it out. Jozey had three more whiskey sours. But Dark never showed.
Photos of the doorway confrontations taken by Spencer’s bodyguard Hank would soon appear at Gossip Hags and Tabloid Bitches.
Likewise a shot of Gwen exiting room 326 alone. And another of the miserable couple sulking in the lobby over drinks. But only after Marvin’s affair was exposed through the column of Anastasia Dark.
Hank’s lobby pic included the curious image of a tall black man with an incandescent smile in a top hat and tails, leaning on a black baton, partly hidden by a potted palm. His tinted spectacles lacked one lens.
~*~
On Wednesday March 5th, mysterious emails hit 5 online boxes. Ostensibly from Beryl Couvier, under subject line “Who Done It?” the intriguing emails were dated after her death. Five “Who Done It?” accusations featured facts but no names, about past or present bad behavior, and there was a different accusation in each email. Each gossip received only one. The emails’ author – who signed them “Beryl from Beyond” – vowed that if their contents were published immediately, the names of “Who Done It” would be sent on the following day. Each gossip assumed the accused were familiar subjects of their slurs: actors, actors, athletes, a few politicians. It seemed that Beryl had arranged these gossip gifts as legacies, posthumous gestures of camaraderie – and mutual malice towards the people who had provided her a living. And provided her colleagues their livings.
Thursday saw all five pieces published, in print, on air or online.
Headlines like “GOSSIP FROM THE GRAVE” and “BERYL’S FINAL GEMS” festooned tabloid front pages and titled a long list of web blogs.
~*~
Also Thursday Roxie and Spence taped a joint appearance on “The Tonight Show.”
Attempting a flat, nasal Down-Under drawl Roxana gave a comical rendition of: “The Australian Constitution: Article One: Waltz, Matilda. Article Two: Party Hearty! Third and Fourth Articles deal with government, law and courts, stuff nobody gives a damn about. Article Five, they do care about: Beer! No beer shall be served in a container smaller than...a missile silo. Article Six, we ladies care about: Men’s Swimsuits. Men’s swimsuits shall be no larger than– ”
“A meat missile!” Spencer injected.
“...than absolutely necessary,” Roxie finished when she could. “Article Seven: There shall be no rules in Aussie Rules Football. Amendment One: An odd bloke in white homburg and lab coat shall at intervals in each match, enter the field with a placard, on which are displayed the phone numbers of girls who want to date players. Amendment Two: the team whose uniforms get muddiest, wins! Aussie, Aussie, Oy, Oy, Oy!”
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