Free My Trip Down the Pink Carpet by Leslie Jordan Page B

see. Get creamed by a blood-red ball or whisk around the floor on my tippy-toes?
    I was enthralled with ballroom dancing. The teacher was a German lady, Fräulein Something-or-Other, who tapped her stick in time to the music and barked orders as most of the kids stumbled around and around, stepping on each other’s toes.
    But not me.
    Oh no, no. I was light as a feather. I swirled around, and even added a few kicks and twirls here and there. I had no idea what interpretive dancing was, but I loved making it up as I went along. My red-faced, sweaty partner had no choice but to keep up as best she could. Poor thing. I had her in a vise-like grip.
    All of a sudden, the Fräulein banged her stick and jabbed me on the shoulder, mid-twirl.
    “Mr. Jordan, may I remind you that the young lady is the picture. You, my dear, are but the frame. ”
    Well, fuck that shit.
    But those dancing lessons sowed the seeds. I loved keeping up with the latest dance crazes. There was this really cool black girl I went to school with named Blondell, who taught me a lot of my best moves. She used to call me “Itty-Bitty.”
    “There goes Itty-Bitty, the Blue-Eyed Soul Brother!”
    One time, she saved my life.
    As far back as I can remember, the student body at my high school had been known as the Brainerd High Rebels. When our football team ran onto the field, a mascot dressed as a Rebel soldier and mounted on a Tennessee walking horse paraded around the field, holding a Confederate flag. Our school fight song was “Dixie”!
    “I wish I was in the land of cotton. Old times there are not forgotten. Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.”
    Well, there were a lot of people that thought the whole rigmarole was racist. So, in 1972, they tried to change the name to the Brainerd High Panthers, and race riots broke out. It even made the national news. I was caught in the middle because I had so many black friends, and that just wasn’t done back then.
    Blondell saw me walking down the hall one day. She called me to the side and whispered, “Itty-Bitty, you know I love you, but you better get your little white ass out of this part of the school. We’re fixin’ to rumble.”
    And with that, all hell broke loose.
    Bricks started flying. Windows were broken. Students ran up and down the halls with bats. The National Guard was called in! A white boy from my church was dragged into a bathroom and beaten senseless, and hordes of rednecks in pickup trucks cruised the city looking for black people to kick the shit out of. I escaped through a window by the skin of my teeth—which, incidentally, has been the story of my life.
    Years later, I was working as a host at the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard, across from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. One night, as I counted out the register money, this very chic black girl came sauntering in the front door.
    “Are y’all still open?” she asked in a Southern drawl.
    “Yes, we are, Miss Blondell.”
    “Itty-Bitty!” she screamed. “The Blue-Eyed Soul Brother! Is it really you?”
    We spent hours and hours catching up. She still knew all the best moves.

Gypsies, Tramps, and Queens

    Here I am in Castle Leslie
    With rows of books upon the shelves
    Written by the Leslies
    All about themselves.
    attributed to Jonathan Swift
    I ONCE stayed in a monastery built in the eighteenth century and rumored to have been used at one time as an insane asylum. It sat, like some great Victorian dowager, overlooking Lake Pantelimon on the outskirts of Bucharest, Romania. It had at some point been converted into a hotel called the Hotel Lebada. On the inside, the crumbling hotel looked like an overdone New Orleans whorehouse—with old marble, gold fixtures, and dusty, bloodred velvet drapes. I was shooting a low-budget independent horror movie called Madhouse, in what must have been the cells for the crazy people.
    A tiny arm of land separated the hotel and lake from the Gypsy camps across the way. Gypsies, in