Virginia closed her eyes and imagined a floating Rolodex before her. Lenny watched, mesmerized as she raised up her arms and flicked her fingers in front of her face like some sort of off-the-hook administrative assistant. She feverishly flipped through her 400 nonprofit connections in Bozeman. No, she thought, we need cash, not the under-funded, liberal crowd.
And then she hit ‘F’. Virginia opened her eyes, looked Lenny as straight in his crooked face as possible, and said, “I think I’ve got our man.”
For his part, Lenny was taken. Not only did this woman have some organizational skills, she was a magician. Maybe he could write in a part for her in the musical, or maybe just be her manager. He wasn’t sure whether to take off her now-steamy glasses and kiss her, or sit down, shut up and listen. Although it was not in his nature, he sat in awe.
When Virginia hit the ‘F’ section of her Rolodex, she quickly came to Irwin Finklestein. The image of this eccentric, Jewish New Yorker flashed before her as she last saw him. He was standing in front of a window fan in his Manhattan apartment, long gray hair blowing in all directions, leopard skin briefs - whoa. The image wasn’t all that appealing. A down-side to channeling contact people was that you always got that last vision of them… Irwin was a scholar of ancient Tibetan script, specialized in growing rare orchids, and was Virginia’s former lover. He lived between his apartment in downtown Manhattan and an old, renovated grain tower outside of Bozeman. Like many Tibetan scholars and rare orchid growers, Irwin had a sizable trust fund and was highly connected in NYC. Also notable, she explained to Lenny, was his production of the very popular Oklahoma performance in Lhasa - the only western musical of its kind performed entirely by Tibetans for Tibetans.
At this point, Lenny’s mind was scheming like a whirling dervish. Visions of Virginia as the next David Copperfield blended with saffron-robed monks yodeling and dancing across his Butte stage. People would come from China, New York, hell, maybe even from the Yellowstone Club, to visit and fall in love with the land of pulchritude and plenty, Butte! He nearly
was in tears with visions of fame, money and people bursting into song.
Seeing Lenny’s reaction to the mention of Irwin, Virginia realized she was going to need to call him. This would be a little awkward in lieu of their last meeting, but she just had to rise above it. After all, cross-dressing had never been a crime, and even though she felt very uncomfortable with the reptiles, she just had to remember that not all people were brought
up with the strong family values she was - thank god - instilled with as a young girl.
1 comment:
Liz's part was read by Heidi. It was written by a true Bozemaniac, as evidenced by the incisive character description of fellow residents. Irwin could hardly have been written by someone unfamiliar with the multiple personality disorder that creates the spiritualist-deviant-scholar so common in that town. Bozeman, a place in some ways far funnier than Butte, at least more farcical, began to pull the gravity of attention away from beautiful Butte.
Liz dropped some of her own mystery nuggets that served to later confuse and fuse the story in hysterics.
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