I first reached out to the New Parkway Theater in March, when I was still learning to live with the chokehold Heated Rivalry had on me, trying to get my arms and brains around how to be productive within the madness, how to participate, how to make a difference or a dent or contribute something. I saw screenings happening throughout the world; I have been going to the New Parkway for years (and to the O.G. Parkway for years before that) so it seemed  perfect. I knew I wouldn’t have the bandwidth to do it until Fall, and they weren’t accepting private event requests that far in advance.

So I went about my life, setting a calendar reminder, doing my job and living my life and trying to feed the fanatical beast snarling inside me so it wouldn’t turn on its host and eat me.

In September of 2021, I came across a painting online. I think I may have been on Twitter — this was before Musk bought it and made the platform inarguably subjective, and at that point of the COVID-19 pandemic where those of us in places where that made a difference (footnote: like in CA but not in FL) stayed home, and any crevasse of the internet was a place to climb into — when she showed up:  A thick conflagration of marmalade hair, brutally parted down the middle like the innnnteresting monster in my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon, extending to the floor where it disappeared into shadow like the tail of a coat or the ashen ends of a halo too grand for its own good; an upside-down triangle face, gray-blue, dominated by staring almond eyes and topped by white eyebrows extending out vertically to form wings, thick and feathery as if to take flight and bear the weight of, if not her whole body, then at least her mind.