So many crushes… all the time… so, I’m relegated to the one at hand. A Hollywood party in the hills, but the Silverlake Hills version: scruffy backyard brunch, homemade waffles and quesadillas, mimosas and lots of second-hand funkywear. Everyone was quite lovely and sociable. The host was a B-Horror movie director. And over to a group of us walked a surfer with the slightest speech impediment and a small gap between his front teeth. Hot. His eyes told of enormous sensitivity, cultivated by more than his share of acid… not un-recently. Today at brunch though he was stone cold sober, or was so used to acid to betray the source of his trippy majesty. He told us all of the first day of his first job… as a chldren’s party Barney, big purple head and gloves… the works, being beaten up by the rich jewish 8th graders the moment he left his car; how he got to the door and when the 2 year birthday girl saw him, she screamed and cried inconsolably for the rest of her party; how he had to sprint back to his car in full Barney the Dinosaur regalia because he forgot his Barney tape player with the music that he had painstakingly memorized… in English AND Spanish (he then sang a bit of it for us “I love you, you love me”… and yes by then I was beginning to) and how his next Barney gig included firing the Barney already at the park making elaborate, advanced-Barney balloon animals because the Barney Balloon Artist was way drunk.
I proceeded to find out that my Surfer Barney is now a music and computer genuis and professor, huge turn on, that he is a book publisher of very interesting photo books and that he was one question shy of winning a million dollars on “Who’s Smarter than a Fifth Grader”… you know what show I mean. I sat mesmerized as he told his stories and we shared ideas, every one of my internal perceptions of him registering on him as his flawlessly tanned body language became alternately exposed and defensive in seconds, like a dance of ourting and vulnerability. Wow.
The guy talked A LOT, but I could tell that it was because he loved his world and everyone in it and was just so excited to share very interesting ideas. He tried to get others to pick up the mantle and spew forth with their big thoughts and stories. No one did, either because they were thinking “oh no, brace yourself, we got a talker here” or, like me they were fascinated and captivated by this beautiful, sensitive, perfectly flawed and incredibly passionate Barney.
