Hello dear readers, writers and those who are both,

Oscar’s Salon would have simply not been possible, not been nearly as well put together, nor would the word about it have gotten out nearly as well to you without Oscar’s Team.

Each of them has been exceptional in terms of their skills, ideas, reliability, enthusiasm and patience.

It’s been a lot of work over the past four and a half years. And, happily, with this team, a lot of fun.

The category is our predicament.
Everyone not in our category is a not. This is the knot.
“… photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880’s and 1930’s … show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done.”

More and more transgender people are choosing gender reassignment via hormone injections and various types of surgery. It’s a relief, often a joyful experience to become the gender one has always felt oneself to be. Mismatched gender can feel like imposed camouflage yet reassignment—in heterosexual society eyes— is often viewed as deception. It’s a camouflage conundrum either way.

The larger one notices it tucked in there. Menace pulses out from it (is Oscar imagining this?). It swings over on a guy strand and lands close to the small one, which immediately darts to the other side — its terror palpable. Oscar wants to intercede but traffic is too heavy — she’s caught in the web of this story, gripped by the larger spider’s absolute intent to kill radiating from its body.

At the pyramid’s apex: morality, creativity, spontaneity, acceptance, purpose, meaning and inner potential. Oscar’s repeated packing up her personal and professional necessities as she moved between seven temporary locations prior to Montreal plunged her to the bottom. She takes some comfort in this for at the bottom nothing is extraneous: a particular alertness is required. Simplicity.

Dinner last night. Lise and Oscar talking about Lise’s meditation retreat at Auschwitz. The puzzlement about why so few survivors of the death camps would talk about it after they were liberated. Oscar mentions an article she read about the alarming increase of PTS in U.S. soldiers and how the suicide rate for returning Canadian soldiers has also shot up.

The woman excused herself and went into the bathroom. Within a minute, her partner abruptly strode over and pushed open the washroom door. Went in.

Silence – sound of the lock – silence.

Scuffling then her odd groan that signaled he had entered her, then increasing sounds of force and agony – everyone in the store frozen in disbelief – then her aching sobs. That’s when the male customer went in. Silence. Then. Oscar. Went in. Told him:

“Let her go.”

The liar’s sense of reality doesn’t suddenly crumble nor does she or he feel profoundly betrayed. Also, the liar is not subjected to ongoing blame whereas the deceived one usually is (“You should have realized what was going on; you must have turned a blind eye; you drove him to do it.”)

We identify with the liar. Disassociate from the one deceived.
“Manipulation of the truth is worse than no truth.”

Curtain call. Oscar calling out “Bravo!” “Brava!” Final drop of the curtain then the bewilderment of entering hundreds and hundreds of bodies chatting and moving out of the hall down into the subway. J and Oscar staying close, acknowledging how they each want to hold on to what has just happened. Not forget.

“Hey. Watch out! This is the latest scam! Don’t help him! It was on the news last night!”
Oscar. Squats to pick up coins and tokens, glances up at him as he stops to watch. Quick assessment. He decides. Crouches down and helps as people stream by on either side but continues on to his girlfriend:
“If you put your bag down to help them, they grab it and take off!”

Czeslaw Milosz said a writer in the family is the end of family.
Jamaica Kincaid said she writes about her family as if they were dead.
What do author and family have in common?
A book can bring us to our knees.
It has taken Oscar almost forty years to acknowledge in writing the other author in the family.
Thomas Heggen.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted and was stationed on a Navy supply ship for fourteen months. Utterly bored, he repeatedly requested a transfer to a destroyer but his commander repeatedly denied his request. To counter numbing monotony, he began writing vignettes about the small dramas being played out on ship.

Two large hives. Oscar and bees gingerly becoming acquainted. When they buzz around her (don’t bat them away!) she hums the note they make and this seems to ease their uncertainty. She watches their typical fourteen-hour workday: constant stream of ninety-degree-angle ascent and descent to and from control-tower hives.

October 2013. Oscar in Vancouver at the reception before the Virginia Woolf Conference banquet. Oscar nervous “in the extreme” (Orlando). As Oscar walks into the hotel convention lobby, she spots Miranda and Sharon (who’s also reading) huddled together by Helen, the conference chair. Helen offers to buy them a drink. Oscar confesses she’s socially inept in these situations, to which Miranda and Sharon confess similar feelings.

Vancouver. Oscar invited to read at the 23rd Annual Virginia Woolf Conference banquet – between the entree and dessert.
Of all her betweennesses, this is a new challenge for Oscar.
She considers. A palate cleanser? Something refreshing, humorous (the typical fare), but this is not Oscar’s forte.
Oscar flummoxed. Every idea of what to read nosedives like an inadequately made paper airplane.
Then Orlando taps her on the shoulder.
There’s the fit: Orlando and Oscar– food, drink, lively exchange of ideas.

On Vancouver streets, panhandlers most often are met with suspicion, anger or averted eyes (“you don’t exist”).

Street people streetwise living close to the ground see through who we are as we rush by. Panhandlers’ eyes and Oscar’s often meet; sometimes they speak and, not infrequently, Oscar gives some change (change—what is needed here).

No “Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord!” Street people spot-on about gender for they cannot afford even the most unintentional insult.

Over the course of her life, all the unacknowledged, unsaid undercurrents about her betweenness denied outright but mostly camouflaged. To have it spontaneously shouted at her and to shout back was refreshing. Yet, she also realizes she is safe, she is not a young Black man who could have been as easily shot.

Big Data collection corporations on average have 18,000 pieces of information culled from every aspect of our online activities to sell to other corporate marketing departments. Big Data’s cannibalizing of our habits and preferences is becoming the world’s most valuable and profitable resource.

Big Data refuses to disclose its information on us, to us. Harmful misinformation is almost impossible to correct.

For Big Data (echo of Big Daddy), anonymity on our computers, our handheld devices is a ruse.

It happens.

Happens after twenty years of writing; twenty years of applying; twenty years of “Unfortunately(s) …”

It happens on a sunny Montreal day as the magic realism of the storm’s creations begins to melt. On this 20th of March, 2013, day: the spring equinox. This day when the length between sunrise and sunset/sunset and sunrise is exactly the same. It happens on this one day of perfect betweenness. Oscar receives the call.