Festival 2011 - The Doctor is In

I’m sitting Gary’s booth at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, wondering what kind of story I can write about this year’s Festival experience, when a woman stops in front of me and starts stretching. She bends from the waist, forward, backward and sideways.

“My back’s bothering me,” she tells me.

I say I’m sorry. Maybe that was a mistake, because she takes that as a cue to tell me more.

“I hurt it last month at my son’s graduation…” and she is off and running.

I learn that she is a single mom and a teacher who got divorced when her son was little. She swore to herself she wouldn’t date until her son was out of high school, a vow she almost kept. There was that one time when another teacher asked her out and she thought what the heck, it was just dinner. When he wanted more than dinner, she backed off. Then there was the guy from another city who stood her up on the first date. She thought he was a real jerk until she found out he died right before their date. She sighs and says she is done with men, even though her son has now graduated. Still, she was having dinner by herself tonight when a man at the next table started chatting with her, telling her how he lived in Laguna, he was really, really rich and he’d love to spend the evening with her. She passed on the invitation, but now she is wondering if she should have said yes.

“What do you think?” she says. “Do you think he really is rich?

I shrug.

“Well,” she says. “It’s been great talking with you.” She puts out her hand. I shake it and nod, afraid to say a word for fear of triggering another story. She asks where she can get a cup of coffee and heads off in the opposite direction.

People tell me things. My mother was the same way. Perfect strangers would unburden themselves to her. I’m contemplating whether this is a genetic predisposition when an old man saunters up to me. He’s looking for a neighboring artist who isn’t here tonight.

He looks sad and disappointed to have missed his friend.

“I just moved back to the area,” he says. “I’ve been away a long time. Do you live in Laguna?”

“San Clemente,” I say, not imagining that this will spark a memory for him. He tells me about a fine young woman he knew who moved to San Clemente and was lost to drugs there.

“What would make a good Christian girl ruin her life like that?” he asks me.

Somehow I feel a little responsible since I live in San Clemente, but I say I don’t know. He launches into the whole story. I squirm in my chair, wishing someone would come with a question about the art. I could probably answer an art question. Finally he is done with his story and tells me it was wonderful to meet me. He asks for directions to the bathroom, and I send him on his way.

I’m feeling a little like Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip right now. Like I’m sitting in the psychiatric help booth and the sign says the doctor is in. No one has offered me five cents for my advice, though.

A man with a big potbelly and a bulging shoulder bag looks at the art and then inches up to my chair. The chair is high, so when someone stands next to you, you are eye to eye.

He wants to talk cameras. Since I’m tending a photographer’s booth, I expect this line of questioning. I can tell people what camera Gary uses, but after that I plead ignorance.

Potbelly tells me about the 44 cameras he has and all the lenses and how all these cameras are antiques now because they’re film. He asks what I think about using his lenses on new digital cameras.

I say, “I’m not a photographer.”

“You didn’t take any of these pictures?” he says.

“No,” I say and then I make my fatal error. “I’m a writer.”

What do you know? He is a writer, too, and a filmmaker and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His ex-wife writes children’s books and he has accidentally illustrated one of them. Accidentally, because she just needed some sketches to show the publisher what kind of illustrations she had in mind and the publisher liked his sketches so much he published them in the book.

He starts coughing during this part of the story and fishes through his bag.

“My acid reflux irritates my throat,” he says as he pulls out a cough drop and pops it into his mouth. He sucks it a second to lubricate his throat before he continues the “conversation” about writing.

“I can think up stories,” he says. “But I have trouble fleshing them out.”

Here I make another serious mistake.

“I’m the opposite,” I say. “I have trouble coming up with the story.”

He brightens as if he is having one of those aha moments everyone talks about. Suddenly, he is suggesting a collaboration. He does the story. I do the fleshing out.

“Do you have a card?” he says.

Good grief! What have I done?

“No,” I say, hoping my terse response will tell my whole story, one that needs no fleshing out.

His hand is back in the bag and he’s pulling out a card for me.

“Here,” he says. “You send me all your material and I’ll come up with a story.”

I have to admit it is tempting. I’ve been trying for four years to find the story that will connect all my bits and pieces into a novel. Still…

I take his card. It says he is a nuclear design engineer, not a storyteller.

“That’s not my writing card,” he says and plunges headlong into how he has a patent for nuclear waste disposal and he also developed a way to get energy from seawater, but that patent belongs to the government. His design has been fitted on a spacecraft that landed on Titan. In case the craft landed in seawater it could make energy using his device, but it landed in mud so no one knows if it would have worked.

I might have this all wrong. My attention has wandered to the people going through the bin who might actually be interested in art. They walk away as Potbelly is finishing up this part of his life story.

He’s pawing through his bag again, but comes up empty this time.

“I really need a Kleenex,” he says. “Do you have a Kleenex?” Apparently we’re good buddies now.

I search my own bag under the chair for the little Kleenex pack I always have. Don’t all therapists have Kleenex handy?

I give him a tissue and he blows his nose. I pray he doesn’t consider me such a close friend that he will hand me the used Kleenex. Fortunately, he sticks it into his bag with his business cards and his cough drops.

“Thanks,” he says and looks at his watch. “Say, which way is the Pageant of the Masters?”

I point the way and he is gone.

It’s time for me to close up shop, so I lock up the cupboard and grab my purse. Walking to the shuttle stop I search the faces of the people I pass. What’s your story I wonder? Then I remind myself I’m off duty now. The doctor is out.

Copyright 2011 by Liz Zuercher