Julie Anne Long

Wondrous encounters of the exotic kind

Just look at that sweet little face down there. It's a marmoset, one of the world's smallest primates, and it's indigenous to the Central and South American rainforests. Which is why someone in East Palo Alto was startled to find this one running along their back fence yesterday. I should mention that despite its slightly exotic sound, East Palo Alto isn't exactly part of the rain forest. It's a suburb down Highway 101 in the Bay Area here in California, about a half hour from where I live.

So...holy cow. What would you do if you were, say, doing the dishes, maybe humming a little tune, la la la, and then looked up out the window...and saw that? Would you start to wonder just exactly how much wine you'd had with dinner?

"We thought, 'Sure. What have you been drinking?' Scott Delucchi, spokesman for the animal care agency, said of the call that came in from a resident saying a monkey was running along the back fence. "But when our officer arrived, there he was."

The marmoset is a tiny little thing, only twelve ounces, and no one knows where it came from. They were able to catch him, thank God, with the lure of a banana, and he's going to go live in Primarily Primates, a sanctuary in Texas. Which ought to be a bit of a culture shock for the marmoset, if he's a Bay Area native.  Here's the whole story.

It's kind of wondrous to stumble across a wild creature like that, and it suspends you in a moment of absolute sweet surreality—provided, of course, you haven't stumbled across a python, or something. (Still surreal, but less sweet.) A few years ago, my route to the train station from my job near the Embarcadero in San Francisco (close to San Francisco Bay) took me past a bar called Bricks and through a small park studded with with cypress trees. One evening as I passed Bricks I saw a...tiny cockatiel sitting at the curb. This little green thing. Like it had just stopped in for a few drinks and was waiting for a cab. It flew away as I drew nearer, and I thought, "Huh. Someone's pet, perhaps, has escaped." And I wished it good luck, and wondered how it would survive.

But then, as I entered the park, I heard this racket that sounded like...Good God, it sounded like... But it couldn't be... Could it?

I slowly looked up and saw, perched in the cypress trees...dozens of brilliant, noisy parrots. Chattering away. Big, green and red exotic birds, clinging to the branches, hanging upside down, preening, just generally being parrots. It was absolutely glorious, like plummeting headfirst into a Garcia Marquez novel.  And it brought on a brief sort of out-of-body experience, because it took me a moment to synchronize my accepted sense of reality with what I was actually seeing.

I'd stumbled across the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, a famous flock of parrots all of which probably used to be pets but have managed to create a home with each other in San Francisco. That particular park, and those cypress trees, are part of their daily route, too.  The wonderful 2003 documentary about them recieved rave reviews. It's a marvelous story.

And one day my sister, who lives in a woodsy town in very northern California, was driving along a curving mountain road when she noticed something odd jogging alongside the road. Something, um, unnervingly taller than the car. She slowed the car...and had her own sort of "Holy crap!" moment.  Because it was an emu. A giant, prehistoric-looking, three-toed bird, jogging down a mountain road. And when she pulled up alongside it, it actually slowed down and peered into her car. LOL. Turns out there was an emu farm in the hills where she lived, and this one had gone on the lam.

And so, since I won't be blogging on the weekends, generally, I just wanted to share those stories with you, and here's hoping your Fourth of July is safe, colorful, and delicious, and may you have a few wondrous, exotic encounters of your own. :)  And if you've had any odd little exotic encounters of your own, whether startling or wonderful, tell me about them in the comments!

On hearing the "F" word shrieked in public, and letting someone play with my hair...

(And the winner of the signed copy of BATS is...TERESA HENSON! Yay, Teresa! Thanks for helping me inaugurate the blog, everyone! If you commented yesterday but didn't win BATS, I'll send you a signed bookmark if you send me your address. :) And stay tuned for future giveaways!)

          It struck me yesterday that I can go for whole weeks without hearing the “F” word shrieked in public, but the moment I step onto a MUNI train to go downtown it’s usually only a matter of moments before I hear it. Yesterday, as I was riding the train to go get my hair cut, there was some sort of “altercation” (that’s almost too pretty a word for what this was) between two women on the train, which began with colorful swearing and concluded with the two of them windmilling their arms at each other in a chick fight—slap slap slap slap slap—until the bus driver heaved a long-suffering sigh, stalked over, and separated them. And then he herded them off the train. He was like a superhero bus driver. The rest of us applauded.

          Ah, MUNI. Don’t go changin’.

          MUNI is such a microcosm of all of San Francisco, and that’s what I hate about it, and that’s what I love about it. For $1.50, anyone in the world can get on the train. LOL. It’s one of those things that unifies everyone who lives here in a sort of collective cheerful loathing, and like the weather, talk of MUNI is an instant icebreaker. We all ride it.

          Anyway, so I went downtown and got a haircut. It was nice to do something purely physical and in service of my vanity—LOL—since I just finished a book and I’ve been burrowed into the psyches of all my characters. I wear all of the characters around like a series of second skins for weeks to try to get everything right—what are they feeling, thinking, seeing in this moment? How is the room lit, what details do they notice? How do I put this into the perfect words to capture the moment, move the story along? Am I spelling and punctuating and structuring the sentences properly as I do this? LOL. You do have to kind of feel and think and see on behalf of everyone in a book, and it's as if a whole crowd of other people have temporarily borrowed my mind and heart and thoroughly used both of them. It's like I need an exorcism when it's all over.

          Sitting slack-jawed in a chair and letting someone play with my hair seemed like just the ticket. LOL.

          Hair salons are adorable in some ways. I love mine. It’s in a big sunny loft on Powell Street, and though it’s quite the hipster place, and definitely not cheap, the clientele, men and women, are all different ages and from all walks of life, from groovy youngsters getting their hair elaborately spiked to older women getting their eyebrows dyed. It's a friendly place—no attitude from anyone, and you feel very welcome there, and they play the best music. LOL. Yesterday it was The Who, specifically the entire Who Are You? record. Great songs. And I love half-spying on people as they sit in salon chairs and point to their hair and fuss with it, looking mostly a wee bit vulnerable and self-conscious as they try to explain to their stylists how they want to look. We all have our measure of vanity. And I love watching how everybody leaves the salon looking brand new and with a spring in their step. I've had the same stylist for a decade, and she's the coolest—smart and funny and down-to-earth, and I've never had a bad haircut. From her. From other places, before I found this salon...boy, I've had some doozies. Ever had a haircut that made you weep? That convinced you that your boyfriend would immediately break up with you? LOL. Well, it was a long time ago, but I did indeed get that haircut. I looked like an artichoke.

          So how about anyone out there? Where do you get your hair cut? Have you gone to the same place for years? Ever had a reaaaaalllly bad haircut? How long has it been since you've dramatically changed your hair?

The Harmonious Unibrow, or the gritty reality behind the pretty words

SCENE:  Closeup of computer screen rapidly filling with rows of words as a pair of hands fly over the keyboard:

   
          It wasn’t until he heard the creak of a light step on the stairs to his room that he admitted to himself that he’d been waiting to hear it for days now.  That he’d lain awake for nights desperate for it, every one of his senses honed to razor alertness, hoping for it. Declined invitations, conducted a campaign of quiet seduction so unlike him it unnerved and distantly even amused him. Never had he wanted anything more, it seemed. Never had he been so uncertain about getting it.

Tom sat up in his bed, struck the flint to light the lamp next to his bed, and the tiny room glowed in the warm light. His hands shook, for God’s sake, even as he did it. His heart had set up a drumming in his chest.

He saw the light of her candle quiver against the wall first, and then the shadow of her, and then the woman herself. Her cloak was wrapped round her; beneath it, he saw light muslin.

Her hair was down, a sheet of silky darkness burnished by the dueling lights of her candle and his lamp.  He could scarcely breathe. When she saw his lit lamp, she lifted her own candle up with hands that trembled, and puffed it out. 

He couldn’t speak.

In silence, he watched her drop the cloak. Saw, in the shadows, the outline of her slim body through her dress, her long legs, slim waist. And in silence he watched as matter-of-factly she reached for her dress, and pulled it—Oh God—right over her head.

The site of her body completely bare to him all at once was an exquisite physical shock. He stopped breathing.

She began to fold the dress.

He remembered to breathe again. “For the love of God, Sylvie, leave the dress.”

She dropped the dress and laughed then, a soft, shaky little laugh. Lifted her hand to push back the long mass of hair, and he watched, mesmerized, the lift of her small perfect breast when her arm rose, then the waterfall sheen of the hair spilling behind her.

          OK, fairly steamy stuff, eh? We can assume that something passionate and sweaty is about to happen between two beautiful people, specifically Sylvie and Tom in WAYS TO BE WICKED (out in October.)
          Now....pan out from the computer screen to the author—aka, moi—who's feverishly typing these words while the Deadline Clock (think Doomsday Clock, only for authors) ticks the seconds inexorably away. Very likely I'm wearing my hair in one of my two favorite workaday styles, one of which I call The Radish—so named because the whole mass of my hair is scraped up into a ponytail, making my head look like a giant radish—the other of which I like to call the Cowardly Lion (or the Half-Radish) which involves just pulling the top half of hair up out of my eyes in an elastic, like the lion did when he was off to see the Wizard.
          If we're at the eleventh hour on the Deadline Clock, the finer points of grooming will have in general gone straight to hell, sacrificed in favor of spending as much time as possible writing. My eyebrows have probably begun to creep yearningly toward each other across the bridge of my nose in an attempt to form a single, harmonious unibrow, and other parts of me probably need exfoliating, trimming and shaving desperately. I'm probably wearing a red t-shirt (because most of my t-shirts are red, as are, at this point, my eyes) and my jeans are looser than they were a few weeks ago because I frequently forget to eat when I'm on deadline (don't weep for me: when it's over, I celebrate by eating with both hands, practically). And because it's chilly in the house I've absently reached for the nearest thing to put over the t-shirt, which is my lavender robe, so soft and thoroughly worn that if I accidentally drop it anywhere my cat immediately makes a nest in it. (Soft things and sunspots are like Kryptonite for cats—they must surrender. They instantly go all sleepy.) 
          In short, I am sexy as all get out. And the contrast between me and what's going on between Tom and Sylvie and in the story couldn't be more stark, and this always strikes me as pretty funny. Over at the Diva blog we've been talking about fashion this week, and it made me wonder: do we behave differently when we wear different clothes? Does dressing comfortably (some might say a little too comfortably) when I write free my imagination and intensify my focus? Or would my prose become more elegant if I wore a tiara and pantyhose? I once worked for a large company that made jeans, and the workaday attire was casual every single day, not just Friday...but we all worked CRAZY long, intense hours.  There was nothing remotely casual about that workplace.
          So what do you wear to work? Would you rather wear something else? Do you think dress codes make a difference? What's your favorite thing to wear when you're really dressing down?

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P.S. I'M GIVING AWAY SIGNED COPY OF BATS! I'll also choose a random winner of from today's commenters—commenters who aren't related to me, that is. :) So don't be shy—pipe up!

And for those in the know: Jennifer Y. of Georgia found my Stealth Contest hidden here, and she won a signed copy of BATS last night, too! BOY, she was fast! Keep your eyes on my website home page for more Stealth Contests—I do a couple per  month, usually, and I love to give books away to the quick and sneaky among you. :)