lest the queens in their martini haze set down a watery glass on his wooden antique furniture. To call everyone to order, LaRue let out her Holly Golightly whistle, and the meeting started. Someone asked what they should wear for the caper that was to take place at 2:00 a.m. in the morning. Tiki torches were suggested to light their way during the trek. Gladys Goodfoot offered to drive and that we could all lie down in the back of her pickup covered with a tarp. Each letter of the sign had a built-in ladder, which was how LaRue said Entwistle got up to the top to throw herself off. “So,” she said, “all we have to do, really, when we get up there is haul the fabric to the top, fasten it to the back of the letter and then just fling it down, and voila, one letter down, only the rest to go…except for the two L’s in the middle!” Then there was a discussion of how to fasten the fabric so that it wouldn’t fall off. Someone suggested using a staple gun. We would need more than one, so Birdnest Beatrice offered to borrow some from the theatre where she worked. Everyone was excited and getting amped up for this ultimate Hollywood publicity stunt! Then Jack weighed in with the question that stopped everyone in their tracks. “So, how many bolts of fabric do you have and how many yards or feet in each?” He had picked up a pamphlet about the sign from one of the tourist shops on Hollywood Boulevard. “You know, each letter is 45-feet tall.” LaRue knew from fashion design school that there was only 30 feet to each bolt.
material they would need for this Sisyphean task— to cover the H, O, Y, W, two other O’s, and the D—each went and bought a bolt of black fabric from the local fabric store. But when that wasn’t enough, LaRue asked Gladys Goodfoot to drive her old pickup truck over (that also served as a bedazzled float on Pride Parade Day) to the back of the school, where she had stashed multiple bolts of black fabric behind the trash bins. When I heard this caper had morphed into grand theft, I wondered if I was now aiding and abetting, having encouraged LaRue that she could pull off altering the sign. But as a writer looking for inspiration, this Hollywood Sign caper was too rich not to see through. Then again, as they say in Hollywood, some scenes are best left on the cutting room floor. Because there was nowhere to sit in LaRue’s apartment with all those bolts of fabric lying around (that her cat Nefertiti ended up using as scratching posts), a group meeting was instead held in her ghostwriter Jack’s apartment. The queens called Jack “Mr. Practical” because without him, LaRue’s book would have never been written. She couldn’t type, had little self-discipline and was only focused on getting her life story made into a movie. Jack made coffee for the meeting, but some of the participants brought over the ingredients to make martinis. This was a strategy meeting, but they also wanted to have a good time. To set the mood for this secret nighttime gathering, Jack lit a few candelabras and quickly set out coasters,
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