Burton’s Antony, Elizabeth’s Cleopatra & a Ground Run at the Crust

Their tumultuous liaison-- before the marriages and divorces-- famously began in 1962 on the set of the colossally over-budget epic, Cleopatra.--Liz Ronk

Although my new found old age presently puts this to the test, I was never much one for the feminine accouterments of vanity, and unlike my mood challenged cousin, I rather shirk the effort when it comes to daily appointments with cosmetologists. My hair, though otherwise unknotted thanks to temporary fill ins prior to my current depth charges in search of authenticity, hangs unpleasantly silver white, thinning and unruly, and I can hardly afford to be fashion conscious, so I have no idea who Kate Spade is. My only indicator toward rancor is for the 13 year old daughter, as thirteen was also a traumatic year for me. But if I wrote in my post above that we should learn to accept the consequences of obdurate suffering, the flip side of the coin is it is relatively unimaginable that her privilege wasn’t worth combating whatever her problems amounted to. Philadelphia’s oozing ineptitude is like one long string of rock candy ruthlessly blistering my esophagus, one calamity after the next, my interpersonal space all but barren of any meaning unless you include the endless revolving door of minorities whom I’ve despised (and what does Galahad do with this truism, pray tell?), and here a fashion guru engages in a violent act of dramaturgy which give women of her mindset pause. Fuck the mental illness caveat. The majority of those who adhesive themselves to psychiatric disorders tarry on like the rest of us, oftentimes micromanaged by the welfare state with the same degree of competence I’ve gotten since my 1996 resignation. Financial difficulties, divorce? None of these things would have landed her where the majority of spastic savants land, sinking in quicksand. One can only imagine what anguish drove her to her cessation. In my case, you don’t. Interspersed throughout my threads since I came to Blogger was the outcry I have nothing left. This now includes lack of control over my mobility, and although my focus has condensed on this male nursing aide, now joined in my default conspiracy, to the point that preoccupation seems obsessive, my vulnerability fraught with being damned again, it isn’t so much that he’s another unobtainable male inadvertently reeled in and driven back, not quite. It is merely that he represents what Frank Versante should have been for me: a middle-aged relationship worth settling for, one that died in a flash fire and yet remains binding, at least, as long as I stay put. He has been both, conflicted and hard on me, seducing and diffident, fearful too. In so many words, I told him, jokingly, that if his hands got near my cherry, then I would be staking a claim, with one of my winsome smiles. He now behaves as if my vagina was a radioactive mine. I happen to find it amusing. Nonetheless, whatever I think I still feel, or trying to calculate what he does for me, I will eventually cut the cord. I forgive him for, well, our foreplay. He forgives me, for both the foreplay and my hard slash into the social stigma of a white cripple and a black lover who isn’t her lover, yet, but I am not one who blissfully buries her dead. He woke up my sensuality, left it in midair, and I’m not having it. Necessity merely demands a hold on the end game. And now I’m off to bed, as promised.