I keep about 5000 messages in my email box going back about two years because I am lazy, and every once in a while I get the urge to go through the really old ones. It’s like looking at old letters. I found this portrait Steve Fritz took of me at a Drowning Rat two years ago when I was just getting over my divorce. My friend Tiffany Lee Brown has been organizing these events just east of Eugene for a lot of years. Drowning Rat is kind of an Oregonian answer to Burning Man. It’s rainforest instead of desert, and a moss rat that gets thrown in the river instead of burned, and it’s really small and private. The deal with the rat is it’s a way to let go of things. I have a whole sequence of photos I’ll write up some time about what I did that weekend to get rid of my wedding dress. My wedding dress sort of haunted me after my divorce. I had had it preserved in a vacuum-sealed box with a plastic display window. I didn’t know what to do with it. So finally I gave part of it to Tiffany for her wedding dress she was having designed, the good part with the nice beading and heavy silk, and destroyed the rest. Above is me when I’ve gotten dressed up for the party as a kind of Gilligan’s Island Ginger type girl and am totally relieved somehow by my throwing the ashes of my dress in the river. It meant a lot to me, that dress, at the time. It’s weird but these ritualistic things that I usually am put off by do actually work sometimes. Below is me having my way with the dress, getting rid of it for better or for worse.
