I Survived the 2006 Maritime Writers’ Workshop and Literary Festival – The Princess of Art, Revisited

So there we were … me … Joyce … Rand … and Ionesco (dressed in drag) … crawling for culture. And we were magnificent! We were the cat’s ass. We were godlings of the night on the prowl and hungering for culture and booze.We crawled through a maze of streets and traffic signs, bellies bared to the hot night wind, thirsting for a zesty glass of Shiraz.

We came across an Oasis in the Cultural Hole, Ingrid Mueller’s Art Gallery. She had paintings. She had photographs. She had sculpture. She had wine. We crawled in and rolled across the floor, knocking over Queen Elizabeth who, as usual, wasn’t buying anything … just drinking the wine and eating the cheese and talking to everybody who didn’t have a gay cat. Of course, she ignored me, having heard of my gay cat, Pico.

Ingrid (disguised as Ingrid Mueller, the Princess of Art) saw me rolling on the floor and stuck one of her 10 inch stiletto heals into the side of my head and said, “You just knocked over the frickin’ Queen of England, you little perv.”

This is Ingrid Mueller moments after taking her 10 inch stiletto heal out of my head when she was finally convinced that I had knocked the Queen of England on her butt as an absurdist expression of performance art. She told me to drink much wine and keep my grubby fingers off the paintings.

By now I had one knee operating one leg from the middle of the hamstring, up. It made for great crawling. I crawled to the bar.

Jimmy Salinger was passing out the wine. He raised my roof beam high with a double whammy Shiraz that knocked me backwards into Joyce who was having a love-in with his belly dancing instructor, Emmy Dickenson.

This is not really Joyce, I learned later. He was just a stream of stuff from Dickenson’s unconsciousness. But he could really pack away the Shiraz for a stream.

Rand and Ionesco (dressed in drag) somehow defied all the odds of gravity and made it to their feet and approached Joey Conrad for directions to the next bar … er … gallery.

Conrad thought carefully about a route to the next bar … er … gallery leading through some godforsaken jungle of slaughter spanning entire continents that would have put all us all up shit creek without a paddle whining, “O, the oar!” Rand and Ionesco (dressed in drag) ate him on the spot. On the way out, we pounced on an unsuspecting smiling family and ate them as well. One must use the found objects of one's environment when crawling for culture.

This unsuspecting smiling family was terribly eaten in the name of culture.

Next: Joyce at Joyce and other bedtime parables.