Free Chanel Bonfire by Wendy Lawless Page A

by bodyguards. For weeks, I held out hope that he would come find me like the prince in Cinderella searching for his one true love.
    I always went for the pansexual guys who wore makeup, big shoes, and glitter: Elton, Roxy Music, T. Rex, and David Bowie. Even at fourteen, I knew you couldn’t help whom you fell in love with. My friend Lynn Cassidy was hopelessly gaga over Donny Osmond, who I thought was too perfect with his straight teeth and bowl haircut. At night, before she went to bed, she listened to him croon “Sweet and Innocent” on her stereo and then kissed the thirty-five Donny posters on her walls good night. When we discovered the Osmonds were coming to London, we mobilized at the Cassidys’ house to make a plan.
    “How are we going to meet them?” screeched Lynn. We plowed through many bags of crisps and bottles of soda trying to strategize. It was important that we not have a repeat of our botched attempt to meet the Jackson Five at Heathrow a few months before. Having gotten up at 4:00 a.m., we were only able to get close enough to see five Afro’ed heads cross the tarmac. I was devastated.
    “Let’s just go over there. Maybe we’ll think of something on the way,” said Lynn’s little sister, Diane, sweetly. We all jumped on the tube, heading for the Churchill Hotel. When we got there, it was completely surrounded by hundreds of screaming, crying girls. Bobbies were trying to keep the “weenyboppers” (as Donny’s followers had been dubbed in the British press) back, and television crews were filming. It was a circus.
    “Look, they’re letting taxis through,” said Robbie, characteristically observant. It was often my sister’s diabolical genius that set the plans in motion. “What if we pretended to be hotel guests, getting out of a cab?”
    “Outstanding!” cried Lynn.
    We ran down the block, tearing past the hotel and the screaming mob, and hailed a taxi. We gave the driver five pounds to drive us up to the entrance of the hotel. Less than a minute later, the top-hatted doorman at the Churchill was opening the taxi door and welcoming us. We headed through the lobby, straight to the elevator, having no idea what floor they were on.
    “Let’s start at the top,” Lynn said, punching the highest floor. When we got out, it was too quiet, so we started running down the stairs, stopping to check every floor for Osmonds. Five flights down, security men were sitting on folding chairs in the hall. We thought we were busted, but they were so impressed that we had made it this far that they let us stay for a while and hang out. Jimmy, Donny’s little brother, was playing basketball in the hall. Robin stuck herhead out the window, and the girls below went wild thinking she was an Osmond.
    “You girls want to meet Donny?” The rest of us didn’t care, but Lynn did, so she went to meet her dream man. Afterward, she was all flushed and gooey-eyed. We rode down in the elevator in silence, Lynn, on cloud nine, ecstatically dreaming of being Mrs. Donny Osmond, and Robin and I thinking of how much fun it had been breaking and entering.

chapter six
    CHANEL BONFIRE
    When Mother became restless or bored, or if she was avoiding a lover or was too afraid to open her American Express bill, we’d skip town. Most often, we’d go to Paris. Like the spoiled American teenagers we were, Robbie and I soon began to whine about having to go: “The waiters are so rude! The toilet paper’s waxy! What about Italy? Or Spain?!” Finally, at one point we refused to go.
    “Leave us here; it’s only two days,” we said before one early-fall weekend. There was going to be a big party that weekend with hot boys we did not want to miss. We had even bought new hip-huggers to wear.
    “It may not be two days this time. I have to go on business,” Mother replied.
    Business? I thought. Like working? For money? Mother had once sold a few poems when we were small, but business was not a word anyone would associate with