Entry #26

Dialogue Girl
by Dottie Camptown


Megan and I met running lines at Loubelle’s 24-Hour Actors Studio in Culver City. After the 3:00 am workshop she took me to a park and silently led me to the bottom of a ravine. She skipped the kissing.

“Chassie’s got those boys cooped up like a pair of jackrabbits, Ethel,” she says in a sickly voice, unbuttoning her shirt to expose lovely breasts.

“The Royal Tennebaums?” It’s a lucky guess. She seems the type to quote movies about genius.

Light begins to take hold of the sky. We’ve already had sex twice in less than an hour, so the fact Megan still interests me is significant. The blanket we are lying on is itchy on my bare back. I turn over, propping myself on my elbows to study her. She really might make it in the movies.

“Lovers talking at sunrise is a cinematic cliché,” I say. “I like you, Megan.”

She adopts a high-class drawl, “The thing with Dickie - it's like the sun shines on you and it's glorious, then he forgets you, and it's very, very cold.

“The Talented Mr. Ripley. I could love you.”

“I can't imagine you would ever have had any interest in me, except as an amusingly cranky eccentric curiosity.”

“Ghost World.” And she is probably right.

She pushes herself off the ground and straddles me. Her shoulders become one more form to hold the warmth of the emergent sun.

I find it refreshing she has nothing at all original to say.