Brittany Murphy & Pee Wee Herman grappled with each other in a honey-drenched alley.

Anaïs Nin & i gadded about a hotel room in our robes. she donned some gray silky lingerie & wanted me to do the same & to expose ourselves through the grand window onto some quiet tree-filled neighborhood, but i couldn't find any lingerie to put on. she disappeared & hundreds upon hundreds of people dressed as if for a red carpet descended upon the hotel. Charlie Sheen drunkenly barged in & announced that people of color who think they have problems ought to watch white people get heart attacks on TV. half of the crowd agreed & left the scene with him, some of them couples who had a smiling face for the event but turned around showing their disdain. a man leading a Boy Scout Troop said he could help me socialize better by taking walks in the park with his troop, but i was more worried about people looking under my skirt. i wandered away & got lost in the crowd.

when i read all eleven diaries of Anaïs Nin (including her younger diaries & some of her expurgated stuff), i had dreams of discovering more of Nin's works in big pink volumes in a library that recurred in my dreams. i don't even like her writing all that much, but much the way Edward Gorey felt about Henry James, i felt compelled to read all of her works.

pizza ovens at the tops of elevators. a woman gets angry & steals a man's pizza from another elevator. i walk around random bookshelves, collecting books illustrated by Edward Gorey hidden among the shelves. the stack in my arms grows high enough to touch my chin. i start to put some back. i find a pair of brown thigh-highs socks with strings attached to the heels: pretend-stilettoes, sharp heels wilting into yarn. i put them on & enter an ice rink with bars set up to divide it into horizontal sections. i enter a section & skate along the bars, doing a spiral & then a camel spin. my brother waits in the bleachers.

the pizza must mean patience without deceit before reaching a goal. my mind is telling me to be selective in what i collect, & to wear the brown thigh-highs i bought some time ago. what do the string-stilettoes mean? femme fatale pretensions? memories of figure-skating while my younger brother waited in the bleachers seeping into my dreams, although i was never good at the spiral position & never advanced to the camel spin. limitations on my skills & creativity?

a few nights ago i had a dream of dolls' heads violently swirling in cake icing & pencils that scratched out images of cats in outer space. there was more to the dream, but it's hard to remember. lots of art, motifs lifted from Pop Surrealism, a female artist ranting about the distortion of her message by copycat artists, lots of female artists whose violent girly artwork was on sale at Amazon. i vaguely recall floating goddesses reigning over illustrated islands, perhaps there was candy & blood & dresses, the colors white & pink were dominant, feminine plastic toys & cosmetics abounded, spilling powder & sprinkles over the plastic doll heads, anger about the use of menstrual blood & feminist drama in art, something about sisterhood & disavowing certain symbols. collages! i created collages out of never-before seen images, layering magazine cut-outs over one another, pieces of fabric with frayed edges, dashes of glue & blood. little girls' tresses & flower petals & love notes written on pink paper.

The Itinerant Postcard: $1 or trade
a 24-page, quarter-sized perzine with illustrations by Edward Gorey & prose & poetry by me.

The Itinerant Postcard #2: $1 or trade
a 24-page, quarter-sized perzine with illustrations by Edward Gorey & my thoughts on Pinay identity, language, race, & food.

Hearts: 50 cents or a stamp or trade
a 16-page, 1/8-sized mini fanzine, a sort of prose poem inspired by images on WeHeartIt.

Cherries In a Reliquary: $2 or trade
28 pages, 1/4-sized, cardstock cover. Your choice of yellow or pink cover.
Nineteen small poems about love, fairy tales, witches, dolls, & other sundry subjects.

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there was a discussion panel on the radio, so i dreamed of women discussing Roe v. Wade as i shuffled clothes around in a closet. later i took a nap & returned to the same room, only this time the women were gone & replaced with who i assume were roommates. i turned on a showerhead that sprayed water onto animal-print throw rugs piled up on an unmade futon. i stepped out of the room & into a hushed dark hallway where i tried to put on a large pair of black underpants, but i had difficulty putting my legs through the holes.

i was at an outdoor Bruins/Habs game on an ice rink with kitchen islands that the hockey players skated around. i held onto marionette strings attached to the goalie Carey Price; they got tangled & prevented him from making a save. i was also secretly a Bruins fan, although i'm not in real life (go Kings go!). after the game, i figure-skated around the rink & did ballet positions on the kitchen islands.

interpretation: my feminine figure-skating past is reasserting itself. trouble reconciling girlyness with male sports fandom? possibly feeling guilty for being a bandwagon fan & bad luck for Carey Price.

i dreamed of a night-time ride aboard a schoolbus driven by one of the student passengers, who took us to a grocery store to in search of ice cream that wasn't there. on the way home, an explosion startled us. a Russian jewelry store with large white columns in front of the building was dripping debris. the explosion had sliced through the columns.

i had another dream that's harder to remember. something about identifying saints on a school quiz. a maiden or cherub named Winne traced a line along the back of a statue of Saint Sinne, which brought him to life. dragon-ships came from afar to swallow his body.

i was either chasing or being chased by a cruel prince whose features i couldn't remember other than that he was dressed as a yellow acrobat & wearing a giant metal cone or funnel. a naked lady threw her bare chest at him & begged him for assurances of his love, which he gave, along with an impossible embrace through the cone/funnel. he swung on a trapeze high above a procession of people moving along a coastal precipice. it was here i determined he was evil.

interpretation: beware of dangerous lovers.

i dreamed i was a vampire. no biting was involved. instead, a man swung his pocket-watch in circles as i crouched dementedly over a menstrual puddle in an otherwise empty darkened cabin. my head felt tremendously heavy.

object of anxiety: a small hook fell across my foot. i picked it up before it caught my skin.

the following is a pastiche of reviews of a show i dearly wanted to see on my birthday a few years ago.

Creator and performer Aurélia Thierrée, the inimitable Aurelia Thierree, has performed as actress and illusionist and dancer since early childhood. She is not so much playing a single character or characters but a woman intoxicated by wild dreams, who climbs curtains, dangles by her ankles from scary heights and creates scene after scene of gentle irony, coupled with her fine-featured face and the eyes of a 1920s screen siren. Her pale and lovely countenance seems to have been peeled from a vintage poster. Her confident and fearless corde lisse is quite breath-taking. Her luminous eyes and cheeks fill the frame of a miniature proscenium. She also happens to be the great-grand-daughter of Eugene O'Neill.

The family pedigree is clearly visible in the sumptuously rich artistry on display. Her mother, Victoria Thierree Chaplin, daughter of Charlie Chaplin, created and directed this dazzling, ethereal and sensual, solemn and mischievous, profound and absurd. Quiet and gentle (the intimate encounter, the duet, the mimed interior monologue), enchantingly nightmarish, most inventive, clever and downright entertaining French circus spectacle performance. an absolute spellbinder. A magical ravishing whirl of visual illusions and theatrical trickery, a ceaseless string of vignettes, tableaux and dances that stretch the imagination with some odd macabre moments when the puppets take over. A brilliant display of acrobatics and dazzling stage invention in the twisted tradition of Shockheaded Peter, Tim Burton and Edward Gorey. Chaplin's world is as white and black as snow on earth - and as red as blood.

Finding inspiration in European circuses and medieval drawings, by the magic of the music hall, variety show and circus to create an intoxicating concoction of illusion and fantasy, upside-down and inside-out worlds, Ms. Thierrée has populated her Oratorio with Salvador Dali-esque clocks, dancing dresses, disappearing time, and people that seem to exist in altered states. The illusion- and surreal-ism-filled vignettes of scenes are tentatively drawn together by the theme of a world in disarray. a beguiling evening of dreamlike sketches begins with her delicately beautiful visage appearing from an open dresser-drawer (followed soon after by her limbs, in a variety of reality-defying angles). Very much like a waking dream, in which a world of impossibilities and opposites reigns. Shadows walks across the stage casting human beings in their wake.

Simply treat after treat: visual wit, chills and thrills, frothy sight-gags, complicated costume changes, impossible entrances and exits, delightfully sinister glove puppets, a suicidal puppet, and a smoking baby, a cascading waterfall of white lace curtains, an elaborate lace creature (she produces a pair of knitting needles and knits her lace leg back together), a 'stage within a stage' sequence that provides the most exquisite snow effects seen in Wellington since Slava's Snowshow. A touch of magic, the legacy of the circus, childhood whimsy and surprises!

Welcome to the topsy turvey world of Aurelia and friends where they sunbathe in the snow and the mouse catches the cat. If Salvador Dalí or Lewis Carroll's white rabbit hurried by, either would be perfectly at home here. People have dangerous relationships to the inanimate objects. Props have personalities, mundane items throb with life. Furniture has a mind of its own, trains go through people and, at times, the puppets are in charge. the kite flies the girl. a trenchcoat tussles with its owner, the red velvet curtains framing the proscenium become a central character in the magical, mostly wordless show, and remarkable things happen in their folds and lofty reaches. Aurélia Thierrée rides the blood-colored drapery like a blonde, silken djinn, slipping into and out of their embrace with an acrobatic élan. It seems a dream world set to accordions, percussion, chamber music, haunting ambient music, gypsy jazz, cabaret, classical and more, she fuses herself to the model train's track.

Near the end of the show, Thierrée becomes an hourglass with her body's sandy essence running out the bottom. Purely delighted a sold-out audience so stuffed the Pope couldn’t score a seat with a pocketful of C-notes and indulgences.