Who's that girl?

The reason I haven't posted since last week is because my girlfriend Lennie made me get a myspace page (see Mom Gone Wild link on sidebar), which sent me into a spiral of despair, confusion and possibly early menopause.

I tried telling Lennie that myspace, like fruit-shaped cereal, is for kids. But she insisted I would fit right in. I am extremely suggestible. If all my friends were jumping off a bridge, I would absolutely be right behind them. Within forty-five minutes of Georgia telling me she had strepp the other day, I felt my throat closing over. So on Thursday morning, with the schools cancelled because there had been a snowflake, I ventured in. It was extremely disorienting at first, like going to a rave, or shopping at Old Navy. Flashing lights and loud music. I groped around blindly until I found a code generator and was able to pull together a myspace page, all the while wondering, what in the hell am I doing? Like I haven't split my creative focus enough already. Such is the life of the ENFP.

For those of you who have not myspaced, it is like a Playboy playmate questionaire, or temp agency application. You are prompted to list your interests, vital statistics, inclinations and other personal details. It was a lot of pressure. I had to choose a song, a music video and a photograph. It was a little like planning my own funeral. For the video, I used our family Rock Star. I flipflopped on the theme music, settling on the Shins new single, but if I ever go back in, I will likely change it again. As for the photograph, it was challenging to find something recent that didn't scream Mom. I needed to be wearing something without mucus on it.

I settled on a photo taken last year, on the night I retired my Super Heroine Dress, my favorite and most outrageous get-up of all time. I found it in a secondhand store in 1996, and am wearing it in the above snapshot from about that time, taken in the parking lot of the blues shack where I worked (as a waitress, in case the five-inch heels mislead you into thinking I had a job as an exotic dancer — that, I did for free at the after hours club, after five or six bourbon-and-cokes). Although the Super Heroine Dress is not visible under my fringe leather coat, you can get the overall vibe. A picture of the actual dress is posted on the myspace page and here, at my friend Kathy's online gallery (I would adore a signed print of this for my wall, if anyone felt like impulsively buying me a present).

Within a few hours of creating my myspace profile, I had an offer to go have "drinks" from some Michael Scott-type who said he was coming through town on business. This caused me to play up the married-with-kids-church-lady angle that I was trying to play down in my photograph. My About Me section reads like a Mormon caught at a strip club...I am just there to save souls.

Once I had my myspace page complete, it turns out there was absolutely nothing left to do. As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of myspace is to find someone you know and send them a message that says, "Hey! You're on myspace! I'm on myspace too!" And then you do the cyber equivalent of staring into your drink, pretending to enjoy the pounding music and strobe lights. Unless I am missing something, that seems to be the extent of it. Kids today.

Well, there I was with all my mixed feelings about the Dress, and growing older, and being more and more Out of It. So I spent the weekend writing about it, thinking I would post those thoughts here. But it turned into something bigger, so I am looking for a home for it elsewhere. Also, some money would be nice. Business has been kind of slow, and I might have to locate those shoes.