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NEW YORK - MY L WORD OBSESSION GOES TOO FAR: PART 1


When I first started being honest with myself that I was gayer than I let myself believe, I had no queer friends. In fact, I had no friends at all—I’d just moved to Las Vegas and didn’t know anyone and didn’t really want to. So I turned to the L Word (T-minus five days until Season 6!!!), and watched every episode in the old seasons, then watched the new ones religiously. Bette, Alice, Shane, Jenny, Dana—oh, Dana!…they were all my guides and my friends. Shane often visited me in my dreams. (Actually just the other night I dreamt I watched the first episode of Season 6 in my bedroom, masturbating, and then came out wearing a robe to say hi to my roommate, Kathryn Moennig, aka Shane.) But Jenny…crazy, fucked-up, annoying Jenny…I had the hots for her. So when my friend surprised me for my birthday with a Mia Kirshner (the actress who plays Jenny) stalking expedition, I was pumped.

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My friend, who I won't name or picture so as to spare her the embarrassment I am about to further heap upon myself, was on a prolonged visit to New York and didn’t have a job. She called “checking her email” googling her girlfriend, googling her friends' bands, incessantly keeping tabs on Facebook, and checking for L Word updates. We stayed up until 5 AM one morning taking L Word “Which Character Are You?” quizzes on iChat together, obsessing over the meaning of such questions as this one, which had us pretend we were spending an entire day in the L Word universe:

Was I fancy pretty dress clothes or was I unique and “me?” Or was I casual and relaxed, because at work that’s how I look, even though in the outside world that's not how I am? HELP.

Or this one, which was such a total mind-melter of a girl question it almost gave me a panic attack:

In the end, often she was Kit, the soulful singer and café owner with a sordid past, or a couple times the one dopey boyfriend Jenny had before she went gay. Most of the time I was Jenny, the sexually confused, obliviously rude, pretentious, self-absorbed writer/cutter/LA cunt who everyone who watches the show absolutely hates. Except for me and my friend. Jenny’s our favorite.

On the show, Jenny writes a shitty, melodramatic autobiographical book about her fucked-up (not really) life and becomes somewhat famous for it. In real life, Mia Kirshner wrote a book too, inciting bitter rage amongst the lesbian community. Actually, I have no idea what the lesbian community thought, but it sure set off some alarms in my mind. Though some people have a difficult time separating actor as real human from character played on TV, with the exception of Buffy—I mean Sarah Michelle Gellar—I have no issue with that. Except for when they start imitating their character’s narrative development in real life. Then shit gets a little hazy.

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But see, I like her character because she’s so obnoxious. I sort of hoped she'd be that way in real life too. Fine, I’ll say it: and because she’s hot. But while my friends absolutely seethe over that fucking bitch Jenny Schechter, I realize that means she’s pretty damn talented as an actress. Or else she was typecast. Either way, a trip to her book reading at Barnes & Noble would settle it.

My friend and I had been amped for a couple weeks about this, prepping for our big day with Jenny—I mean Mia—in advance by watching old L Word episodes over and over again and speaking to each other in L Word code, like referencing situations from the show as if they were our real lives. (“Let me check my iCal,” or “Oh shit, I’m sorry I’m running late, I have to walk Sounder,” or "We should look up that girl on OurChart," stuff like that.) We obsessed over our outfits and what to do to get us prepped. Should we go do something mindless and dumb like play beer pong or should we cram extra hard on L Word or what?

Alls we knew is that we wanted to get her, but we didn’t know how. Not like kidnap her or anything illegal, but get her to hang out with us, get her to think we were cool. Have drinks, shoot the shit…and maybe… oh, I dunno…maybe I could kiss her? Mia the actor has always been elusive about her sexuality. I’ve heard rumors she was authentically bi and I can believe that. She played a bisexual terrorist named Mandy on 24 once. It’s plausible I might stand a chance.

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In the end we just dressed like the version of ourselves that had to hurry to get out the door on time—me, a B.O.-drenched Vietnam vet; my friend, a box of popcorn dressed for a funeral—and met up on the train. On the ride there I was feeling lightheaded and giddy. My friend said she’d just eaten a chicken sandwich from a bodega and it left her with no emotions. What? She was suddenly over it? No! She couldn’t abandon me! I’d even brought props to help us out in case of emergency: a wig if one of us needed a handy disguise, some capsules of fake blood if we wanted to fake an injury for attention/sympathy, some glittery confetti so we could celebrate and seem "fun," tarot cards so I could show her I'm deep and mystical, and a bag of powder that’d make water turn the color of and fizz up like beer, so that once we got her out with us we could chug water all night while she got drunker and drunker, her judgment growing ever cloudier with each sip.

We talked about the only other times we've tried to stalk famous people. For her, she was friends with them first. That doesn't really count. Me, I stalked a Top 40 band when I was a teenager and ended up fucking the guitar player. Success. As  we rolled up to our stop we realized we didn’t have a clue what Mia's book was about. What the hell was the matter with us? How did we not research her book? We were hoping it was a shameless memoir, but after we got tea and coffee from the Starbucks inside we realized we were dead, dead wrong. Instead of the swarm of squealing, wet-eyed lezzies we were expecting to see in the audience, there were polite bearded folk and their womanly make-upless counterparts swaddled in polar fleece and cargo pants and hiking boots. (It sounds like I’m describing a pack of lesbians, but trust me, they weren’t.) What the fuck?

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There were no seats so we stood pretty much right in her natural direct line of eyesight and stared at her the entire time. We quickly realized this book, called I Live Here, was authored with a few other people, like someone from Adbusters and other activists, and that it was VERY SERIOUS. Serious in a serious way, stuff no one thinks is a joke, touching stories about kids in Malawi with AIDS and the missing women in Juarez and sex workers in Burma. And it wasn’t some bleeding heart showbiz bullshit a la Brad Pitt’s fucking tattooed back piece of the New Orleans levy system. This was seven years of real research, of traveling alone to countries women don’t go to alone, of listening to people tell their sad, sad stories, and spending her own money to do so. No one sent her on this mission. She did this because she was curious and fearless. And furthermore, any royalties she earned from the book she was donating to Amnesty International.

With this truly thoughtful, generous, political twist to the personality I completely imagined she had, she was now even hotter. Except when reading, she looked so much like Jenny Schechter giving a pretentious reading, pony tail bobbing as she sighed with her chin in her hand, that I almost started to hate her. And on top of that, honestly, and this probably makes me a bad person, I was kind of bored. I went there to be charmed and dazzled, not depressed. So I tuned out to the extent that I dropped my iced tea on the ground and made a huge noise and started to giggle. And this was when she was talking about the photo she took of a woman with a stick in her vagina, aka a home abortion. Oops.

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When everyone finally stopped reading from and asking dumb boring questions about the book it was time to line up for the signing. I realized if my friend and I were going to get anywhere near Mia we’d have to buy the book. I was curious about it anyway, so whatever. We flipped through it, trying to appear interested rather than creepy and scared shitless, and each took turns in front of the bathroom mirror, where I rebraided my hair and reapplied lipstick really super fast so no one thought I was off pooing in public. We wrote notes to each other about what to do next:

Me: “Should we wait @ a café across the street afterward and follow her in a cab?”

Friend: “I don’t have enough for a cab but we can run out and pretend we’re battered women.”

Me: “She holds the microphone like Mariah Cary.”

Friend: “I want to say something to her but I can’t figure out what!”

Me: “I’m gonna tell her I think she’s brave and smart and she should hang out w/us for those reasons. How upset were you w/me when I dropped my cup?”

Some weirdo looking for attention picked up a German dictionary and recited the word for “headache.” We rolled our eyes. A woman in a chewed-up denim skirt showed off an enormous tattoo she had on her calf of Mia Kirshner’s face from Black Dahlia.

Wow.

We were the last ones. We’d waited so long for this. I was sweating really badly and smelled, and was shaking a little. The other guys signed my book, even wrote out my name in awesome blocky 3-D letters. My friend looked at Mia and vaguely smiled, I mumbled a thanks to her for writing the book, and then each of us spaced out in a different direction while she signed away. Right before we scooted off, I asked her if we could take a photo with her. She graciously obliged, resulting in one of the most embarrassing pictures I’ve ever taken taken in my life. See how intensely, psychotically happy I am? What a fucking nerd. And how she just wanted to be anywhere but right there? I’m going to give myself the benefit of the doubt and say she was just tired.

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After my friend and I walked away we started hissing at each other. “Shit! Shit shit shit! Why didn’t we talk to her? What’s the matter with us?” We decided we had to go back; we weren’t going down like this. I took a second to breathe and then remembered: Oh yeah, I work at Vice. I can entice her with an interview, and actually she deserves to be taken seriously anyway. What she did was pretty amazing.

So we sauntered back all cool, acting like that whole thing of posing for a dorky-ass fan photo didn't just happen. I interrupted her little powwow with friends who’d been hanging off by the side, waiting for her to wrap it up already, and complimented her on her earrings. Smooth, right? Then I asked her if she wanted to do an interview. “Yes!” she exclaimed. And then her publicist stepped in. I tried to pretend like I was too busy, not poor, to jet off to Toronto or Portland later that week to do it, and instead made plans to go meet her in Boston a month later.

We walked away feeling not entirely like losers, not entirely successful, scheming for Round 2 of our stalking adventure (which you'll get to read about later this week). High on emotions, we went off and drank a zillion different kinds of booze, and I started crying in a bar. Awesome night.

LIZ ARMSTRONG