Baby Jane?

Baby Jane? (2011)

“Her gaze went to the row of French

doors that comprised, almost totally,

the east wall of the room, and to the

darkness beyond. The Hudson house,

a white, two-story Mediterranean

absurdity, loomed in ghostly dimness

at the end of the garden. “Can she

walk at all?”—Henry Farrell, What

Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Watching the drag version of Baby Jane had left me feeling rather disillusioned, dears—somehow helpless like the wasted old Fag I had most certainly become.

Once upon a tea time—I believed in the legends and glamour up there on the Silver Screen. The charm and magic that was said to once be the Divine Divas.

Especially Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. For simply years and years now I’d managed to guide myself thru the travails of tacky life—embracing them tightly so that their radiance could reach the awful chill spreading inside me.

But now I could see that watching old diva-flicks was a mistake. The shock of ogling and gawking at this latest campy drag-version of Baby Jane had simply wrecked me.

Gazing at the preposterous, posturing drag queen versions of Blanche and Baby Jane, I realized with stinging clarity—that all these years my sole defense against ugly empty Str8t reality had been simply a  deluded mistaken hollow illusion.

Johnny Be Good and I had been living here in this gothic rotting Sunset Blvd mansion for 20 years now—and neither one of us was getting any younger.

I sighed and hearing myself sigh, I reached out and rang my buzzer. My invalidism up here in the attic made me think of fallen leaves rotting slowly and hideously in some dank, sunless space.

I rang the buzzer again and again—knowing that Johnny Be Good simply hated me. He’s the one that stuck me up here—where nobody could see me.

I was the Madwoman in the Attic—the contours of my face underscored by dark shadows. Johnny wasn’t much better—the once pert and fox-like features of his face now embedded in folds and sagging wrinkles, wrinkles, wrinkles!!!

Johnny Be Good hated and despised me. He’d already pushed me in my wheelchair down the staircase several times—hoping to collect the inheritance down at the bottom of the stairs!!