Art Today had not wanted to cover Dylan Redford’s new sculpture installation, The Big Pink Pussy, but the damn thing was built with tax money, a National Humanities Grant. It was all the rage. No way to ignore it.
Dylan judged the opening was going famously until Ginger Fitzgerald of Art Today stepped inside the museum installation room in her red stilettos.
Ginger had reviewed Dylan’s installations twice before, neither time favorably. Tonight she was in a mad hurry. Her copy was due at the office at eight a.m. and she’d already toured three unbearably bad installations.
Dylan gnashed her teeth as Ginger clicked up the raised platform in her Prada heels to tour the Big Pink Pussy. Dylan had read, indeed memorized, Ginger’s previous mud slinging reviews of her artwork.
Ginger squinted as she strolled inside the crinkly pink cervix. On the advice of her audio tour master she plucked a taste tab off the slick pink walls. (Th Latex walls were covered in detachable peppermint taste tabs for those bold enough to take a lick, which Dylan always encouraged.)
Unimpressed by the installation, Ginger brushed past Dylan, tossing a comment over her shoulder as she clicked out of the museum. “Disappointed dear,” she sneered, “Tres derivative of Judy Chicago”
Dylan puffed up. “That bitch did suburban dinnerware. This is my vagina.”
Ginger sniffed the air recalling the odor inside the installation. Peppermint and warm latex were not a pleasant mix. “And it smells like it too.”
It took three rent-a-cops to pry Dylan Redford off Ginger Fitzgerald.
Not one to take physical assault lightly, Ginger pressed charges.
“Art bitch,” grumbled Dylan in the courtroom the next week.
“What did you call me?” asked the San Francisco Judge, who happened to be a lesbian, but also a Republican. Without waiting for an answer, she sentenced Dylan to six months in women’s prison–this was her third felony assault charge–or one month in rehab with a year of pissing in Dixie cups thereafter.
Dylan arrived in Vermont at Sugarbush rehab two weeks after sentencing on felony assault against the art critic who’d maligned her work. She dragged her duffle bag through the snow. It was loaded with sculpting and welding tools.
She was so high on coke she thought she was checking in at a queer art resort in Switzerland.
She wondered for a moment when she saw the owner, Lily Rockworthy, manning the check-in. She’d never seen a 76 year-old counter girl, dripping in diamonds, but heh, she dug older chicks, especially ones that were stacked, a term which clearly applied to Lily.
Only later, when Dylan awoke to find herself neatly tucked into a twin bed, wearing striped pink cotton pajamas, did she realize how dire her life had become.
“Oh fuck,” Dylan moaned, “not another psych ward.”
Nan Goldberg, the Manhattan bond broker who was booked in the bed across from Dylan, poked her head from under the covers where she’d been enjoying a Lisa Scottoline novel (Dirty Blonde), and a smuggled pack of Dunhill cigarettes. She fanned away a halo of smoke before speaking. “Actually, dear, it’s a lesbo spa, with a teeny bit of rehab tossed in.”
Rehab? Shit, thought Dylan, this was worse than she’d thought. At least in the nut house they gave you drugs.
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