The Guru-ette and The Runaway Giraffe: Or The Frustrations of a Former Reporter

After 700 practice dance turns along the shoreline (see previous column about becoming a dancer), I was about to get pneumonia when all of a sudden the guru called. The energy generated from twirling 700 times between the Venice Boardwalk and the Santa Monica Pier had triggered some sort of energy release, he explained. And he had had a brainwave: I was to become his assistant or a guru-ette! I was to report for duty the next morning. I called Jim instantly and could hear the screech of his car leaving the driveway. He wanted to become a guru-ette too. “No more Nickeloden scripts for me,” he yelled down the phone as he sped towards the beach. When he arrived, I showed him how to do a dance turn, just like I had learnt in my class the day before in preparation for my planned career as a dancer. Remember! Anyhow, that was now my old career, cos things happen fast in LaLaLand. And so I left Jim, a gangling figure with his knees and arms flying in the wrong direction, turning awkwardly along the beach. He was determined to be a Guru-ette too. I headed to Little Tokyo to get myself one of those Sensei kits. In the Japanese store, the man spent an hour trying to dress me as a concubine or something like that. But I wasn’t having it. I left wearing one of those cool-looking Karate kid jackets and practiced Kung-fu moves in my car all the way home. I had been saved. I got to the gym shortly before closing and so, as usual, had Bianca, an old-school dumpling of a fashionista who sported a Liza Minelli hair-cut, and bright red lips, which slopped down to one side and perfectly complemented her Addidas hoodie, which she would wear with nothing underneath! Between calling the security guard a “Fasceest,” for telling her the club was closing, she spotted me before it was too late to escape. I was cornered and her beady eyes and questions had me reveal my entire life story to her in the blink of an eye. Hmmm, I thought. She would have made the perfect journalism teacher. In order to annoy the security guard further, she then reeled off fact after fact about current affairs that made it obvious she must read the newspapers like a hawk. I was filled with a sense of hope. Maybe I wouldn’t have to be a guru-ette forever. (I was in fact beginning to miss journalism.) When I got home, it seems that the cosmic energy generated by my dance moves had generated a response to one of my far-flung pitch letters from the day before. If I could get from LAX to Timbuktu for $28.50 return, there was a story to be done on a runaway giraffe. I thought for a second and remembered a flight attendant on Egypt Air, who had let me stand in the cockpit with my laptop plugged into the kettle socket one time so I could file a story upon landing. He had just the ticket. But how would I tell the guru? I phoned Jim to see what he thought. But he was too excited to think straight. Upon completion of his 700 twirls, it seems that he had been approached by one of the Beach Lifeguards and offered a job doing a special twirling watch in which he would keep a 360 degree check on what was going on at the beach. We had survived another day.