Suzanne Holds the Mirror

Yesterday my friend, Stephanie and I wore purple skirts with flowers on them. I wore a blue flower in my hair. My eyemakeup matched my earrings. She had on orange clown shoes and put her long dreadlocks up in a half bun on her head. When we went to the Mexican restaurant, she took the little paper Mexican flag out of the grapefruit margarita that we shared and put it at the crown of her head.

Stephanie (sometimes she calls herself "Steffy Sue") and I went to the carnival in the parking lot of the local community college. It was getting cold and as we walked under the shadows of the rides we would shiver a little bit. The rides were expensive, so we only rode a few: the kamikaze was like a boat at the end of a pendulum that hung you upside down. We rode the tilt-a-whirl (if you lean to one side you spin faster) and the zipper.

The zipper is a 30 foot high rectangle with a track that goes around it like a compacted ferris wheel. On the track are cages that can flip upside down and turn around 360 degrees. It was raise us up over Oakland and then we would flip backwards and fall forwards while it lowered us back and around. I love feeling like something terrible is about to happen, like you're going to hit the car in front of you, or you're going to fall out, yet knowing that you are completely safe and that someone has engineered this thing to not hit the car in front of you and that thousands of people have already been in this exact situation and have come out just fine.

Once, while we were walking around, a woman looked at us and said to her friend, "Are they the Charmed Sisters?!?!" referring to the TV show about witches. I wonder if I was Shannen Dougherty or Alyssa Milano. It's funny how you can only see what you already know.