Old Tiapos Brothers and Sisters

Sister Luci hasn't aged one day, she is as beautiful as ever and still looks like she wouldn't pass the age and height limit test at Kiddy World. Brother John must be taking flaxseed oil or the Anti-Aging Clear. Since Luci stepped away from TIAPOS she has written most of the Lonely Planet Hawaii books, while John is unquestionably one of the two best writers you've never heard of. John used to write his TIAPOS stories on the back of his arm at a taco shop ten minutes before he knocked our socks off with their audacity.

Jeez, dynamiting the cat? And hiding under the car as the pretty girl's high heels clank along the asphalt? John's daughters Meghan and Natalie are now 20 and 15, but we watched and heard them growing up from little kids, week after week.

Last night Luci and John, as well as Beth, Ducknik and Plotnik assembled at Hanky Girl's incomparably, uh, clocky home on Arguello Street. Luci lives in Vancouver now and was in town for a yoga convention and decided to accept Hanky Girl's offer to stay with her for a few days. So Hanky decided to have a small get-together in the late afternoon. It stretched far into the evening.

How could it not? So many stories to tell. We talked about everybody -- all these folks miss TIAPOS and all the funny characters we got together with every two weeks for more than ten years, telling secrets to each other in stories that we certainly never told wives and husbands. Authors trust each other and as you get to know each other better that trust gets deeper.

We talked about the other Best Writer You Never Heard Of -- Carol O. She is not doing well these days, so the story goes, but her stories live on. Every Christmas John still tells his kids Carol's story about stealing the Christmas Tree from the grocery store with her son, and how it was so much fun that they made a family tradition out of stealing another Christmas Tree together every year.

And the one about how, years before that, she and her friend decided one day, in a deeply depressed state, to commit suicide together. They'd end it all by sticking their heads into an oven. The problem was neither of them had an oven, so they had to borrow a friend's apartment and they couldn't get the friends to leave the house for a few moments so she and her friend could finish themselves off, but finally the oven was available and the apartment was empty but--it was a small apartment with a small oven, and both of them couldn't fit. And they couldn't decide who should go first. So they sat back and lit up a cigarette to talk about it, forgetting they'd already turned on the gas. Thank God she lived to tell about it because Plotnik is in hysterics even now, just thinking about Carol reading that story in her flat Michigan accent.

Oh, man. No one ever made Plotnik laugh as much as Carol O.

Hanky Girl is as wonderful as ever and Beth hasn't gotten any less sweet, nor less loony.



Who else but Hanky Girl would paint her bedroom red and buy red flame sheets and then decide, upon reflection, that it looked a little bit like a bordello?



The evening all went by 'way too fast. Plotnik and The Great WantzANewName-Nik are the only two Tiaposians left from those days, though there were other wonderful folks who came in between, like The Great Dance-Nik and The Great Sparker and Tim and Big Blogs and Nguyen Michael Jackson Goldberg and others Plotnik is certainly forgetting to mention.



So, memo to Blonde Bombshell and Chef Pickle and Mississippi Motorhead and The Great Large Pants and the Great Mushnik and Domin-Nik and Plotnik too: it's a great thing we've still got going.

Plotnik dedicates this post to our buddy Wally in Eugene. Your ears must have been burning last night, old pal, because we kept talking about you and Julie.