I�m a Godmother to my new little niece Stephanie! Yay! Thanks, Kak & Dale. I�m trying to find her the perfect little present.

Newport is excellent. We saw Jacqueline last night, are going out for dinner and drinks with her tonight at a place called �Salvation� and going to see her photography show tomorrow. It�s been good to see her. She is the first person I met at BU, even before school started�it was summer orientation. The funny thing was that we had met and were hanging out the first day and my mom met her mom, so later that night our moms told us, respectively, �You have to meet this girl Jacqueline from New Orleans,� �You have to meet this girl Jenn from New Jersey.� We already had! Anyway, oddly, I talked to Jacqueline this morning and we both had awful dreams last night. Mine was that she told me that one of her friends, after his father committed suicide, killed himself only like an hour before. My best friend Stef was there too, and all of a sudden the doors started opening and slamming, music from Mary Poppins came on unasked and my cats started dancing like the early Mickey Mouse cartoons. And the three of us clung to each other and tried to think positive thoughts because we knew it was scary supernatural energy doing it.



I think it�s because of the Beatrice Turner self-portrait on the wall in our room here at the Cliffside Inn, which is close to the Cliff Walk, where you can stroll along the water. Beatrice Turner, who summered in this house at the turn of the century, and lived here until 1948 when she died, was locked in one of the rooms by her parents (I�m not sure yet for how long) when she was caught taking a promenade along the Cliff Walk with an admirer. Her parents also withdrew her from art school because they did not want her looking at nude models. (Her latest paintings were nude portraits of herself). Her father said, �Paint me a picture of yourself.� What followed, as was discovered after her death, were thousands of self-portraits by a lonely spinster. One of the few portraits of someone other than herself was of her father, after death�she propped his embalmed body in a chair for two weeks (probably in the parlor, where we eat out gourmet breakfast). This painting is called �Daddy in Death.� After her father died she painted the house black, after a line in a poem he had written, �I dreamed that I dwelt in a house of black.� She would stretch canvas over canvas over canvas in the same frames, often painting over paintings. She would be seen walking alone around Newport, in her later years, terribly thin from self-induced (I assume) malnutrition, wearing fashions that were popular in her youth (think of the difference in fashion between 1900 and 1940). She was very much an outcast, through most of her life�there is an excerpt from her diary in a 1950 expos� in Life Magazine where she laments the fact that the really rich people in town, i.e. the Vanderbilts, Beekmans and Mills, dislike them because they are poorer, and the rich mothers resent her because they think her a designing woman toward their sons. Anyway, I find her story fascinating as well as sort of chilling. Brent�s sick of seeing her pictures everywhere! We were spying in the rooms upstairs because we�re the only ones in the cottage and Brent said, �That�s definitely too much Beatrice� upon seeing one of her nudes. I got a kick out of it.

We walked along most of the Cliff Walk. It was brisk and sunny and lovely. We found a little path down to the rocky coast and we tiptoed around and I found quite a few beautiful snail shells and sea glass. It reminded me of going to Kennebunkport, Maine and finding periwinkles in the tide pools. The daughter of the B&B innkeepers was my age and warned me not to touch the periwinkles because they were poisonous, or venomous, or something. I�ve always been drawn to the little world in every tide pool. It was so nice to be by the sea. You don�t have to do anything to the ocean to make it fun. It just is soothing and it makes complete sense to me. I get immediately sucked into tranquility. Nothing else really matters. It�s just happy.

�Gentiles are people who eat mayonnaise for no reason.� �Robin Williams

We had really good sandwiches at a place called Taste Buds and ran around to a few shops. I bought an adorable black jacket (but really wanted the Margot Tenenbaum honey-colored mink) and a pretty glass fountain pen because mine broke a few years ago and I just had the strength to throw it away. I also picked up a few fun reference books�I really wanted the Oxford English Dictionary but I guess that can wait�The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, Straight From the Fridge, Dad: A Dictionary of Hipster Slang, and The Fabulous Girl�s Guide to Decorum.

Argh. A few entries ago I wrote about having to write a review of this Frantic with Edna cd. Well I hate the album. I think it�s bloody awful. But even so, I tried to be fair. Well, Joe, the guy who runs the mag, says my review is �too vicious� and that he has �a problem with it.� I�m really not sure how in heck I�m supposed to sugarcoat the thing. You can wrap shit in cr�me brul�e but it�s still shit. And you�re obviously trying to deceive someone by doing so. Frantic with Edna ain�t worth the powder it�d take to blow their noses. The only way they could gas the slobs is if they did a Houdini! (Ya like that? It�s from my new hipster slang dictionary.) Now I�ve got to figure out how to fly it through to endsville.