SOUNDTRACK:
[READ: December 9, 2022] “Le Cochon”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my fifth time reading the Calendar. I didn’t know about the first one until it was long out of print (sigh), but each year since has been very enjoyable. Here’s what they say this year
Like we always do at this time: the Short Story Advent Calendar is back for 2022. We had such a great time last year working with our first-ever guest editor, the one and only Alberto Manguel. This year, however, we’re bringing things back to basics. No overarching theme or format, just 25 top-class short stories, selected in-house, by some of the best writers in North America and beyond. It’s December 12. Jasmine Dreame Wagner, an American writer and interdisciplinary artist, once received a stuffed unicorn from Tim Curry. (This one is true!)
This is a story of exaggerated possible deliberate misunderstanding.
Honey Vienna is an actress. She is hanging out of a window of a flat in New York City. She is calling for attention from everyone including her younger sister, Ingrid, whom she literally sent a letter to to come and see her.
In typical fashion she had even called the cops on herself.
She yelled that Lew called her a hack-voiced, freaked-out pig, a mass of psychotic confusion, infantile and heartbreaking.
What Lewellyn had, in fact said, was that Honey was a cherry bomb, a cannon cracker, an anthropological dig, a high priest delivering an Easter mass of psychedelic Confucianism, ejaculatory and, yes, heartbreaking, but she hadn’t heard any of that.
The final section shows Ingrid retelling the above story which happened five decades earlier. Honey Vienna had become famous which Ingrid seemed displeased with.
Okay, so I utterly missed what the author says:
“Le Cochon” is a story about a drag queen and the perfume executive who loves her so deeply that he sponsors a permanent wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute to honor her wig collection as a collective masterpiece before he passes on. It’s a short narrative about family and legacy, an alternative history that honors the wig as an ahistorical object on the level of an ancient sacred amulet or a weapon or shield from antiquity, one with ritualistic transformative powers that must be preserved for the greater good.
I was completely out of my depth on this one.
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