Making Flippy Floppy

Yesterday evening I had a bizarre chance meeting with a real local celebrity. I was perched in my usual spot at my usual haunt, relaxing after work and chatting with my homegirl Jessi the bartender, some of the boys and “Mama Maggie”, Leo’s friend from Oklahoma. A couple of friends stopped by to see if anyone wanted to go down to the North Idaho College SUB with them to see the Raining Jane concert. “Not until they start serving Martinis” was our group reaction and off they went. The front door has a trigger that sets off an electronic announcement whenever it’s opened that robotically barks “Beep! Beep! Front Door!” This is for when the place is dead and if the bartender is in back she knows someone’s just arrived. However, us regulars hear it and immediately our heads all turn to the front door to see what character is going to enter stage left. “Beep! Beep! Front Door!” and a petite woman in an ugly white and green windbreaker pops down the stairs. She’s talking on the phone and she elicits no reaction from us at first. As we began to absorb her presence, our eyes darted bark and forth, exchanging looks of mirth and confusion. I think Alex was the first one to say it: “Oh. My. God. What in Gay Hell is that poor woman wearing underneath that ugly-ass windbreaker?” Let’s put it this way: Her top half was all soccer-mom casual: the jacket, hair in a pony tail, denim cap. From the waist down it was purple, pink and orange sequined hot pants, shiny black nylons, dancing shoes. She lingered on the other side of the room, still chatting on her phone, as we cattily invented possibilities to explain her look. My favorite was Brett’s: “Oh girl, she just done got off the Greyhound Bus, if you know what I’m saying.” Me: “Um…no, I guess I don’t know what you’re saying...” Brett: (rolling eyes) “She a ho!” We sat motionless and silent as she hung up her cell and walked up to the bar. Even without any help from the outfit, it was plain to see we had a crazy lady on our hands just by her general demeanor and vibe. You could see the fear in poor Jessi’s face as she approached the woman: “What can I get you, sweetie?” “Democracy. Real democracy, that’s what you can get me…” and she prattled on for what must have been about 30 seconds, but what must have seemed like an eternity for Jessi who just stood there, mouth agog, eyes glazed. As soon as she opened her mouth I realized exactly who we had on our hands, and in my excitement I blurted it out: “Oh god, I know who she is!” She heard me say it and the boys withered as she instantly headed over our way. Ask anyone I know and they’ll tell you I’ve always been a magnet for off-the-wall, mentally ill freak-a-zoids. I have no idea why they always find me, but they always do, and I actually don’t mind some of them that much, as long as they bathe. They can be sort of entertaining and I’m always polite and respectful. Sometimes I wish I was a film director in the vein of John Waters or Harmony Korine, so I could put all the weirdoes that flock to me to some good use. As she bounced over to me, she threw off the windbreaker to reveal a psychedelic bustier also made of purple, pink and orange sequins, and with kind of a Native American flair to it. It was like something Bob Mackie might have thrown together for Pocahontas. She had endless beads and gadgets strung around her neck and arms, and on the back of the dress she wore something I can only describe as a cross between a giant dreamcatcher and an eagle’s nest. “So…how do you know me, then?” she chirped, and the question was on everyone else’s lips as well. I thought about how to approach it delicately? “I saw you in the newspaper a couple of times few years ago when I was going to NIC, you’re a little notorious,” I said. Mary B. You’ll likely remember her from an incident in 2004 when Raining Jane was playing the NIC SUB for a packed lunchtime crowd and she leaped onstage, ripped her blouse open to expose her rather pendulous breasts and some gruesome scars, all covered in some crusty body paint. Chaos ensued, and Mary was escorted out. Apparently she had been 86’d off campus quite a few times in previous weeks for creating a variety of public disturbances she’d created to bring attention to her bizarre patchwork of causes. Oddly, in Idaho it’s actually legal for women to bare their breasts in public, but she was jailed for trespassing. The story hit both local papers the following day and Mary B was the name on everyone’s lips. It was her fifteen minutes of fame, you could say. (Here’s a link to the archived news article including her full name.) So, three years later and Raining Jane comes back to NIC to play another concert, and Mary decides she is going to make an encore performance as well. This time, however, she had the courtesy to email her intentions to the college and was greeted upon her arrival with four CDA police officers who kindly told her to scram. After a bit of a kerfuffle she did scram, and somehow our lounge was where she decided to land. And here she was in front of me, suddenly yammering away at 80 miles a minute:

“Yeah, they tried to call these flabby old things breasts in the newspaper, I took that as a compliment, ha, ha…one time, they had all these different tables in the lobby representing all the different groups, so I decided I was gonna set up a table too, to represent the mentally ill, but they didn’t like that idea too much, ha, ha…they tried to tell me I couldn’t lay my protest blanket on the grass, only on the asphalt, and you know what that word sounds like! ha, ha…and they really thought they needed 8 burly cops to handle little me, don't I look like such a hardened criminal? ha, ha...”

Protest blanket? She demonstrated for me her special spiritual juju dance she invented that she wants to film and post on the Christian media site Mosaic (I’m guessing they won’t let her.) She talked about how she loves her camera phone because she can record “the evidence” because “you can’t be too careful when the FBI is following you.” She showed me her tomahawk, which she claimed was “made of a 7,000 year old fossilized sea clam and was blessed at the Altar of the Blackfoot Indian.” She said she’d recently had her name changed to Stone Calf Warrior Woman. I noticed all my “friends” had gradually abandoned ship, leaving me alone to deal with the crazy person, as usual. Actually, although she is quite nutty, she’s essentially harmless and I actually found some of her stories and viewpoints to be quite interesting. In reality, I share many of her basic viewpoints about Bush and the war, the out-of-control CDA Police, the treatment of native Americans. Unfortunately, her message is ultimately lost within her scattered delivery of it. One moment she would say something really eloquent about ending the war in Iraq, and the next minute she was ranting like loon about some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theory involving her son, the FBI, the “internet people”, Jesus Christ and the angry spirits of 9,000 dead Indians. I listened to her for about 20 minutes and excused myself to the men’s room, hoping she might have decided to drift on to another set of ears. Sure enough, when I came out she had latched onto Kris and Jason who’d had just enough pitchers of beer to find her amusing. Actually, Kris was spot-on when he described her as “comedy gold.” She made Kris use her camera phone to snap a shot of her and I, then she asked for my phone number. “Don’t have one right now,” I lied. She said “Email?” Why not, it might be fun to see what kind of messages I might get from her. Our friends that had gone down to the Raining Jane show returned and a mild panic emerged. The band was headed our way after they were done breaking down their set, and they probably would not be delighted at the idea of a reunion with their number one breast-baring, mentally ill fan. Everyone looked at me. I said “Fine, I’ll get rid of her IF you buy my next beer.” I just told her the truth of the situation and she said “I don’t have anything against Raining Jane, they just happened to be there when I decided to stage my protest. I guess I owe ‘em one…call me a cab, I’ll go.” With that, she put on her god-awful windbreaker, grabbed her clam fossil tomahawk and was gone. When I got home I decided to do a quick email check before crawling in and sure enough she had sent me our photo along with a strange little audio file in which she addresses “Representative Sayler… Democracy Now… my son…and whoever else I’m sending this to…” and ends with the mantra “I want to have my dance shown on Mosaic!” Listen here.

Labels: Mik-n-Mac's, Stone Cap Warrior Woman, Strange Happenings