When '60s sex bomb Mamie Van Dorencalls you “stacked,” it's a little like Boris Yeltsin saying you like to drink. Which I do, and which is neither here nor there, except to say that the OC Peace Coalition's anti-war dance party Saturday at Hart Park in Orange was the greatest anti-war dance party ever!, and that no one should ever again hold an anti-war dance party without asking stacked little me to host it, or without asking Miss Mamie to bring her special brand of vampy anti-war brains and beauty. (Check out a video of her mad-as-hell speech at her Inside/Out blog at MamieVanDoren.com.) Sometimes anti-war rallies can be a little dreary when the folks organizing them forget to include the dance party part, but that wasn't going to happen on my watch! No sir!
After roll call with the freaks and hippies and vegetarians and police (who clapped and yelled from the back) and undercover police (who didn't) and anarchists and Greens and Dems and principled conservatives (I think there was one) and Decline to States and veterans and PTA moms and old people—”Old people, make some noise!” said I, and the old people, how they did!—we got down to the business of America, which is business, but mostly in our case the business of America was impeachment because brother, we are mad. Mad, I say! Maaaaad!
Were we as mad as The Real Housewives of Orange County were about their OC Weekly cover debut last week? Well, I'm not sure that's possible—at least now that New Orleans ain't on our TV screens every day. I'd venture that Americans were even madder at the government for losing an entire American city than the ladies of Coto de Caza were when I called their spoiled children “Hitler.” But maybe not. Sometimes people forget to have perspective. Especially in Coto.
Anyway, doing the Impeachment Boogie along with what the Orange PD estimated at 400 to 500 people, and what I estimated at 750 with no other evidence than vague intuition, we had the Weekly's own sage and loverly Jim Washburn; one of David Horowitz's 101 Most Dangerous College Professors, UCI's MarkLeVine; Aliso Viejo City Councilman Karl Warkomski (and if you can figure out why Aliso Viejo is electing Greens, please do let me know—and if you are a Green aiming to clarify it for me, do at least try to be concise); and Steve Young, an Irvine lawyer (and Democrat) who keeps running for Chris Cox's old seat in the 48th Congressional District. We'll let you know when that works out for him.
Also? Orange Unifiedschool board trustee and performance artist Steve Rocco was there. Congratulations, city of Orange!
After a hoot-filled march to the Orange Traffic Oblong, where but everyone honked and waved, bearing out the polls that show 75 percent of the American people now find the war in Iraq to be one giant clusterbomb of a clusterfuck, Vickie Castro, a Gold Star mother for peace, took the stage to remind us why we were actually there—not just to have a big hippie dance party or to cluck self-righteously about everything this administration touches turning to shit, but also because American mothers' sons are meeting the wrong ends of IEDs every day, and Iraqi mothers' everyones are there right alongside them.
You can blame Donald Rumsfeld for his disastrous and plumb-deef war planning, if you're a conservative who's now sort of admitting the war seems lost, or you can blame the administration for its 1984 solution to our 50/50 electoral divide—Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia—but . . . wait a minute. I think Iran just looked at us funny.
Same time next year, hippies? I'll bring the bongos.
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It was one of those event-rich weeks, since I'm off men and am now fantastically busy and actually left my house. For instance? I just called GOP fixer Mike Schroeder's mail-order Siamese bride and invited myself to her husband's birthday party this Thursday. “Hi, Susan!” said I. “I heard Mike's having a birthday party this week! Can I come?” I have never had shame, and I'm not going to start now—you just know they invited their pet, the Register's Slappy Mickadeit, and I'm ass-tired of riding Susan's back-of-the-bus!
“Okay, well, it's just going to be 80 of his closest friends,” she told me, pausing thoughtfully. “And you!” And then we laughed and laughed. Boy, that Susan Schroeder! What a hooker!
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What else got me off my ass this week? Well, Wednesday was Disney's Princesses on Ice! While far too long for all the 4-year-olds in attendance (it didn't end till 9:30 p.m.) and unnecessarily including second-tier princesses like Mulan and Belle from Beauty and the Beast, the skatravaganza had lots and lots of pretty dresses that had me absolutely inspired to find someone to make me a Louis XIV ball gown and also to lose 15 pounds, possibly by taking a yoga class or more likely by going hiking for the first time in years, which I actually did, going to Holy Jim Trail Sunday, where I saw stoners. From the smell of them as they passed, that was some fine, stanky green.
Thursday was Orange Crush at the Orange County Museum of Art—free, and starring the band all the hep 25-year-olds are groooving to, Madman Moon! “That last song is the single,” a guy enthused, to which I enthused back, “Yeah, a single for The Kinks in 1972!” Ray Davies should sue (oooo ooo ooo ooo ooo). Then I said lots of funny stuff about the Village Green Preservation Society that nobody got, but which was hilarious. Trust me. Some fun teens danced at the front, but when they tried to get some not-fun teens behind them to dance too, the not-fun teens exhibited such horrified looks and giggles you'd think someone had asked them to do something really embarrassing, like agreeing to be filmed by producers-unknown for a national audience that only wants to see assholes at their worst, or like, I don't know, bombing a hundred thousand people back to the Stone Age on a trumped-up lie.
Friday? How about Chris Gaffney and friends at the Fullerton Museum Center to open our own Jim Washburn's shiny, sparkly show of Nudie suits and 'spensive guitars mostly from the collection of Mac Yasuda. Billy Walker, a man with Reagan hair, purty blue eyes and preacher-man cadences sat in-uh with the band-uh on several of his age-old No. 1 records. It was the whitest music this side of Pat Boone, and it was beeyootiful, and the people, they danced.
