With the closing of the New York Worlds Fair in October, Panorama publications decided to host a series of conferences called The Future Forum with the idea of envisioning what the twenty-first century might really be like, highlights of which were published in ParaNorma magazine. Experts in the various fields covered would venture their educated guess while Jenny moderated, often shooting down their rosy predictions with a dose of her brand of logic. Videophone, she opined were never going to happen. They eat up too much bandwidth and nobody really likes using them.

"Getting woken up at three-fifteen in the morning by some creep hoping to get a look at my tits isn't something I'm looking forward to."

On race relations she offered...

"We have good laws in place right now... but if there are any more riots like the ones in Watts we may see a complete abandonment of cities by white people. Even here in 'liberal' New York you have blockbusting going on in the boroughs. That's where realty companies move one or two Negro families into an all white neighborhood and scare the white folk into selling out for a lowball price."

On whether we'd have a Negro president by the turn of the century...

"That's a tough one... the timing would be right for one of their people to move up the ladder... but I think there's a wild card we haven't thought about. A lot of people from Puerto Rico have been coming over here... and in California, Texas and the other border states, Mexicans are coming into this country. Latin voice may turn out to be more powerful than the Negro's."

On the general subject of the economy she had a very definite opinion.

"Right now we have an excessively high tax burden. If you make a dollar in this country and you're in the top tax bracket, the government will confiscate seventy cents of it... until last year they would take ninety-one cents of it. We've been able to get away with this folly because there was nowhere else for the capitalist to go but things are changing. Right now the Japanese are at or near parity with our industrial development and they don't have nearly the cost burdens we do. If we do not act now we may be forced to cede whole industries to foreign manufacturers, probably within the next decade."

On the president's 'Great Society' programs.

"Not the worst thing in the world, but he's paying for them out of the general fund. We have a Social Security tax. There ought to be a 'welfare tax' so at least we know what we're paying for."

"We are getting close to the practical limits of the 'strong city center' model in the big cities like New York of Los Angeles. I don't see downtowns going away but I think you will see them cede more and more services and cultural amenities to the suburban rings. By the turn of the century city centers will likely marketed more for their access to their suburban business centers than as a destination in and of themselves. More people will commute from the old core city neighborhoods to their suburbs than the other way around. Harlem to give an example, might well become a bedroom community for the offices, factories and shops around Fort Lee."

Presenting a model of her building of the future from last year she added, "The future of architectural design will be in buildings that look good to a motorist passing by at fifty miles an hour."

"Traffic incidentally is going to be a mess. The days of a morning and afternoon rush hour will be seen as the good old days once traffic spreads throughout the system. And don't expect to be about to build our way out of it. Any highway improvements will only bring more users."

After listening to presentations of monorail and 'magnetic levitation' railroad systems Jenny reminded them...

"Any new transportation system will have to fit in with the existing grid and will also require a substantial capital investment that, even when we've reached the saturation point of our highway system, we may not be willing to make anymore. In addition any mass transit solution will have to abandon the old 'hub and spoke' mentality that current systems are designed around in favor of some sort of flexible grid system. Like our highway systems we're still stuck with the old-fashioned notion of urban and suburban commuters going downtown and back with minimal consideration for what will the more important crosstown transportation needs."

"Your magnetic levitation system has promise... but it would likely be cheaper more useful to take the wireless power transmission part of it and apply it to an electrified bus system. You could lay the system down in modules during scheduled repaving projects. With computerized signaling only the modules directly under the buses need be fully energized. By selling access to trucking companies, you could put the system on a paying basis and better yet, you would also cut down on the air pollution that plagues our urban areas."

Her observations on the computer industry were such that they merited a 'spin-off' article called 'Is There a Computer in Your Future?' that not only predicted 'yes' but set forth a timetable based on a known industry observation that the basic measurements of computational power double in relation to price about every eighteen months or so.

"The written word has the most promise right now. Mind you, a computer can never replace the printed word in ease and convenience of use but as a 'processor' of words it will be as revolutionary as the printing press, even more so. Expect the publishing industry to acquire the first workable systems by the mid to late nineteen seventies and the home user to have the same sometime within the next ten years."

"Closer to my heart are architectural and the engineering fields. Being able to work out intricate plans on a television screen and see instantaneously the results of changes would blow the field wide open. Imagine the ability of a prefabricated house builder to have his plans indexed to every building code in the country. Imagine being able to test the structural integrity of your designs without so much as a brick being laid and even more importantly, being able to check suggested design revisions as they come from your subcontractors. The J Platt and Company is already shopping around for such a system to use in its construction sequencing work."

"The creative arts in general will benefit from 'personal' computers and will likely drive much of the technology. Well before full processing and storage capability become available, 'electronic' musicians will be able to sequence and edit their compositions on a computer for automatic playback on their instruments. A singer like Elvis or Sinatra or group like the Beatles ordering such a system today could create a new industry like that brave fellow who first electrified a guitar. The technology is within reach but not the programming."

"And therein lies the rub. A computer is only as good as the instructions you feed them and the instructions are only as good as the programmer that writes them. Unfortunately computer programmers are born and not made and while the educational system can help those with the aptitude and temperament for the profession we can't expect everyone to adapt to the ever changing mindset of a computer."

"The computer must be made to adapt to ours."

During the forum meetings she brought out one of her snails tchotchkes to demonstrate a point.

Holding the snail tchotchke by its shell and sliding it around she continued, "Anyone can point to what they want... I figure by putting a ball hooked up to a couple rotary switches inside something like this... and press a single button on here when you get to the one you want... Obviously we'd want something less snail-looking but you get the idea..."

One of the things only touched lightly by the forum but expanded upon by the article was the use of the computer as a communication tool.

"In researching the possible uses for a computer in the home the idea of the happy housewife being able to collect and store recipes on one invariably came up wherever I went. To prove the futility of such an endeavor I asked an interviewee to go ahead and type one up for me while I wrote the same one down on an index card. He wasn't a great typist and I don't write recipes but I still had it written down and formatted so it would be easily understood long before he could type up the ingredients."

"Computers won't be storing recipes for the time being but it did get me thinking. Suppose a computer could be trained to read recipes off those index card and check the ingredients against a household inventory? Suppose your computer could remind you to call the grocery store for any ingredients you didn't have or better yet call the store itself. With all the capabilities of computer technologies its use as a communications tool is one that will change everything we've ever known or thought about the way we live and this is a technology we are just beginning to exploit today. A few school districts are installing terminals in their classrooms to access college mainframes and our company is in negotiations with the local school district to share the costs and use of what were looking to buy. Imagine the consequences of every man having capabilities undreamed of by the largest corporations today. Imagine being able to obtain perfect copies of every song ever recorded, every book ever published and every work of art ever painted or photographed at the push of a button. Imagine being able to buy, sell and trade your own creations to all corners of the globe from the comfort of your home."

"Imagine being able to rob a bank from the comfort of your home."

"With every new technology comes crime and without the proper safeguards in place, the 'comput iverse' will be no exception. As more and more of our daily transactions are done in the realm of the 'computi-verse' the risk of electronic crime becomes greater. Everyone looks the same to a computer and without the proper safeguards in place, it wouldn't take much for a lowly miscreant on the other side of the world to pass themselves off as a citizen in good standing and rob him of his fortune and good name with little if any recourse under today's laws."

"Electronic warfare could take so many different forms that we might be under attack without even realizing it. For example electronic news services could find themselves falsely announcing the death of our president. This could cripple our communications systems for hours like it did in Washington on the day president Kennedy was murdered. Millions of people could be notified that they've won a lottery somewhere and be asked to supply the electronic passkey to their bank accounts to receive their winnings. The messages themselves could have hidden programming codes that could disable your computer or put it under external control."

"As bad as such problems are, there are solutions to them and the opportunities far outweigh the risks. One need only imagine the unlimited opportunities if computers are so cheap ubiquitous and portable enough that any child born anywhere in this world has the same access to the the comput iverse as any other. Imagine a shut-in living in Oxford, England being able to obtain a Harvard education while a poor Negro in a Cambridge, Massachusetts flat studies at Oxford... or maybe at a university in one of the new African nations. Imagine native indians being able to preserve the tales and ancient ways of their elders and share them with other native tribes across the globe. Imagine a Amazon piranha fisherman bragging about his catch to his Eskimo buddy fishing on a frozen lake outside of Nome..."

"It is a big world after all."

At the Future Forum conference Jenny also brought up the subject of being able to trade 'nekkid' pictures and 'stag films' freely across her 'computi-verse' but nobody could decide whether that was a 'good' or 'bad' thing, so it never found its way into print. It was agreed that pornography would likely be a significant driver of computer technology if a way can be found to make money in a realm where if one person has something of value, he or she can pass it on freely to anyone else and they could easily do the same.

"This may be the one arena where Socialism triumphs over Capitalism," Jenny wryly observed.

It was a fun series of conferences but it was soon time for people to move on. The major item on Jenny's agenda was getting her financial house in order and the first task on that list was severing the Electric Valve company from its stock issues. A holding company, was created and the Ryerson Electric Valve company was duly transferred to the Lawson Financial Group.

In addition to the sailboat and the Los Angeles factory, Jenny got possession of that extra pension fund which had the grand total of one dollar left in it. She had considered letting it retire for good but after looking at the numbers, opted to use it as her own pension account, funding it with the proceeds of her inheritance. Her employment with Panorama was a nebulous one at best without even the apocryphal handshake to bind it but Jenny had decided to end her active relationship with the company so N'eddie threw a 'retirement' party for her at the Playboy Club in celebration.

Fittingly enough, her final contribution would be the plans for a beach house in the Hamptons to be featured as the 'party house' in Panorama's own 'girlie' magazine 'Gal-o-rama'. It was to be a lavish structure that Jenny claimed was inspired by General Motor's 'Futurama' pavilion for the Nineteen thirty-nine World's Fair. She'd divided the structure into three separate 'function zones' with a single storey kitchen attached to the two storey 'party room' with a three storey 'sleeping tower' at the other end. The tower was to hold two bedrooms with attached bathrooms on the upper two storeys that cantilevered over the foundation story which held an exercise room. Attached to the kitchen was a drum-shaped room that held the utility services on the ground floor and a sit down 'water spa' on its roof. Since the kitchen's roof was to serve as a deck for the upper party room storey, she wrapped a flight of stairs around the drum so rooftop revelers could traipse on down to the wading pool to join in on late night 'tadpoling' sessions.

It was during her final assignment for Panorama that Jenny managed to set herself up for the next phase in her architectural career. She had plans to be in California by November but she was asked to find a construction company with the ability to take on 'Jenniferhouse VI' as a reduced-cost 'prestige' project before she departed. Naturally, her first choice was the builder of her beloved Lever House so she made an appointment with the Fuller Construction Company to give them first crack at the job. Arriving at their Fifty-seventh Street offices, she stopped dead in her tracks upon glimpsing a model of their 'Albany job'.

"Did you hear that kids? I think... I just heard my ovaries screaming..."

"Just look away Jenn... We're here for something else, remember?"

With the edge of the project model we'd been schlepping around for her, we gently prodded Jenny onward to the office of their client services representative. Honestly, she can be like a kid in front of a candy store window sometimes. At any rate, Mister Vacanté remembered her or at least her hairdo from the summer days she'd spent watching them on their 'Park Avenue job' back in the Fifties.

At least she made a good faith attempt to present the project she'd come in with and Mister Vacanté did give it a looking over while Jenny mentioned the particulars about needing someone willing to round up as many donated and 'promotionally priced' materials from suppliers as they could.

"This is going to be a cross-publication 'show project'... which we all know means N'eddie wants a beach house and she wants someone else to pay for it... and with taxes these days still way too high... can you really blame her?"

He couldn't and figured a prestige project couldn't hurt the company's bottom line and they could write it off on their taxes anyway and why were we wasting our time discussing this in a stuffy old office when there's a perfectly good bar downstairs? Three martinis later and he was curious as to why Jenny was handing the whole project off to some local 'second stringer' architect instead of supervising it herself.

"Only so much I can do on a 'learners permit'. Anyways, I'm off to Californey with the mister and kid as soon as I can get things settled here... Man, they really rook you with these olives... could fill a whole 'nuther glass with what they're displacing."

"So what are your plans? Hate to see talent like this go to waste..."

"Well... I got a kid to look after. I've got a friend at SOM. Might take an internship with their LA office... if she can get me one, that is..."

"You couldn't stick around for another year?"

"I could... but I really don't have a place to live anymore. Here, I mean... just finished a house in LA... No... If I were going to hang around here, I'd rather be doing something on that Albany job of yours... Now... there's something to cut your teeth on."

Back upstairs, we were in the office of top man on the Fuller totem pole.

"Y'know you've gotten quite a reputation in the business..."

"Oh, I was afraid of that..."

"Hey now... people are saying good things about you. Just the other day somebody brought in this 'earthquake study' of yours..."

"Could be worse honey," opined his secretary. "Could have everyone thinking you're on the payroll so the boss could write off his 'nights on the town'."

With logic like that, Jenny could only table the idea so she could at least get her husband's opinion on the matter. She had other considerations to factor in, the Company was also in the running for a slice of the Albany job and dad might have a need for her, so it wasn't necessarily a foregone conclusion that she'd take whatever the were offering. In addition Eddie had been busily setting things up so that he wouldn't have to travel as much. He had managed to get Trans International interested in taking over that Los Angeles property for their business of 'Americanizing' the foreign films they imported and getting himself assigned to head that division of the company as well. They wanted a sound stage for reshoots and new scenes they might want to insert and a few recording studios to dub in English dialogue. Not only that but Eddie had also gotten them interested in a scaled down version of Jenny's World's Fair building as the 'head house' for their new studio.

We thought we knew or at least had an educated guess to her decision as we watched the Ryerson family waving their farewells to us from in front of the TWA terminal at Idlewild field as the taxi carried us over to our gate at the American terminal for the flight home to Oklahoma. It had been a good year and a half since we been back and even we get a little homesick. Eventually. Strangely, we were met at the airport, not by our parents, but by a college mate named Rachel who hailed from the nearby Olsen spread. Explaining that our parents were still a little sore about our World's Fair appearance, she offered to let us stay at her place for a couple days while they cooled off. She also had a film project in mind that she wanted our help with.

"Hi... I'm Rachel Olsen... I have cancer. I'm going to die... soon."

It was a cinematic introduction all the more jarring for its matter-of-fact delivery by an otherwise healthy-looking young blonde splashing about in the waters behind Jenny's old house. Even more shocking was the dissolve to the same young blonde's lifeless body on the dissection table of medical college. The premise of 'Goodbye Rachel Olsen' was elementally simple - follow a girl through the end stages of cancer with intercuts of her dissection by medical students - but it was a grueling year-long ordeal made all the worse by our having to take her parents to court in order to finish the film according to her vision.

The funny thing is that we'd barely given her much notice in the art and photography classes we'd taken with her. Those first couple of semesters were a period of adjustment for us and we were still trying to figure out who we could trust and all that. Usually if someone keeps cringing any time we touch them unexpectedly, we figure them for a lost cause.

On the off chance her parents did interfere with her final request and to have an idea of how she wanted the scenes we'd filmed already arranged, she had us film the medical dissection of some hapless drunkard that we figure had sold her body for enough booze to finish the job. By the time a female dissection was available we already had in the can several thousand feet of pictures of Rachel in and out the hospital as she slowly got the bad news that her cancer was too widespread for surgery or any other method to take care of. With a rough idea of what was going to be done to her, we were able to better select what to film of the things she liked to do. For example, we shot scenes of her hands working a pottery wheel to match shots where the hand muscles were being exposed and identified on the dead lady. They had cut into the poor lady's sex organs so Rachel had us film her having sex with her boyfriend.

As spring turned to summer and her strength started to waver, Rachel wanted to get in some last moments of fun before she'd weakened completely. She got a few more practical jokes in like stealing a 'Jesus Saves' sign from a church and planting it in front of a bank. She had always wanted to go to Hollywood and we were able to arrange a visit to Eddie's company. It wasn't all fun and games, there was business to attend to as Ryerson International Pictures was slated to distribute this work of art on the college and festival circuit. We has hoped to be able to introduce her to Jenny but her busy schedule had precluded that. She'd at least taken the 'Hamptons job' and only came home to LA on weekends.

Jenny was going to remain in New York for the July Fourth weekend. Rachel had never been to The City and wanted to go however we didn't join her on account of our needing a short break from this project. We wanted to have some record of the trip and luckily we were able to get in touch with Heather Robinson who was more than pleased to hop on a plane to Oklahoma and fly back with Rachel. It was Heather and Jenny that came up with the opening shot for this project and it was Jenny's voice that gave Rachel off camera direction as to which way she should swim to match the as yet unseen morgue shot. Not shown in the final project but preserved for posterity were the images and sound of the DeFeos as they watched the filming from their back yard.

Also filmed was Rachel's near drowning as her strength suddenly gave out on her and she had to be dragged out of the water by Jenny with an assist from poppa DeFeo. She had recovered enough to be filmed looking out to sea and enjoy a July fourth cookout but we had to have an ambulance meet her at the airport coming home and was fully bedridden by the end of the week. The end was coming and we all knew it. She had one last obsession to fulfill before she rang the final curtain and with Heather's assistance, we set up a miniature camera rig to record her last view of this realm attached to a 'negative pressure' release to make that final shot. In addition to the still camera was a motion picture camera set to turn off when she let go of the 'dead man's switch'. We and Heather had planned to keep a day and night bedside vigil but we barely had the system on her head for a test run when she started shivering with the realization that she was passing right then and there.

Her body had barely cooled when her parents tried to claim it and the footage we'd taken. We had Xeroxes of all the legal documents on hand, but they were determined to get her in the ground before we could round up our lawyer to enforce them. Luckily for us, there really was an ambulance chaser in the emergency room that night and we at least had Rachel stored in the cooler till a judge could be rousted from bed. As cranky as he was and as disgusted as he was by the project as described to him by her family, the law and more importantly the cowboy code of honor was on our side and Rachel Olsen was wheeled into the the dissection lab the next afternoon to be exposed for all to see. They completely disassembled her, even plucking her eyes from their sockets and carving them open to show all the parts. That was the shot we cut in with her final fade to black. What remains they didn't keep we had cremated with the intent of returning the ashes to her parents but such was their bitterness over the whole affair they refused to accept them. We still have her at home in our version of the White Metal Cabinet.

The bad taste left by this endeavor couldn't be sweetened by the smash success our film had garnered. It seems that real death and dismemberment with a dash of real sex was catnip for the Nineteen Sixty-seven filmgoing collegian and there was an exhausting lecture and festival circuit to go along with it. We actually got nominated for several awards including one from the Motion Picture Academy. We didn't win an Oscar but we got one for best documentary at the film festival being held in connection with Montreal 'Expo 67' World's Fair. Each award or appearance was like a dagger to our stomachs but we soldiered on with the dim hope that Rachel would somehow appear from behind a curtain to reveal that this was all a grand joke. It was but she never did.

"Yep... made a movie."

"Yep... built a beach house."

"How's the kid?"

"She's turning into a real sailor... a drunken one. Walks like one. Talks like one. Drinks like one... even fights like one!"

"She's on solid food now?"

"Well... she's gettin' the mushy stuff now but I still keep the keg tapped. Do hafta bottle it on account of work, so... if ya see milk in the icebox... that ain't milk! Least not the moo-cow stuff."

She had work the next day and seeing as we had nothing better to do, she let us tag along. Her first stop was at the Company offices at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. She had some meetings with staff and made a few phone calls and was out the door by quarter to eight to make the drive to the airport. Things had apparently changed in the last year and a half because we didn't pull into Zahn's but the larger Republic Field just up the road. The Fairchild company had sold the field last December and the Platts moved their big-fish-in-a-little-pond over to the more spacious field.

"Well... that's new," we remarked as Jenny led us to a private jet with the same 'Platt Air Services' logo on the side and 'JP-20112' on the tail as their old plane.

"It was a prototype for a private jet the Fairchild people couldn't sell. Cute isn't it?"

"It's you... Looks like a DC-8 that'd shrunk in the wash... but it's you all right... When did you get jet rated?"

"I'm not. Not yet anyway. Take my qualifications this summer."

"What happened to the Douglie?"

"Dad still uses it for company trips but Brenda and Bitsey use it for their tour services most of the time. Got this little fellow for myself and the Fuller company. Should be here in a minute..."

The Fuller men were met by company cars for the drive to Albany, leaving Jenny to hunt for her ride in the airport parking lot. It was a bright yellow flat-paneled beast from the Volkswagen company that only someone like Jenny could love. She said it was called a 'Thing' and we still recall the loving snarl on her face when she said 'Thing'. With that utility cart of hers dragging behind her we rattled into the town, crossing the concrete arches of 'Great Western Gateway Bridge' that Jenny reminded us was one of the Company's early jobs and sadly was about due for replacement. It was the morning rush for the General Electric factory but once we passed the railroad bridge downtown we were swimming against the traffic tide and it only took a little under twice as long to drive to the job site as it did to fly in from Long Island.

"We're thinking of chipping in for a company helicopter."

From the ground it was hard to make out anything so we had to take a ride to the observation deck of the big state office tower we'd used as a landmark those couple of years ago to take in the enormity of the divot carved open by the demolition of the dozen or so blocks of brownstones that was the 'Albany job'. With a path being cleared down to the river, it looked more like London after the blitz. Supposedly this was all slum but we couldn't help feeling bad for all the people that had their homes taken away and made to find another place to live. From the pictures we took they didn't look any worse than the fields of brownstones in Brooklyn and according to Heather people had a fierce pride in their neighborhoods there. Such is the price for progress.

"You sure know how to put on a show for the news don'tcha Jen..."

We'd returned to find Jenny standing on the hood of the Thing, waving her arms and shouting commands like a traffic cop as she attempted to clear the logjam of construction vehicles trying to get into the construction pit while a cameraman and his reporter looked on with bemusement.

"I don't usually do this... but we've got a big pour today and you only have so much time with wet concrete... C'mon people let's hustle!"

"So what are your regular duties?"

"And what are you doing now?"

"Well on the big pours, I'm the one who checks the traffic on the way to the mixing plant before we call in the trucks. Once we get a conga line going we really don't like to hafta stop... Whatsa matter Shorty, ya never seen twins before? I think we better go inside... here watch the kid a sec."

We drove onto the lot and parked next to the J P & C trailer. Jenny started to explain that she didn't usually bring Arianna with her but was interrupted by the baby talk from her fellow engineers.

"Yes... they're big tough he-men now... but you should see 'em run when baby needs her diaper changed. Really, most days my sister looks after her. She's got kids of her own so it's not a big problem. It was a lot easier last year when I was working closer to home. Parents have a cabin cruiser and I could just sail to the job site and let the waves rock her to sleep. She loves boats..."

"So what it like being one of the only girls on..."

"Well it's not so bad really. The boys seem to think I'm lucky or something... I suppose it helps that I do the morning prayers for everybody... being the bosses daughter doesn't hurt either... least not around this office anyway."

"You ever have any problems..."

"What do you mean? Like getting hooted at? It sorta comes with the territory but they got over that months ago..."

"I was more thinking... Well... some men don't like taking orders from women."

"Yeah... I've gotten a couple of those. Y'know it's like they make a game of it. Either they're trying to get you to cry or they want you to call in supervisor. Never could get me to cry but I will call in a supervisor if I have to. I know that what they want so I just turn the tables on them. I just go on the radio and say something like 'this li'l crybaby doesn't want to play with the girl, could you send the supervisor down and change his diaper'."

"Anyone ever threaten you... or get violent with you."

"I take it he never bothered you again."

"He never showed up again! Seems there's this thing with the mob... or the unions... if a we get a call sayin' someone's in a certain place where they're not supposed to be, that's their subtle way of telling you that the guy better find another line of work or he'll never be seen again. Honestly, I didn't plan it that way."

"Have you had any dealings with the Mafia?"

"Well you do know that the 'Mafia' doesn't exist... Even the Feds call it 'organized crime'..."

"Well have you had any dealings with..."

"Any dealings we have in this business are strictly legit... Anyone else... we have an 'understanding'. Let's just keep it at that..."

Jenny excused herself to take care of company business. The traffic at the gate had been cleared and the roads from the cement plant were as well. After checking with the pour sites she gave the order to load the trucks and send them on their merry way. She too was on her way to the company apartment to better oversee the deliveries.

"See that little apartment building over on State? Used to be a block away... where the Al Smith is now. Back in the 'Twenties we did the engineering work for the company that moved that building."

Up on the top floor she positioned herself at the window with binoculars to await the cement mixers while a scanner monitored radio traffic as little Arianna scuttled about the room.

"We couldn't help noticing the large number of Negroes on your staff..."

"Yeah, they've been with the company for a while... some have been with us since before the war."
"Really?"

"Well we don't have a big problem with hiring Negroes here... Oh... there's a funny story I gotta tell you... One of the civil rights groups in this town decided to send a bunch of 'testers' to my office... Y'know to see if we discriminated? Well this colored kid comes up here looking for a job... I wasn't in charge of hiring, so I was kinda puzzled as to what was going on but I asked him to fill out a card anyway. Well another colored kid comes up and then a Puerto Rican and I kinda got the idea of what was going on. Finally a white kid comes up and I knew what was going on so I give him the old Bugs Bunny act... I tell him he's hired with a big slap on the back... take him to the window and ask him to take a message down to some guy down in the lot. I give him the envelope with message and send him down with another slap on the back. I'd written something really nasty on the note and called my man ahead to clue him into what was going down so when he got it, we could all have a good laugh at that poor tester's expense. We're real stinkers around here."

After lunch she literally changed hats from her J P & C hard hat to one from the Fuller company in order to collect the afternoon progress reports. She took the opportunity to extoll the virtues of the project they were getting for their taxpaying dollars.

"I don't know if this is gonna be 'The Answer' for your city's problems but this is gonna be a real peach... I mean this is gonna have 'style' man and that's really all that matters in the end. I was too young to get in on Brasilia... but I'm gonna be telling my grandkids about this... As much as I like the creative process this is the one project I can hardly wait to see finished."

The news crew did some interviews with her Fuller co-workers about what it was like working with a woman and they went on about how they liked having someone to 'mother them'. Someone also brought up how Jenny had talked someone out of jumping off the observation deck. Apparently she said something about how the few people that survived jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge had the same thought halfway down, that there was nothing in their life that was unfixable - except what they'd just done. She then suggested that he go home and maybe think about it for a day. The building would still be here if he felt like going through with it tomorrow. He never did come back.

The news crew was gone before quitting time so they missed getting footage Jenny's after hours fun which was just as well because she had to forgo the usual trip to the local watering hole with the boys on account of having Arianna with her. Jenny would have to have her beer at one of those suburban 'chain' restaurants in the form of their specialty beer-boiled hot dogs. Not having much of an appetite, we asked for grub from off their children's menu to go with our pitcher of beer. The waitress not only let us do so but even gave us the little prize that came with our meals - a sheet of cardboard with the punch out shapes you're supposed fold and slot to make into...

"Hey look Jenny! Doesn't that look like your old house?"

We had put them aside to work on our dessert when Emily, of all people, storms in on some sort of warpath. Slapping a copy of Panorama on the table she fumes...

"Hey! I gotta bone to pick with you... what's with this hit piece on Riverbay You know we offered to let you in on this project..."

Jenny took a minute to skim through the article the gist of which was that for such a large project very little imagination was put into its design. As an example it was noted that even though it was built along the shore of Eastchester bay no attempt was made to integrate the complex with the waterfront save for a four lane access 'boulevard'. As for the buildings it was noted that of the three building styles only one was marginally interesting and all were poorly arranged. Of Walter Drake's 'signature' style of carven massing, the article declared that it was' a little long in the tooth and too fussily detailed'. The killer quote from the article was 'It is said that some people ought to learn from their failures but this time Drake and Van De Lay need to learn from their successes.'

"Uhm... You do know I no longer work for Panorama... At least not full time... Anyway it's not my name on the byline..."

For the record the byline was 'Marjorie Dunwoody'.

"One of my mother's old socialite friends wanted to try her hand at architectural criticism. She's very interested in urban affairs... You mean to tell me you drove all the way up here to ball me out for this? I didn't think you cared."

It didn't soothe Emily's hurt feelings to learn that who that 'old socialite friend' friend was. She stormed back out into the evening and the fuming drive back to the city. We had 'Jet Jennifer' to ourselves on account of the Fuller men having flown home earlier and sending it back empty.

"Gee... I probably should've mentioned something about the piece on Habitat '67 I'm doing for next month's Panorama... If I'd known about that two years ago I might've taken that job with her old man just to get Moshe Safdie in on the project."

"We were up there for the Expo '67 film festival. Pretty nice complex... except for the parts that look like the inside of a ribcage. We kinda didn't like that... Yeah, bad association..."

It didn't take much imagination on Jenny's part to figure out what we were referring to. She let what we said sit there while she thought of what she wanted to say.

We knew how she felt. One of the big teachings of the Jederman was that you mustn't 'violate the flesh' if you could possibly avoid doing so. Apart from the practical advice against opening the flesh in the days before antiseptics there was the body is god's creation and you shouldn't mess with it angle. She used to tell us about how the Egyptians would chuck pebbles at the embalmers after the mummification process because they'd violated the flesh. It's something so deep inside her that it practically oozes from her literature. Her art too.

During the flight home she was going through a screenplay called 'John Cheese Go Home' that Ryerson International was thinking of optioning. It was a fairly obvious horror story about tourists who go through all kinds of abuse from the locals with the big 'reveal' being that they'd been set up to have their kidneys 'harvested' for the black market organ transplant racket. Jenny wasn't satisfied with it and wanted to expand upon the mad doctor's 'excuse' that he was 'avenging' the 'imperialist' in his pissant little country. She had sketched a grisly tableau showing herself on a buffet table with a fondue pot where her stomach used to be and a beer tap where... well you'll have to use your imagination. Neat little chunks of her arm had been sliced away and dunked in the boiling oil with the words 'eaten alive!' scrawled under the sketch.

Upon landing, Jenny put the script back in its place under the lavatory sink. We spent the rest of the evening shagging balls back and forth under the backyard floodlights till our arms got tired. It was company softball season and after all these years, she was getting back into the game. Many a fine summer evening was spent on a blanket in the grass with Arianna at some ball field out in the Albany suburbs. As fine a pitcher as Jenny was, she spent most of the summer trying to get in the groove and the rest of the 'Amityville Sluggers' lineup was sorely depleted on account of the better players on the J P & C team working at the World Trade Center site down in the city. Still they managed to beat the 'Empty Fullers' more often than not.

On weekends Jenny would get in her flight hours by flying us all to LA, where if we weren't doing anything at, all she'd be hosting 'little' parties for Eddie's 'industry' friends or Doris and whatever new man she was gatting about with that week. For such a quiet women she sure knew how to play the field. For a change of pace we'd head up the hill to party at Cheryl's new pad. She had made the most of her building site and of the three truckloads of quarry rubble Jenny got a good deal on. The street level garage and entrance was already being called 'The Batcave' by us at least. Above that and seemingly independent of said cave was her bedroom and studio with private balcony with a metal balustrade. Perched above that was Jenny's pavilion and its own balcony with concrete balustrade. This had the kitchen and 'public' bathroom behind a class block wall with a 'pass-through' bar to the open party room.

Some 'serious' business was taken care of as well in the form of site visits to the Ryerson International Building site. Jenny and 'Skiddy' would race each other to the site in their little sports cars - Jenny's Volkswagen 'Karmann Ghia' would've been way outclassed by Cheryl's Mustang if she hadn't been the better driver on hills and curves. By summer's end the tower skeleton was a couple storeys from topping off and the studio wing was ready for use, though the breeze blocks screens for the outside walkways weren't fully installed yet.

Her intercontinental lifestyle got Jenny noticed when the Fairchild company featured her in brochures and advertisements for a last-ditch attempt to market their 'Jet Setter 220' business jet. It was a lavish looking campaign with mother and daughter in the cabin lounging in white sable jackets while we sat nearby. For some reason we were all blowing bubbles. Another picture from the session had Cheryl in a bikini and angel wings and holding a surfboard - something about being able to go surfing wherever she wanted. It was gloriously over the top and doomed to failure as Bill Lear's jet had the glamour end of the market with Grumman getting most of the 'serious' businessmen. In the end, Fairchild offered the 'Jet Setter' and its plans to Platt Air Services for the token payment of one dollar. Jenny literally had to pass the hat around because nobody in her entourage had thought to bring cash or a checkbook with them during that meeting.

Her time in Amityville had its moments of merriment like the ten year reunion for her high school graduating class which was held in the old clubhouse. Needless to say, Jenny was the star achiever of the lot with N'eddie a close second. The attendee everyone least expected to appear but actually did was Niké Gunnarson and we could see why everyone had been entranced by her. She sure was a looker and if her breasts had succumbed to gravity in the last decade, we couldn't tell. Even after ten years the crowd was still intimidated by her beauty that nobody wanted to go up and talk to her so she made the first move by asking us what classes we were in.

"Oh... no... we were summer visitors... Jenny invited us..."

"You two know Jenny? Oh you'll have to introduce us! I'd always wanted to talk to her but she was one of the 'cool' kids and I just didn't have the nerve..."

We blazed a trail to Jenny and Ashleigh's table for her and resumed mingling with the crowd.

"I'd like to try a few songs from my new most favorite singer ever... You guys know 'Light My Fire'?"

For what was an impromptu performance from a pickup band, you'd never know that Jenny hadn't written the song from the way she made it hers. Man did she love that band, if for no other reason than they'd done a cover of the old 'Alabama Song' from 'The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny'. We kind of liked 'The End' ourselves but only on account of it's Oedipal complex. They didn't do that song though. They covered other selection from the album before ending the show with a sing along version of Mack the Knife to go with the Alabama song. Jenny hated that 'Vegas-style' version of Bobby Darin's, preferring the slightly drunken tempo she'd seen in a movie version of 'The Threepenny Opera'.

Sometime that October she actually got to meet the lead singer Jim Morrison at an indoor party thrown by Cheryl's next door neighbors to celebrate the release of The Doors' second album. We all had been warned ahead of time about his hit or miss personality but he seemed appreciative of Jenny's 'where have you been all my life' praise for music lyrical stylings. He in turn had been told about Jenny's former singing career and after a few token words of praise for the architectural designs of hers he'd seen on the drive over, he asked to hear some of her singing.

"A friend of mine heard someone singing this while she was walking down the beach a few years back. haven't figured out what to call it. I've been carrying this around for a while... anyone read sheet music?"

She hadn't changed a stitch but it was clearly Lady Desdemona who took the stage in the little clearing of partygoers. Somebody dimmed the lights as the piano players went through though the opening bars of the Lady's torch song.

"Hello-I-love-you, won'tcha tell me your name. Hello-I-love-you, let me jump in your game. Hello, I love you... won't you tell me your name?"

Mouthing the words, 'Holy shit, that's one of my songs!', Jim had this look of surprise, that flashed to anger and finally bemusement. Turning to one of our hosts with a laugh, he chided, "Oh man... You put her up to this didn't you? You know that's goin' on the next album..."
"Goddamned if I know anything about it... Didn't you say you wrote this on the beach back in 'Sixty-five"

"Yeah... but the only other person nearby was this colored girl... No fucking way they could possibly know each other..."

Looking directly at us he added, "Uhm... On second thought..."

"Strange days sure have found you, eh Mister Morrison?"

"So uhhh.. what do you girls do... besides freaking people out?"

"Uhmm... Well we did a movie last year... We made a movie... It was pretty big on the festival circuit so you probably missed it... Goodbye Rachel Olsen?"

"You're shitting me! Hey Ray! Get over here you're not gonna believe this... Ray! These two did that movie... the one with the dead girl. No, I'm not shitting you..."

For a few moments we allowed ourselves to enjoy the appreciation of fellow artist. It turned out Jim and Ray had been film students so we could impress them with our boring 'war stories' for a while.

"So uh... tell me... did that girl really die?"

"If she didn't... it woulda been the practical joke of the century... of course the joke woulda been on her because we're pretty sure that was her body on the table. Come to think of it... she coulda pulled a switcheroo when her parents tried to claim the body... but that'd be wishful thinking" Hmmm... maybe we ought to take another look at the raw footage..."

"I tell you what... If I make it to thirty, I'm gonna fake my own death and split to Africa..."

"You and me both Ray..."

We were finally joined by Jenny who after being praised by Jim for the rendition of his song, reiterated her story with a description of Niké that sure enough, matched his recollections of the girl he'd seen. They wanted to talk further but our hosts interrupted everyone's reverie to announce that they'd just managed to get a hold a short film of from a 'friend of a friend were showing it in their private screening room. It was a small room and so we all had to watch in shifts. We, Jim, Jen and Ray were in the first group. It didn't take more than two seconds for us to realize...

"Eh... seen it... Seen a better print of it..."

It was a mucky, slightly out of focus print but at least it wasn't Jennifer's Junior Prom which, according to Jenny, had since been moved from the White Metal Cabinet to the safer digs of a locked box in Jenny's dad's desk at the J P & C offices. Taking her own warning to heart, she let everyone else chew on the possibility of a second shooter off in the bushes for the evening. It wasn't her party so she had nothing to cry about.

After the movie was screened for everyone, the party drugs came out, which was our cue to head down the lot line path for home. Everyone was dropping acid nowadays and for some reason the stuff just opens a circuit in the parts of our brains in charge of the arms and legs we don't have which is a whole lot least interesting that it sounds. At most we might get a 'phantom' itch and where's the fun in that? Jenny's already wired strangely so acid trips just piss her brain off like the TV show you'd only seen once and on the second time you got stuck with a rerun. So at most parties she played the role of 'den mother' and if she didn't Cheryl did. Even in sunny California midwestern values still counted for something with her.

With all the turmoil people usually associate with Nineteen sixty-eight, it was a pretty placid year for the Ryerson-Platt family, insulated as they were from it. We'd taken a photojournalist position with Panorama so we didn't see as much of Jenny as we used to but Jenny was an easy enough person to find whenever a big anti-whatever demonstration came to the state capital. Her opinion on 'the war' was curiously nuanced. She supported our right to defend South Viet Nam but opposed the use of a our army and marines to do so, believing we should supplement not replace the south's military capability. She opposed conscription on the grounds that it was involuntary servitude for an undeclared war, but didn't cotton to the rabid anti-americanism of the 'peace' protesters who she saw as spoiled brats projecting evil on their parents just because they wouldn't let them have candy.

Her writing career got a boost when no less that three separate production of 'First Girl on the Moon' were undertaken that year. The Godzilla people, Toho films, did theirs with an all-Japanese cast and a technicolor 'futurist' set that looked nothing like anything on the Apollo program. The Ryerson International production was co-financed by an Italian TV network and stayed truest to the original script. Interestingly both studios filmed their opening scenes at the same glacier in Iceland, but with different submarines. Toho built a hollow shell on top of an old barge while Ryerson International managed to get the use of Jeff Misener's USS Devil Ray so Jenny got a nice little reunion out of the deal. The third production was for BBC radio and naturally was Jenny's favorite, especially since it had been a 'real-time' serial running the fortnight before the launching of Apollo Eight. Even though she had owned up to being tipped off beforehand by her contacts in NASA, it still amazed Britons to hear the Apollo Eight crew read the same words from the Book of Genesis that Jenny's characters recited previously

We had also made a trip with Jenny to Egypt to check out the massive Abu Simbel temple relocation project. With a name like Brillstein, we were not exactly welcomed with open arms but Jenny had been able to impress the locals when, upon coming across an ancient tomb that had somehow gone unlooted, she demanded that it be sealed and covered over with cement.

"That doesn't belong to you. That belongs to his family... or if he was a pharaoh... the Egyptian taxpayer."

A few months later she had the pleasure of giving our Abu Simbel guide a tour of the South Mall project. As amazed as he was by the scope of the project, he seemed impressed most with the sarcophagus-like Swan Street building, suggesting that maybe instead of marble they ought to use sandstone on the ground level and maybe carve hieroglyphics onto it to echo the county names that were carved on that nearby state office tower.

"Yeah... I see it too... I had this idea of having an obelisk carved for this little park where there was supposed to be a highway connector and a grand stairway up to the building... I wanted to have an open passageway through leading to monumental walkway onto the plaza... with smaller obelisks along the way. Unfortunately there have been so many budget overruns already... As much as they liked them, there's not even a chance that any of my ideas would go through now."

On the political front, Jenny spent much of the spring and summer doing work in support of California Governor Ronald Reagan's bid for the Republican presidential nomination. She felt she couldn't back Nelson Rockefeller campaign on account of her working on a project of his - when asked she said the Albany job was too important for the state for him to be 'fooling around' in Washington. She flat out refused to support Robert Kennedy, not for political reasons, because she was absolutely positive he'd never live to be nominated much less see office.

"Look, everybody loves you Bobby" she warned at the one Kennedy function she'd allowed herself to attend back in January, "so it stand to reason that every nutsack out there'll be gunning for your ass. Even Jackie thinks you'll never make it to Chicago, so why put your kids through all that? Let Teddy have a crack at it, nobody gives a shit about him... Hell, he survived a plane crash, even God doesn't want him!"

"We ought not mourn his tragic passing but instead we should to be grateful for the 'extra time' he had been granted by our lord and for the wise use he had tried to make of it."

The year ended on a happier note with the completion of the Ryerson International offices around Thanksgiving. Once again Cheryl was able to translate Jenny's ideas into a twenty-eight thousand square foot abstract masterpiece in green glass. With a floor to ceiling window design of five stacked two by two panels, the building looked a lot taller than its ten and a half storeys. Only the entry vestibule, styled after the Corning museum's, facing the access road gave any sense of scale and this being Los Angeles, nobody really used that preferring the parking lot entrance instead.

Floor plates were ridiculously small, twenty-eight hundred square feet on the first six storeys above the four thousand square lobby and half that on the top three and a half - that extra half belonged to the top floor mechanical room. The service core, counting the bathrooms, took up a third of the lower floors and two thirds of the top two usable floors. Still it was laid out so that just about everyone got a corner office with dramatic views of the industrial park and freeway below.

If people had bothered to look up from their passing cars, they might've caught a glimpse of the acting talent washing down in the second floor shower with only steam and careful trigonometry to preserve their modesty. on the other floors, the best seats in the house, for men anyway, used that apex of the triangle with the sexes divided by a T-shaped glass block wall.

Glass block surrounded the elevator and air conditioning shafts as well as the central fire stair tower. With a building this small, every square foot counted and the redundancy requirements were met by pairing two full height stairways with four separated access doors in the core of the building. Just like the J P & C building, columns were painted silver and wrapped in glass block for that tower-of-glass look she loved so dearly.

If the bottom seven floors were for business, the top three were for play with a reception room on Eight and a guest apartment on Nine. On Ten, Cheryl installed one of the first 'Jacuzzi' water spas you could get, mounting it up on the 'half storey' so you could look out over the city. It was pleasant enough, but not nearly as uhm... 'well engineered' as Jenny's. Down on Ten she put changing rooms, a wet bar and a grill for cookouts and as a tribute to the company's surf movie roots, found some old wooden long boards and had them refurbished into desktops for the offices. All in all, it was a splendid vote of confidence in the future of the motion picture industry in Los Angeles.

Nineteen sixty-nine seemed to settle down to a dull roar with nothing much to report for the first half of the year. The most exciting thing to happen on the Albany job for Jenny was the day the next weeks steel arrived for a structure instead of the steel they needed for that week. After some deliberation it was decided to erect the steel they had into larger subassemblies and put it aside for next week.

Having long since been jet rated, Jenny was hired as a consultant by Bitsey and Brenda as their 'Class Trips Inc' tour service was taking off and they were looking into buying one of the smaller jetliners. At the same time the J P & C as well as our dad's business Petroco, were interested for a large corporate aircraft so it was hoped that the three companies might be able coordinate their purchases and either get one plane to share or two or three of the same plane and pool maintenance resources. On account of this, she got a lot of free rides to and from California in order to 'try out' different airframes.

If they were going to pool their investment in a single plane Jenny recommended a Boeing 727 on account of it having a built-in 'air stair' and because Boeing had introduced a larger capacity model, meaning that airlines will likely replace their older ones soon. She did note they would require a larger flight crew but three-engined jets were the minimum you needed for an 'EROPS' extended range operations exemption if they wanted to be able to fly trans-oceanic routes. She also noted that many 'first-generation' jetliners were on the market at prices low enough to justify their higher operating costs.

If they wanted their own jets there were three twin engine models worth considering. Boeing's 737 was one of the better models but an air stair was a 'special order'. Douglas Aircraft's DC-9 did come with an air stair and being a 'Douglie' was Jenny's choice. Bitsey's mother Elizabeth campaigned for the British BAC-One-Eleven, noting that her family back in England had some influence in the government and might be able to get some sort of government subsidy or loan for a three plane order. It was the smallest of the three which meant that with a waiver they might be able to use Republic field at least for private flights and with three they could least out one and use the other two more often.

Jenny was interested enough to take time off from work to spend hang around the Utica maintenance facility of Mohawk Airlines, a local operator of the plane. It was a four word phrase 'windscreen lacks passive redundancy' she'd written down as a note-to-self raised enough red flags with everyone else that queered the deal.

In the end it was our government that settled the matter when it refused to allow the purchase of foreign aircraft when two perfectly good domestic models were available. By way of protest, Jenny recommend leasing, with an option to buy, any of the One-Elevens that had been allowed in the United States before the importation ban. Class Trips Inc opted to table their expansion plans for the indefinite future and the whole issue was dropped for the time being.

It goes without saying that man's landing on the moon was the big event of 'Sixty-nine. Jenny had taken leave from the Fuller company to study for her architect's license and being the friendly dockside neighbor, had the free time to offer our neighbor's kids the chance to watch NBC's raw feed of the landing from inside the studio control booth. She had already given them the material she'd collected for that 'First Girl' story and Janice had wangled a tour of the Grumman plant. For the grown-ups, Avi showed off his Robert's combination reel to reel video and audio tape recorder and his recordings of the landings from all three networks - he'd used machines from the store.

We'd stopped covering protests when we learned that if you took a walk around the block after the news crews left, nine times out of ten the unruly mob would be packing their signs by the time you returned. Besides that, a lot of them were 'rent-a-mob' protests financed by a hidden wheel looking for power or an easy payoff. Jenny's rewrite of 'John Cheese' was ready for production and Eddie decided shoot the works and let us sit behind the lens. Ryerson International got plenty of 'two for the price of one' publicity but in reality, a director and cinematographer have separate tasks that with only one pair of hands between us, meant they'd lost a considerable amount of production time in the bargain. Still, we kept the production reasonably within the time and budget allotted.

The story begins with a well to do couple driving down a deserted Oklahoma highway. The woman screams as if seeing something and jerks the wheel. With a flip of the camera the car is a mangled wreck by the roadside being taken apart by rescuers and we didn't have to pay for a car crash. Cut to the funeral montage and the opening credits where their surviving child 'Valarie' played by an Italian actress named Sabrina Martinelli and her best friend 'Roselyn' played by Heather Robinson throw dirt in the grave as Don Fardon's 'Indian Reservation' song plays. We'd wanted but couldn't get a local Cherokee for Sabrina's role as she was supposed to be playing a 'half-breed'.

They meet up with friendly male expatriates from Australia and together they tour the sights of Parador, enduring barely concealed hostility along the way - even when Valarie saves a local boy from drowning at the Grand Hotel's pool. As a prelude to the violence ahead, the Australian has to slap the boy's hysterical mother back to her senses. On the news, the country's leader makes speeches condemning the 'Yankee Imperialist' for trying to use the excuse of that missing girl as a pretext for an invasion.

Cut to a laboratory back in Oklahoma, where discussion is made of what happened to Valarie's parents. It seems her mother was coming down with an infectious form of dementia and from the blood work it looked like Valarie has the same. They decide to call her to ask that she return home.

Cut back to her hotel room where she's packing for a trek inland. Receiving the call, she says she still has something important to accomplish and hangs up. She and her friend are joined on their journey by the Australians, one of them is smitten with her. At a local fiesta near their destination he's about to seal the deal with her when she explain that she may have something 'catching'. He replies he isn't long for the world anyway.

The four of them wake up on the fiesta grounds to find they've been robbed in their sleep and when they report this to the police, they are arrested and carted off to 'a detention facility outside of town' where Valarie and her Australian companion are separated from Heather and his mate. They quickly escape from their pens and go off in search of the other two.

Meanwhile a couple of street criminals - played by those two Brazilian students we'd met, Manny and Lucinda - have gotten hold of Valarie's purse and passport and speculate that they could use them to get out of their god-forsaken land. On seeing her face on the television as yet another missing American, they figure they could make money by ransoming her. Melinda's character is reluctant to do so on account of it being 'dishonest' to not have the kidnapped person on hand.

They make the ransom call and to their surprise a payment is agreed upon. Back at the lab, they debate whether she is alive or dead and conclude that she's dead. More exposition is made of the 'Belsen's Disease' they're now certain she has. Seems her mother had been raped by a concentration camp doctor who'd escaped from a nearby POW camp. It is decided to take a long-shot gamble and spread their own plague in hopes of staving off a world-ending 'super pandemic'.

Back in the jungles of Parador Heather and her Aussie companion find and free the other Australian and they all look around the creepy old country hacienda for Valarie. They find a dark room lit only by a window looking into an operating room where Valarie is being cut into by a doctor with assistance from a nurse. He delivers his diatribe about foreign imperialists and extracts her kidneys and liver. From the heart monitor it is clear that she's still alive when she's wheeled out of the room and from the movement of her eyes it was also clear that she had been awake throughout the procedure.

Telling the others to escape without him, Valarie's Australian returns to his pen to be wheeled into the room himself. Being a He-Man Australian, he asks that they not give him so much anesthesia as he wanted to talk to them. Not caring one way or another, he's given a spinal and the cutting proceeds. Revealing that the girl they'd cut up was in fact a native American, he notes that they were more the imperialist than she was. He further reveals that she had just inherited a fortune but was dying herself and was in Parador hoping to find her real father. She only knew him as a doctor who'd run out on her mother before she'd been born but she still wanted to help him if she could, and could he have a last look at his kidneys? Many a Foster's 'cold Vic' had passed through them and he wanted to say goodbye to his 'little mates' - his liver too if it's not too much of a bother.

The doctor is disgusted to find them cancer-ridden and therefore unusable. Admonishing him for being a 'picky' thief, the Australian goes on about how much he resembled Valarie and asks if he was related to her father who he identifies as a 'Doctor Howard Zinn'. The look on the good doctor's face was all the audience needed to know that he'd just cut up his own little girl. It was no comfort to know that he was doing her a favor on account of her already starting to show signs of her mother's dementia but as long as he still had him on the table could he 'finish the job' so he could join her on the other side?

As the electrocardiogram 'flat-lines', we dissolve to a plantation style mansion - actually our home in Oklahoma - where Roselyn and the other Australian are peering into the kitchen as Valarie's body is being prepared for dinner. Her eyes dart about as a fondue pot is placed in her stomach cavity with the power cord drawn through a now open orifice. Leather straps hold down her hands and feet and banded metal tourniquets are wrapped around her arms and legs as garnish and dipping sauces are placed around her body. One of the biggest expenses of this production was the creation of an edible body and the elaborate table set up needed to hide the real Sabrina as she was being 'eaten' alive. The straps and tourniquets were used to hid the juncture points so her hands and feet could clench and quiver as she's being sawed into.

For such a grisly scene it was a surprisingly light-hearted set with just about every actor taking the opportunity to cop a feel of her fake breasts or run a hand down the panties covering her fake crotch between takes. On screen, we see Parador's exhalted leader hosting a feast for his fellow cannibal elites to celebrate being able to find suitable transplant organs for his 'beloved Desdemona'. Declaring 'waste not want not' he bids them to 'enjoy the delicious American I have brought for you'. To Jenny's specification, we cast all sorts of races for roles of second and third world diplomats to hammer home the theme of a greedy world feeding off us Americans. As her arms and legs are eaten away we cut to Heather who, knowing Valarie was a plague carrier, contemptuously mutters 'Eat her... Eat her up! Yeah... that's it... lick up every drop!"

Finishing with her body they go after her mind and with the top of her head is exposed slices of brain are carved away. We look into her eyes as snippets of her life flash on the screen. We see that she had been well loved in her short lifetime. Jenny specifically noted that this was to emphasize the intrinsic value of a human's life. To the revelers dismay the brain has flecks of rot inside it and tastes awful so her body is taken away to be dumped in the river 'like the others'. No sooner does her body hit the drink, than a glowing greenish substance billows up from the deep followed by dozens of dead piranha. As the cloud drifts downstream more fish and other animals bubble up dead. The plague has begun.

In the meantime Manny and Lucinda meet the contact in order to collect the ransom. After asking for and getting the proof they have, he hands them the dough and turns to leave. Manny asks why he doesn't wait for them to hand Valarie over and the contact replies that he knows they don't really have her and that they probably killed her anyhow. The company just needed proof that she was gone so they could 'close the books'.

Mystified and somewhat insulted Manny enlists some of his underworld friends to search for her and they arrive at the plantation to find Heather and the other Australian as the alarm is raised. Doctor Zinn has gone stark raving mad and the other two captives have escaped so a search party is organized to hunt them down. Manny and his gang create a diversion while Lucinda suggests they hide near the mansion till dawn as that'd be the last place they'd think to look.

That morning, Doctor Zinn is found clutching the body of his daughter and is shot dead. Heather and her Australian are close to being shot themselves when an arrow fells their pith-helmeted discoverer. An Amazon indian motions for them to follow him to his tribal camp where they show them the remains of the other missing American girl.

"We were setting up for another scene when our cameramen decided to go and relieve himself in the river... No we had been warned by the locals not to do that... and especially not to unzip... Something about a 'devilfish'? This guy figured it was just some superstition... Well... there's this fish... it's called a 'candiru'... it's like... like a lamprey... only it swims into other fish's gills and latches on with these barbed hooks... Well to a candiru, urine smells just like fish gills so it swims into the stream till it finds the source... Yeah..."

"So this poor guy is screaming about the fish that just set up housekeeping... With those barbs you can pull the fish back out... you either gotta cut if off or find a way to cut it out... Now I know a little bit about the uhm... male anatomy... and I know the tube is right under the skin so I'm the poor sap who's gotta do the uhm... surgery. Lucky for him I was able to feel the head... the indians gave me this obsidian knife to use... and held him down while I did the uhm..."

"Y'know there's some universal things out there and every guy on the set couldn't bring themselves to watch..."

"Anyway... I was able to run the little fish through the hole I'd made. Cameraman was wiggling something fierce when I got the needle and thread out, but the natives had a neat trick up their sleeves. They rounded up some of these little fire ants... let them bite the wound closed and clipped away the bodies leaving just the heads. That was able to hold him till we could get him airlifted to a hospital. He's still the man he used to be in case you were wondering."

"You can bet Jurassic nobody else was gonna pee anywhere near the river after that."

The movie finishes up with a chase that ends at the country residence belonging to the United States ambassador who had been holding a press conference. With cameras rolling, Parador's exalted leader falls back on his 'cannibal natives' lie and offers his hand to Roselyn as a 'gesture of reconciliation'. She just gives him a dirty look, and when he takes her aside to remind her that 'she may be on American soil now but she was still in his country'. Roselyn replies with a laugh that she wouldn't dream of squealing on him - wouldn't want him doing fool thing like repenting his sins now would she? To the press she says that her friend had been dying on 'an infectious disease that attacks the mind' and that 'those who'd taken her flesh will likely get theirs soon enough'.

By the eighth of August we'd completed shooting and were hosting a wrap party for the cast and crew at the family ranch. Jenny, cramming for her exams, joined the party by the telephone in the DeFeo's kitchen. It seems they wanted an 'Italian balcony overlook' scene painted on the wall behind the breakfast nook and she was keeping company with Janice. Since this call was going through the exchange, she also had Lori on the line. Having finished college, she had moved into the guest room at Jenny and Eddie's house, and being the loyal sister, was now working as Eddie's production assistant. Lori and Eddie had knocked off early and were poolside up at the hacienda with little Arianna. To add to the cheerful confusion we had an entertainment reporter on an extension trying to interview us and Jenny about the motion picture.

"So tell me... why do the characters have different names from the published serialization?"

"I had made so many changes... the writer of the original screenplay decided not let us use his character names... Seems he wanted to market his story elsewhere and didn't want people to get confused... We didn't mind as we'd come up with better ones. Valarie is named after that hump who plugged Andy Warhol. She had this obsession with cutting up men. Once we had a Valarie we had to have a Roselyn... Y'know... Rose and Valerie screaming from the gallery?"

"Oh... the Beatles song! So Doctor Zinn is..."

"...this political writer. He's from that school of wise guys that have become fixated... just fixated on enumerating America's past crimes... real or imagined... I suppose there's a use for that sort of thing... but I don't find it very productive... I swear Mis'ess DeFeo.. it's not going to show up on your phone bill... If it does... the Company will pay you double..."

"Y'know he spoke at our school last year... Eddie... don't let her go out so deep!"

As Eddie yelled to Lori something about Arianna being a great swimmer, the reporter directed her inquiries to the politics of 'John Cheese' while we ducked into the kitchen to check on the grub.

"I had actually had some of the basic ideas for this back in 'Sixty-four when I was at a restaurant in Tokyo and saw these businessmen at the next table eating lobsters while they were still alive... but I guess 'Rachel Olsen' showed... if there's an audience for films where a pretty girl gets cut to pieces, it's a good bet that there's one for films about eating an American girl alive... Go figure huh?"

"There's a lot of anti-Americanism being tossed around on account of the war. Now I'm old enough to remember being worried about my dad in Korea... and I can't see why we're spending all this dough to round up and train our boys when we could save money hiring out-of-work locals for the job of defending their country... but to say we're an 'evil' country because of this? Why don'tcha go to Prague and tell me that was a paragon of good international citizenship..."

"Hey guys... I think we just had an earthquake! Eddie! You feel that?"

"We do want people to know that if you're coming to this movie to see the world symbolically feasting on America you will get your money's worth... and... you'll get a nice little essay on the possible ramifications of that thrown in too. We didn't have the budget for a lot of stunts and only had enough for a couple special effects scenes so we had to pack as many ideas into this as we could. If you wanna play the twins angle... you could say we wanted have both sides covered..."

"With several sequences showing the city of Brasilia are you concerned about the possible negative impact this might have on US Brazil relations?"

"Well... I'll tell ya... How many crime movies are shot in New York... or LA? I chose Brasilia because it looks pretty damn good on the screen... and because I wanted to see prehistoric indians running around a Twenty-first century city and not because I wanted to dump on the Brazilians. I'd modeled the movie's leader on Castro... and this Puerto Rican reporter working out of New York...

"I'm not kidding... we just had another one..."

"You've been feeling earthquakes ever since you got to LA... It's probably another truck going by."

"I think the main theme of this film is the war on achievement that's been going on in this world since... since the mid-Thirties I guess. I was telling you about that no-count loser... Well Andy was one of the nicest people I'd ever had the good fortune to meet. He has to wear a girdle now to keep his guts from falling apart and this... thing... they're... would you believe the head of NOW is calling her a 'feminist hero'? I just want to rub their noses in the hate they're whipping up."

"But don't you think your portrayal of violence adds to the climate of hate you say you're against?"

"Sure no pr... Hold on... Oh my god... Oh my god! Eddie! Try to get to the ladder honey!"

We heard the phone drop and this rumbling sound mixed with Lori's screams followed by what sounded like rushing water. After what seemed like hours listening to grown-ups yelling at each other in the distance, we heard the slap slap slap of a little girls wet feet walking towards the phone and pick up the handset.

"Mummy... Mummy! The pool broke... 'n all the water went out!"

Jenny tried to sound soothing but we could tell she was halfway to a full-blown freak out. To give her some privacy, we tapped the receiver cradle a few times to get Madeline's attention and asked her to take us off the line. The last thing Jenny needed was to have to deal with some damned reporter. An hour and a half later we got a call from Brenda filling us in on what happened. The hill holding up the hacienda pool had collapsed, sending half of it and a maybe a third of the patio into the street. Arianna was okay but Eddie was badly injured and was in intensive care. Jenny was on her way to Los Angeles. Brenda had fixed it so that her flight would make a stop at Will Rogers field to pick us up in about four hours. We were at the gate in three. They were there in five.

"Are you the twins?"

They were making an unscheduled stop and we were the only passengers boarding.

"Are you the Delta '880' to Los Angeles?"

It was a crowded flight and we had to run the gauntlet of glares from our first class cabin mates before taking our usual seat in the back row. Getting a final funny look from the stewardess when we told her we had no bags save for our travel purse, we settled into our seat to await takeoff. Once in the air, we roused ourselves to look around the cabin.

"You lookin' for someone named Jenny?"

Sitting next to us was this clean-cut looking kid in a soldier's uniform with one of those beautiful Mick-Irish faces we'd see on half the cops and firemen back in The City.

"She's back in coach... I'm shipping out... and she switch tickets with me. Nice girl... She looked awful busted up about somethin'..."

"Yeah... we kinda wanted to talk to her about that..."

We rang the stewardess to see if it was all right to go back into coach to sit with Jenny. No. It was booked solid. Well then maybe Jenny could come forward and sit in the lounge with us. Apparently the heavens would fall if she were to allow that. Fine. Go back and see if the person sitting next to her wants to switch seats up front. As if wanting to be rid of us, she called a Coach stewardess to escort us back to where Jenny was sitting.

Turning to our seat mate we asided, "Girl has to suck on hearing her whole family practically get killed over the telephone for half a day and they gotta go and pull rank on us all of a sudden. Sheesh!"

There were three of four empty seats back in the cattle car and one of them was next to Jenny who looked like she could've used that girdle of Andy's to hold in her nerves. Didn't help things that the damned plane kept jerking around as we started over the Rockies Our fanny had barely touched the seat before she was up and heading for the can so we got back up and waited for her in the vestibule. A concerned stewardess asked us if she was first time flyer. We just said she has a lot on her mind right now.

Coming out of the can, she kept looking up at the ceiling - like she was trying to ferret something out. Seeing us she asked if we 'heard that?' Oh great. We're all gonna die.

"What are we listening for?"

"Every time the rudder moves I hear this spritzing sound... like someone's peeing against the bowl in the apartment upstairs. That's it right there..."

The next rudder move almost knocked us to the floor but sure enough, we could hear it too only now there was a dribbling sound. Whatever was spritzing was now making a puddle. Jenny asked the stewardess to call one of the pilots to come back and have a listen. She tried to be reassuring but Jenny was adamant enough to show the lady her FAA ID card.

"Look I'm a pilot. I know what an airplane ought to sound like and that doesn't sound right... At least tell 'em what's going on so they can have maintenance look at it when we land."

With a shake rattle and roll we somehow made it to Los Angeles and nothing more was mentioned of the incident. We were met at the terminal by an ashen-face Lori, one of the man-candy regulars and Doris, who did most of the talking on the way to the hospital - mostly logistical stuff. N'eddie had got in on an earlier flight and was with Arianna at Ceders-Sinai. Cheryl was up at the house totaling up the damages - not too bad, minor water damage and maybe a couple panels need to be replaced. They'd had to fly Eddie in by helicopter on account of the access road being blocked off by a big chunk of the pool. It was a lucky thing nobody got killed.

Eddie was on some sort of medieval torture contraption but in remarkably good spirits considering he'd bruised or torn just about every muscle in his body and wrenched his back in two or three places. Even with the morphine drip, he ached all over.

"Could be worse honey... could feel nothing at all..."

That next morning the world found out how much worse things could be. N'eddie, checking in with the New York offices, learned that there had been a 'goddamned slaughter' - and that's the words she used - over in Bel-Air. There were 'Hollywood people' involved and since she was their man in LA, she was going to have to check it out. N'eddie had no idea where Ten thousand-fifty Cielo Drive was so Jenny offered to take her there. Being the only ones with a camera, we were asked to came along too. A patrolman working the press barricade recognized us.

"Jesus d'christo... It's like a scene out of that goddamned movie of yours! The bastardos killed a pregnant lady! Cut her to pieces..."

Like many of the other studios, Ryerson International drew its security detail from the local constabulary but we weren't sure as we'd hired some 'Latin types' for the police station scene and he looked like one of them. Turns out he was one of the kitchen staff. There was no question of letting us sneak through the lines but he was more than happy to take us aside and fill us in on the gory details as he knew them - two women, three men, one man shot in his car, one couple beaten, shot and stabbed in the front and back yards, presumably while trying to escape.

It wasn't bad enough for her murderers for they struck again later that night, rousing some middle class Italian couple from their sleep in order to make it an eternal one. It wasn't bad enough for Lori who'd made friends in the Hollywood community and knew one of the victims as someone who ran the shop where she'd just had her hair done. She was completely freaked and wanted to catch the next plane east. Jenny looked more than willing to take the seat next to her.

"My God... it's like they're really coming after us... Well we're not gonna be run outta town... 'Least not till we see the whites of their eyes."

At least Jenny had some sort of work to occupy her. From the wreckage she had determined that a plumbing joint had rusted out and leaked water into the surrounding hillside. Apparently it had been doing this all spring but Cheryl had merely refilled the pool with a garden hose every time it looked a little low and never thought to mention it to anybody else.

"Skiddy... If you're lucky... you maybe get one fuck-up you can walk away from... I've already had mine... If we're to be partners you're really gonna hafta watch your step now."