Free Confessions of a Hollywood Star by Dyan Sheldon Page A

will make me give up.) After all, I realized, it is the most ordinary people who are often the most lucky. And I don’t think it’s something you can really begrudge them. It’s the gods’ way of balancing things out. You know, because these people aren’t gifted, their souls are as flightless as the dodo and their hearts are nourished on the spiritual equivalent of potato chips and diet soda, the gods let them win the lottery. What else do they have to look forward to, poor things? But those of us who are gifted, who have soaring souls and hearts that are nourished by the spiritual equivalent of lentil stew and greens, don’t have to rely on luck. We make our own.
    By the time I got to work I was in my usual upbeat mood.
    “Everything all right?” asked Mrs Magnolia as I came whistling into the store.
    “Red alert over,” I cried. “The flood’s been staunched and all is well.”
    “Thank heaven for that,” said Mrs Magnolia. “When mine overflowed we had to rip the whole floor up.”
    “Gosh…” I shook my head in sympathy.
    Mrs Magnolia smiled sadly over the rack she was hanging blouses on. I thought she was still thinking about her floor. “What a shame that you weren’t here this morning, though. You’ll never guess who came in.”
    With hindsight I can see that a three-year-old with ADD would have been able to guess who it was, so surely I should have, but I was in such a positive, who-needs-luck kind of mood that I didn’t. I said, “The First Lady?” Like Carla Santini, she likes to keep in touch with the poor.
    Mrs Magnolia giggled, which I have to say I don’t find attractive in anyone over ten, never mind forty. “Oh, no, no, no one like that. No one really important.” Hangers jangled as Mrs Magnolia hooked them onto the rack.
    Personally, although I’m sure the First Lady’s a very nice woman, I don’t count her as really important. Mostly what she does is stand next to her husband, holding the dog and smiling.
    “Mrs Carlucci?” I wheeled my bike to the back. Mrs Carlucci used to be one of our best customers, but she hadn’t been in since she bought a chenille robe that brought her out in a rash and blamed Mrs Magnolia, so I figured maybe she’d finally called a truce.
    It wasn’t Mrs Carlucci.
    “A very nice man who’s shooting a movie around here.”
    I was in the storeroom when Mrs Magnolia uttered these words, but I came out faster than you can say “Cut!”
    “What?”
    “I think he said he was the director.” She held up a floral blouse, eyeing it dubiously. “Or was it the producer?” She shrugged in the way of a woman who is used to customers returning things. “One of those.”
    A golden ray of hope rose up to warm my soul. Maybe the costume designers had told Charley Hottle about me after all. You know: Don’t we need someone to be waiting at the stop for the school bus? Well, there’s this terrific girl who works in the secondhand store who’d be perfect .
    “What was his name? Was it Hottle?”
    Mrs Magnolia blinked. “He didn’t say.”
    “Well what did he want?” I was as casual as a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
    Mrs Magnolia slipped the floral blouse into the clump of patterned blouses. “Oh … just to chat about the town, find out where things are, that kind of thing. It seems they’ll be here for several weeks.”
    “Really?” My heart was pounding away like a flamenco dancer. What other crucial pieces of information had Mrs Magnolia gleaned in her conversation with maybe the director or maybe the producer? I opened my eyes wide as though this was all news to me. “Geez… I wonder where they’ll stay.”
    “Oh, I really don’t know. Not now the hotel’s closed down.” The Dellwood Hotel closed down due to lack of interest in the sixties and was finally converted into apartments in the eighties. She shrugged. “I suppose there are quite a few bed and breakfasts around.”
    And I had the aching muscles to prove that I’d been to most