My Trip Down the Pink Carpet Read Online Free PDF Page B

would not let go.
    Boy George looked at me, then turned to one of his cohorts and giggled. “She fancies herself a jockey!” he said. He then broke into song: “She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when she comes! She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when she comes!”
    It all came to a head during a long shot of us standing majestically atop a high sand dune. The camera was miles away and the director shouted at us through a bullhorn. I had reached the end of my rope. The sand was blowing up under my prosthetic pieces and the skin on my face had been torn to shreds. Both my contact lenses were gritty and dry, and my eyes were hurting beyond belief.
    I was so desperate I tearfully asked Boy George what I should do.
    “Well, dear, I know a little Japanese,” he said. “I’ll teach you a phrase so you can alert the director.”
    “What will I be saying?” I asked, a little suspicious. I could tell he was up to something, but I wasn’t sure what.
    “I’ll teach you how to say ‘One more time only.’ That’ll let the director know you can only handle one more take.”
    And so he taught me the phrase, which I repeated to anyone who would listen.
    Boy George egged me on. “I don’t think he heard you. Say it real loud, to that guy over there. He seems to be friends with the director. He’ll explain your situation.”
    What was I saying?
    When the interpreter came running over in horror and told me to please shut up, I found out that it was:
    “Do you have a big dick?”
    Boy George laughed and laughed. Needless to say, I was ignored by the entire Japanese crew for the rest of the shoot.

Spilling My Guts

    The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.
    Will Rogers
    I HAVE always thought Gena Rowlands was the classiest gal around, and here she was, announcing the name of my first screenplay, “Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel,” as the winner of the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Production Grant Award for 1999! My screenplay had been selected over those of six hundred other applicants, so it was quite an honor.
    “Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel” came about from a short story I had written about my days of living on the fringe in Atlanta, Georgia. I had moved to Atlanta when I was nineteen years old so I could live an openly gay life. This was something I had not been able to do even after enrolling in college in Knoxville, an hour away from home. I still bumped into all these people I knew from my church and it was just a mess.
    I was tired of living a double life.
    Shortly after arriving in Atlanta, I became immersed in the whole 1970s club scene, which involved a lot of drugs and alcohol. I suppose it is human nature to sow a few wild oats in one’s impetuous youth, but perhaps because of my small stature I have always felt the need to do things a little bigger than the next person.
    I ran amok. With my aberrant behavior and ongoing shenanigans, I put on an exhibition such as the town had never witnessed. I have been told many times that I was a legend. This is not something I am thrilled to admit nowadays, but I suppose the best way to go down is in flames.
    Back then, I lived in an old hotel called the Pershing Point Hotel. This Villa Debris was in a dilapidated state and seemed to house many undesirables—there was always a select group of drag queens, thieves, whores, drug pushers, aging strippers, and other riffraff milling about outside. When she came to visit, my mother took one look and refused to get out of the car.
    My roommate and main partner in crime during those hairy days was a young woman on the lam from her debutante upbringing. She was a thrift shop peacock in huge black Jackie O sunglasses who strutted around town with everything she owned either on her back or in the enormous bag thrown over her shoulder. She was a self-described “bag lady in a limo.”
    She was Atlanta’s version of Edie Sedgwick.
    I called this young woman Miss Make