Cameras flash at Madame Tussauds – faux celebrities are almost the real thing, right?

Pass by Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, compare your footprints with them – celebrities who walked on the air of fame past and present.  How do your hands compare against theirs?  How do your feet?  If they match, is your joy because you are almost like them or that you see that they are more like us – who exist on the fringe of red carpets and lit ceremony?

Walk on the Walk of Fame pavement – remember the crowd that gathered in droves to see Michael Jackson’s star, laying to rest a fountain of flowers and gifts, mementos and memory.  See it today: one woman, feet perched on the star, one camera to capture a memory far from the moment you remember before.

How did time move forward so quickly?

A car is stopped at the light between Hollywood Boulevard and Orange, a large dark SUV.  Two blondes sit in the front, an unknown number of passengers in the back.  The blonde on the passenger side has a row of dark tattoo lettering bright across her arm; she talks to a group on the street as if she knows them.

Maybe she does?  Maybe they do.

She asks about something on one of their shirts, approving of the logo, the expression, the phrasing…  Whatever it is, does it matter? Sometimes approval is all you need in this town.

Earlier, on the same street,  a stretch limo drove by.  Think bigger.  Hummer H2 with an open back, as if it were taking its passengers on safari – into the wilds of Hollywood people-watching armed with bottle service and disco lights.

A young woman walks down Orange dressed in a purple ball gown complete with hooped skirt.  Remember Donna in 90210, the prom episode?  Except not that awkward.  Her entourage follows her tiara-crowned figure in jeans and t-shirts.  Her mother is among her people.  Is she wondering “where did my little girl go?”  or “can it be tomorrow yet?”

And I sit in the corner coffee shop, not studying.

-cct

• Rebecca Black – Friday
• Alexandra Wallace – Asians in the Library
  • Response videos: David So’s Vlog #4 and Jimmy Wong’s Ching Chong song

Especially when you get to associate them with Cicero and Quintilian!

And yes.  I do realize this is very nerdy.

Check it out here: http://charitytran.com/index.php/2011/03/25/seeking-cicero-and-quintilian-rhetorical-dialogue-on-youtube/

xoxo -cc

Today I began a serial about zombies.  I’m assuming it will have a love story, but for now – it’s a wide-open adventure!

-cct

The Winter Solstice 2010 issue of Mused was just released today and with it is my poem Some Girl. Perhaps the closest I might get to a feminist-assertion of equality – or more so than that, meaning. I wrote this a long time ago and when I found it again, I liked the sentiment and submitted it. It’s easy to get lost in the crowd, labeled, judged. “Girl” and related adjectives could easily be subbed for “Guy” and guy-equivalent adjectives. Don’t we all want to be someone more than some thing?

Here’s a link to the poem: http://www.bellaonline.com/review/issues/winter2010/p040.html

-cct

Sleep Same
by Charity C. Tran

He sleeps like me
curled like a cat
would by a hearth,
into a ball
sleeping soundly.

He sleeps like me
hand tucked
against the thigh
head turned down
sleeping soundly.

He sleeps like me,
but not as I do -
in my warm bed
of gold and purple
and red
of pillows and blanketed layers,
in a room
in a house
while the sounds
of late night TV
lull as a soundtrack
to my life.

His bed is the black -
His bed is the tile floor -
A half block down
Outside my door.

He does not sleep like me.