Devon's friend Carrie, newly unemployed, has come to visit from Minneapolis. For the last several days, our merry band of slackers has roamed the city, showing Carrie the sights. Admittedly, this has included a lot of bookstores, but on Monday the Sight of the Day was Haight Street. As we were walking into Villains, we passed a camera crew, a guy and a girl with a digital video camera chattering in Japanese in front of the elaborate Halloween Emily display in the window. Emily didn't search to belong. She searched to be lost.
I did what any city girl would do. I ignored them. Devon, Carrie, and I walked into the store and never noticed that J hadn't quite followed us. The Japanese camera crew had him cornered and he was gamely answering their Emily-related questions. A few minutes later, he caught up with us somewhere between the bug-shaped backpacks and socks with little flames woven in.
"Well, that was funny. I'm going to be on Japanese television."
"I just found a shirt with a robot monkey on it!" Devon is a sucker for monkeys.
The couple was still standing outside when we departed the store. They were bolder this time.
"Excuse me, do you live around here?"
No San Francisco native will ever resist the chance to tell a tourist that they do, in fact, live here. Among San Franciscans, years spent in the city are the badge of authenticity. We are always eager to wave our good fortune in the face of those who are somehow unlucky enough to live somewhere else.
"Do you mind if we tape you for a moment? Will you explain this to us?" The woman indicated the window full of merchandise depicting a strange little girl and her cats. Emily isn't evil. She's just up to no good.
"Do you have Emily merchandise? Can we come to your house and see it?" Now, when you're a city girl, and some strange couple with a camera asks if they can see your house, you say no. If they're nice, you stall and say you're not sure. If your boyfriend is J, it doesn't matter what you tell them because he is busy scrawling down his cell phone number and address. [As a footnote, J has just chimed in to let me know that he did not give them our address right then and there. He just gave out his cell phone number and it wasn't as if he thought they were ever going to call him back.]
Really, I didn't think that we would ever hear from them again. That's why I stayed out all night instead of cleaning the house. That's why I flung my clothes all over the floor and fell asleep in my makeup. That's why my jaw hit the floor when the phone rang and J told me we had about 45 minutes until the guy with the camera showed up.
There's no point in trying to describe this. You've all seen the scene in that movie or TV show when the kids have made a terrible mess and the clean-up is shot in fast forward to the tune of Chopin's "Minute Waltz." That's it happend, I swear. It was one terrible, cliche-filled blur. Emily isn't lazy. She's just happy doing nothing.
The shoot itself was painless. The cameraman came with a big bag full of Emily stuff, just in case we didn't have enough. We set it all up on the chaise lounge so that we could shoot the house and then come around to the couch and do the interview. I don't think that the punk rock DIY ethic is very common on Japan, because the camera always lingered on the things J and I had made or altered --the dress I made for Gatsby Summer Afternoon, the acoustic foam J put up on the walls of the studio, the way I'd cut the sleeves off of one of my Emily tee-shirts.
I answered the cameraman's straightforward questions about Emily things. When was the first time you saw them? Why do you like them? How much do they cost? I grinned for the camera and hoped that somewhere, the people watching this Japanese fashion program ("a major, major program," they assured me) read a little bit of English, at least enough to read the words written across my shirt: Don't Trust Me.
Emily is very strange.