Mariah and the Big Red Phone

Once there was a girl named Mariah. She was quite pretty and could sing very high notes, and a lot of them all in row. She became a pop star and made millions of millions of dollars. She was very popular in the States but she was even more popular in Asia, where she and Leonardo DiCaprio were idolized for many many years. A marriage between the two would have caused the Asian news media to detonate with happiness.

Mariah was short and round with a lovely fat boot and a mountainous bosom. She liked to wear tight miniskirts and tube tops that strained at decency. Sometimes, in the throes of passion, she would just explode out of her clothes and join her lover in bed. There were those who thought her dress was indecent but all admitted she was never vulgar like Janet Jackson or even that puta loca Whitney Houston. Even though her clothes were provocative, everybody knew that Mariah was innocent…she was still just a young girl singing songs of falling in love and the young girls of the world sang along with all of their hearts.

Time passed and Mariah grew older and more tired and there were new girls who came up and replaced her, young divas with names like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera whose in-your-face couture made Mariah’s bright microminis look churchy. In 2005 Mariah put out a new record. And though many said it was her best record to date, she knew that it was automatically a failure, that there was no way it could come close to the numbers she had put up in the nineties.

One night she went to North Hollywood to shoot a video for her new single “Get Your Number.” The centerpiece of the performance was a humongous red telephone and this made her suddenly very sad. The phone reminded her of the giant props often used on old “Yo! MTV Raps” videos, particularly early jamz from DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. She sighed and went to her trailer. She would get into wardrobe and go through hair and makeup. This would take hours.



The phone had a splotchy pool of red leaking out of its mouthpiece (intentional, it seemed). There were those who thought the phone was melting. Others thought the phone was crying…or bleeding. Some thought the phone was drooling.



The giant red phone beckoned to the idle crew and—although it was strictly forbidden—many went up and touched the phone. Sitting there, these people underwent a quiet but palpable shift. They became pensive and withdrawn and thought at length about the pointlessness of their existences.

When Mariah finally came out it was after lunch and the crew was tired and bored. She was wearing a tight one-piece black cocktail dress and painfully high high heels. She was very topply for someone so squat and low to the ground and she felt everyone’s eyes on her face and body. The crew wondered about her, wondered how old she was, tried to triangulate her age and came at a range of 33 to 38. She looked a lot older than they remembered and someone thought she would look better if she took off her war paint and dressed like a mom and someone else said was snaggletoothed and a few perverted misanthropes celebrated the withering of a woman whose entire being and career had been defined by its surface beauty.

And though it was forbidden, crewmembers took photos in secret, hoping to show their friends and lovers glimpses of Mariah in 2005. But it was not to be. Mariah’s longing to preserve her former sheen and her deeprooted disdain for what she had become caused the cameras to disobey. The resulting photos were like UFO sighting pictures (out of focus, heads cut off, very grainy)--compelling but not convincing.

Like this:



Or this:



Or even this:



Maybe it was her in those pictures, but then maybe it wasn’t. It couldn’t be confirmed and that was the way she liked it. She liked being soft and impressionistic and ephemeral and making the viewer fill in the gaps from memory.



And though the phone seemed a little lame, and though the crew was small and disinterested, and though she was tired and just wanted some peace, she climbed up to the top of the phone and reclined just so, just like the director wanted. The phone wasn’t meant to be lounged upon and it hurt her backside and she complained a little, but she did so with reasonable cheer. By this time the crew was getting used to her and she was starting to look young again, like that actress Julie Delpy in “Before Sunset” who had aged ten years but become even more beautiful in the interim while that Ethan Hawke guy just looked tired and hungry and snaggletoothed.

Now was not the time to be depressed. The cameras came back into focus and the music came up. She smiled. Her hair was magnificent. She was not thinking about her role in the 2001 bomb "Glitter" or any of those other dark things. She was smiling and she was belting out the words to her latest single.



All these years and she was still on top of her game. On top of the world, if you will.

On top of a phone at least.