Note to Distant Friends
One of the best Party Girl scenes comes when Parker Posey as Mary hits the club in a black jumpsuit with sequin cap sleeves and elbow-length, baby blue silk gloves. As a jazzy clarinet riffs over house beats, she suspends advising her friend on a couch to yell NATASHA! at a Grace Jones-esque belle on the dance floor rocking a suit the shade of aged Shiraz, and soon she’s up holding poses like an art class model as Natasha vogues up, down, and around her figure. When she’s done the two play-shove before they split, and once Mary gets back to her friend we aren’t shown Natasha again. It isn’t the music, looks, choreo, even the way she says NAH-TAH-SHAAAH that makes it. It’s all of that, and the quickness of it, this high clown aside between a pair that maybe never meets sober or in bright light. There’s still a true kind of love between them, even if they only see each other at night, in chic glimpses, and that’s exactly how I love you.
Ode to the Crop Top
O sliced crêpe;
dress code break;
half- set sun;
slut symbol;
cracked window;
short story;
a whole summer carnival, shrunk.
How I adore your spunk,
your sincere open call for air
on my belly hair.
The little Target® boy
groaning eww as I pass
isn’t worth any ire.
He’s playing with fire,
but his parents lit the torch.
To think such small cloth
sparks grown brains aflame.
Why you in a girl’s top,
the man yells in DC.
I could have cut him one too,
so we’d both feel the breeze.