by Betsy Robinson
Dear Billy Bruce
Well, it’s finally happened. Thirty-two years after the fact, me and my naked breasts have made it into a Google search. I discovered this today after I noticed a couple of a-holes from Georgia landing on my website after searching for my Equity name, which I guess I should mention since we haven’t talked in all that time. Rosalita Mendelowitz? Remember me? You cast me in your backers’ audition of a Broadway-bound experimental theater piece because you said my hair was just thin enough so that I could pass as a mental patient with trichotillomania.
Anyway, since I gave up my acting career—shortly after a critic masquerading as someone with money wrote an unauthorized review of that scene where I got stripped naked by two enormous women with beards that said I looked like “two traumatized mammary glands in the spotlights”—since I have not appeared publicly in all that time and reside in an unzoned shack in the Colorado mountains, it was a dead giveaway that these Georgia a-holes weren’t looking for the present-day me—the aging freelance writer and editor in order to pay her money to perform non-nefarious publishing services. Out of curiosity, I, too, Googled Rosalita M., and there I was in a fuzzy photo with bad Photoshopping to make my face look lascivious instead of shell-shocked. I know you promised there would be no still photography, so I assume it was taken by some a-hole with a secret camera in the back of the house.
I’ve got to admit I have mixed feelings:
On one hand, at the age of almost sixty-two, it was kind of fun to see that picture for the first time. And I must say, I look a lot better now, having shed a bunch of pounds after giving up dried fruit during the Recession, and now eggs and meat and anything of nutritional value that isn’t in a can (the electricity is spotty in this unzoned Shangri-lah), which I do wish I’d done about three weeks before the performance so my midriff didn’t look so wide. Not to mention, I’d have saved myself years of high cholesterol.
On the other hand, on the list of things I’m upset about, my fuzzily reproduced naked breasts on the Internet aren’t a high priority. I would much rather solve the world economic problems, make sure everybody had compassionate comprehensive health care, end the fighting in Ukraine, have steady income so I could quit worrying about my financial situation at seventy-five and have a nice bathroom. Also, that book-banning stuff has got to go and I would give teachers and librarians big raises and consider their territory sacred. But I digress.
People can be pretty scuzzy, as demonstrated by whatever a-hole posted that fuzzy photo, and I’m pretty easily tracked since I have a cell number on my website so that I can attempt to attract good clients who will provide me steady income until I’m at least seventy-five when hopefully Social Security and the $1.50 in my Equity Pension will kick in if they, respectively, haven’t gone bankrupt or been dismantled by the members of union-hating Orange Man Brigade. But I do not want to be found because somebody wants to talk about my breasts.
However, in the event that some a-hole does call, I have thought up some pretty cool things to say, such as, “You really need to get a life.” Or “I’m so flattered, but I’m sixty-two years old and those breasts are now down around my knees. Are you sure you’re into this phone call?” (A lie because, as I mentioned, I look pretty damned good for my age. Let there be no mistake about that!) But much as I’d like to try out these lines, I wonder if there’s any way you could get the photo off the Internet.
This is not a huge deal to me, Billy Bruce, so only if you’re hanging around wondering what to do with your time now that you retired from Broadway (congrats, by the way, on your attempts to revive Wolf Women in Heat at Lincoln Center—what do those idiots know about art!) or if you’re egging to vent some copyright infringement rage.
On the other hand, maybe one of those a-holes will be so curious about me, he’ll buy a book. In which case, leave the damned fuzzy photo alone. No problem. Maybe I should wait and see what happens.
Hope you and the wife and Billy Bruce, Jr., and your new Billy Bruce Indie Film Company are well. I hear you’ve had quite a success in outsider web TV—is that what those new TV series that aren’t seen on TV are called? Forgive me, but I’m a little out of it since I haven’t worked in three months and my breasts are weighing me down. But anyhoo, keep up the good work, Billy Bruce, and just if you have time, could you maybe look into the Google thing? I’d appreciate it.
All the best,
The former Rosalita M.
Bio: Betsy Robinson writes funny fiction about flawed people. Her novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg is winner of Black Lawrence Press’s 2013 Big Moose Prize and was published in September 2014. This was followed by the February 2015 publication of her edit of The Trouble with the Truth by Edna Robinson, Betsy’s late mother, by Simon & Schuster/Infinite Words. She recently published revised ebook and paperback editions of her Mid-List Press award-winning first novel, a tragicomedy about falling down the rabbit hole of the U.S. of A. in the 1970s, Plan Z by Leslie Kove. Her articles have been published in Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Writing Bad, Prairie Fire, Oh Reader, Lit Mag Roundup. Betsy is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. Her website is www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.