It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [17]
Now continually aware that an ungrievous death was right at my fingertips closest to the saltshaker, I had one hope for my birthday party, and that was simply that I wouldn’t be found heaped over the hors d’oeuvres station with guests lifting my limbs and skull for easier access to the onion dip. As long as I survived the celebration, or even if I died and one person cried, I was going to consider it a success.
But so far, everything was going according to plan as the 31st drew nearer. I wasn’t hospitalized, needing an organ transplant or atrophying in a coma due to age-related age. Instead, I was elated when Jamie mentioned several weeks before that she would drive the hundred miles from Portland to attend, and it was then that I got a brilliant idea. I presented my plan to her and she agreed, saying, “The only thing better than a party is a party where I never have to get up.”
And thus it was sealed.
When she arrived at my house on Halloween morning, she had her little suitcase and a satchel with her, and in the suitcase was everything she needed to complete my plan and become her Blanche Hudson to my Baby Jane from the classic camp horror movie.
Jamie and I first watched What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in high school, absolutely glued to the screen as the former vaudeville child star Baby Jane, played by Bette Davis, tormented her sister and former movie star, Blanche, played by Joan Crawford. Ever since then, I had tried to talk Jamie into using the sisters as Halloween characters but had never had much luck. Confined to a wheelchair due to an accident blamed on her drunk and jealous sister, Jane, Blanche—and her pets—are helpless as Jane dives deeper and deeper into boozy rages and insane, delirious tantrums. Honestly, if there’s anything more hilarious than an aged drunk with smeared makeup, it’s an aged drunk dressed up like a Little Miss pageant contestant reliving her youth in delusions and liquor-fueled hallucinations. True, that’s how I plan on spending my retirement, but as soon as you add a witness to a sullied, addled existence, it quickly loses its playful charm. Which sheds some light on why I could never talk a sixteen-year-old Jamie into dressing up on Halloween to flirt with boys at parties in which every single teen male was dressed as Bo or Luke Duke and wanted to spend the end of the night making out with Daisy, not a fifty-year-old malnourished paraplegic.
But now things were different. Although I was still conscious and was not writing letters to everyone I’d ever met asking them to see if they were a kidney match for me, I do have high blood pressure, and my dentist has thrown around the word “implant” like it’s a party streamer. Two steps closer to death. I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them. And at this stage in the game, when my friends “make out” on anything, it means we have a coupon. Clearly, the time was now or never for our activation into the Hudson sisters. Gingerly, I led Jamie/Blanche across the living room to the corner where the wheelchair I had just rented from the medical-supply store awaited her.
“Ooooh,” she cooed in a dramatic voice several octaves lower than her own, taking on the patiently proper Blanche persona immediately as she adjusted herself in the chair.
“You didn’t eat cha din-din!” I cackled as I channeled Jane, quoting a line from the scene where Jane serves Blanche a feathered friend on a silver plate.
“You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this chair!” Blanche shot back at me accusingly in a dead-on Joan Crawford impression.
“Butcha are, Blanche! Ch’are in that chair,” I replied as I threw my hands up, Bette Davis–style.
It was a stellar performance, and I could already tell it was going to be a night to remember. After we had set the food up and the guests had started