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Saying that she’s veered off topic and is now discussing the hazy three years she lived on the West Coast with some guy, teenager Michael Rorty told reporters that his mom, Marianne, is talking about her lost years again.
“She was asking me about my day at dinner and then some guy named Jonathan came up, and now she’s talking about how they lived in a tiny house in Venice Beach for a few years before she married my dad,” Rorty said, noting that his mom has this rapt, dreamlike expression on her face, the same one she always has when talking about this stuff. “It’s making me super uncomfortable. She’s talking like she’s reading poetry.”
Marianne is reportedly holding a glass of wine aloft and very vaguely describing her pot-fueled escapades during the years 1975-1978. She’s already mentioned the name “Jefferson Airplane” twice, and has maybe implied that she and the psychedelic band had some kind of intimate experience once. Rorty also noted that she and Rorty’s father met and started dating in high school, which gives the foggy stories of her hanging out at the Whisky-A-Go-Go a strange, existential intensity.
“Well not everyone was hip back then, but people didn’t notice if you checked out for a year or three,” Marianne said before putting her hands to her mouth as if smoking a cigarette. “It was after Watergate but before Mark David Chapman. The dollar was stagflating and Jim Morrison was dead. Vietnam was over and the summer of love ended and went cold quicker than a chicken breast in the freezer. Everyone was dropping out, Michael.”
Sources indicate that Marianne eventually began to search through her address book for Jonathan’s number.
At press time, Rorty’s father had entered and started talking about how he had gone to the 1968 Democratic Convention, at which point everyone left the kitchen to do their own thing.
