THE PRESENT
I was recently perusing The Superficial, my favorite of the celebrity gossip websites, and I came across this picture of Jessica Alba in a bikini, and I thought to myself, "Dexter, obviously you’re attracted to Jessica Alba in a bikini because she’s beautiful, and scantily clad, but your attraction also seems to be amplified by that ring that connects the front and back of the bikini at her waist. Why is that? What is it about the ring?"
I don’t have an answer yet, so I thought I’d throw it out there. What is it about the ring? Is it some kind of fertility symbol? Does it somehow suggest the bikini coming off? Is it like a peephole to the skin beneath? I don’t know, but I likes it.
THE FUTURE
I predict that the Apple iPhone will be a huge success.
THE PAST
The Chronicles of Dexteria: Vol. 1. Issue 1.
As the prophet Will Smith taught us, in the classic “Will 2 K” video, “you never know where you’re goin’ ? ‘til you know where you’ve been.”
In that spirit—the spirit of the Willenium—I’d like to take you back to the beginning, to the fall of 1975, when I was conceived. It was a dark and steamy night in Los Angeles, and Mike Ovitz, who earlier that year had founded Creative Artists Agency (CAA), was having a party at his mansion in the hills. My mother, an aspiring actress, had been invited just that morning, while working the tail end of a double shift at a 24-hour diner off Rodeo, by a customer who told her he was a talent scout.
“Come to the party with me, baby,” he said. “I’ll show you around. We’ll have a good time. We’ll meet people. You’ll be great.”
He gave her a $50 tip on his cup of coffee, and told her (and I’m quoting, now, from her diary, which was the only thing she left to me when she died other than her series of collectible plates from the Franklin Mint) to “buy something pretty to wear with it. You know, something classy, and shiny.”
The party, she wrote later, “was like something out of a movie, albeit a very strange, Fellini-meets-Robert Altman kind of a movie." Jack Nicholson was sitting by the pool, sipping whiskey and talking to a topless woman smoking a meerschaum pipe. Bob Evans was there too, holding court in an octagonal room that appeared to exist solely to exhibit Ovitz’s photographs of attractive young women sitting in a director’s chair with Ovitz’s name on it. Underneath the photos someone had scribbled on the wall, in what appeared to be blood, or blood-tinged semen, "it’s symbolic."
My mother ditched the “talent scout,” who turned out to be a mailboy at CAA, within the first ten minutes, and went looking for someone more interesting, or better-connected, to talk to. …
[In the next installment of the Chronicles, my mom meets my Dad, and I’m conceived.]
