Okay, it wasn’t Judy who did it. Except in an archetypal sense. Never mind that, when all this began, I couldn’t have said what an archetype was. Regardless, from the movie, Judy Garland was the archetype of The Harvey Girls.
But it’s because Grandma was once a Harvey Girl that all this happened. We’ll leave it at Judy because Grandma was a very private person.
That doesn’t make her story any less important.
I was, near the end, staying in a motel in Flagstaff, visiting daily at the nursing home. I checked in remotely when I could, alert for any work fires that had to be fought. But mostly even the crises piled up. I was the only family Grandma had left. I’d long since given up on moving her near me, knowing that nothing less than a bulldozer could have gotten her out of Arizona.
Like Grandma, my memory was once pretty good. So: I’ll begin with her story, having had the good sense to transcribe everything while it was fresh in my mind.
To be clear: we didn’t talk, not really. She talked. Sure, I asked questions. I commented. But I knew upfront she wouldn’t hear much of anything I said, much less hear it correctly, because it had been years since she had. Getting Grandma fitted with hearing aids, like getting her to move, was a battle I could never win.
That mostly she guessed wrong, answering the questions she thought she had heard? Or perhaps the questions she thought needed to be answered? Maybe that worked out for the best.
I’ll tell Grandma’s story just as she did, except that I’ve rearranged and condensed things from the disjointed, repetitious manner in which, over several days, she reminisced.
It all began (Grandma said) with Judy Garland....
~~~
Who is Judy Garland? Jeez-oh-Pete, how can anyone not know Judy Garland? Oh, don’t open your laptop thingie. Surely you’ve seen The Wizard of Oz. You remember the Dorothy character? That was Judy.
The other night, watching a movie on the TV in the lounge, I got to thinking about the old days. A 1946 movie... however unlikely that might seem to you, it wasn’t. The classic movies are standard fare in places like this, I suppose because we don’t do well with change. If we residents had had any part in running things, the clock on the DVD thingie (is that what replaced VCRs?) would always flash zeroes, and none of us would know how to run off the movies.
You would think I’d have seen this particular film way back when. But it was playing in the theaters just a few months after VJ Day. Less time than that after... after I’d learned George wouldn’t be coming back from the war.
Sorry, boy. I still get teary remembering. More than fifty years it may be, but it seems like yesterday. You would have liked your grandpa, I know you would. Your dad would’ve, too. The shame of it all is, my own son never knew his father. George and I were married in ’44, just before he shipped out. He went missing before I even knew I was expecting....
But the point, pardon an old woman’s rambling, is that no matter how much I loved the movies, I wasn’t going to theaters when this particular movie came out.
Anyway, the other night, the movie the staff put into the whatever-it’s-called doodad was The Harvey Girls.
Who, you ask? A bunch of waitresses. That’s what people remember nowadays, if they remember at all. But back in the 1880s, when Mr. Harvey started his hotels, men waited table.
Don’t give me that look, boy! I’m old, but I’m not that old.
So, were we just waitresses? Hardly! When Mr. Harvey started his hotels and restaurants out West, the joke was there were “no ladies west of Dodge City and no women west of Albuquerque.” Mr. Harvey brought out women by the carload. By the train car, that is. Harvey Houses served train stations across the Southwest. A bunch of young men, no offense, is just so much rowdiness and trouble. Add enough women, and you get civilization.
I’m rambling again, aren’t I? Sorry. It goes with the age. Anyway, here’s how the movie goes. The Judy Garland character is on a train out West, engaged to a man she knows only from letters, because she had answered his lonely hearts advertisement. Only it turns out he’s an old coot. They weren’t his letters at all, which was another man’s idea of a joke. So—
You can stop peeking under the edge of the table at your Blueberry. Blackberry. Whatever. And your cell phone, too. And anything else from your Batman utility belt.
Hah! Well, you shouldn’t be surprised. The Batman comic goes back to 1939, just like Judy’s version of The Wizard of Oz.
Anyway, about The Harvey Girls. Judy and the old coot don’t get married, but she’s far from home. She takes a job at the local Harvey House....
Just like your old grandma did.
~~~
The Great Depression? Hah! There was nothing great about it. Nothing. And in 1930, with jobs few and far between in Chicago—heck, everywhere across the country—I was in a pickle. Clerical jobs in libraries were expendable enough, and mine had been expended.
Well, not quite everywhere. Hollywood followed rules all its own, and the worse off the rest of us became, the more we flocked to theaters for respite. For a nickel, back then, you got a double feature, and newsreels or an episode of a serial, and a big chocolate bar.
Sad to say, even nickels were hard to come by.
I was twenty-six, younger than you. You’d never guess it now to look at me, but back then I was tall, with blond hair down to my shoulders and twinkling blue eyes. And quite the chassis, too—not that, in a shapeless Harvey Girl uniform, anyone looked womanly. With my money running out, I piled what few things I owned into the old car and headed down Route 66 for Hollywood.
The car? A five-year-old Model T, and it was about my only asset. After the fire, after settling Mom and Dad’s debts, Dad’s car was all I had left.
I never told you about the fire? (She had. Often.) Twenty-two died that night at the Study Club, not that much studying had ever gone on there. Prohibition, you know? It was a speakeasy. Mother and Father had gone to Detroit, to celebrate there with old friends. Celebrating what, exactly? That, I don’t remember anymore, only that the fire wasn’t much of a celebration.
About a month after they died, the market crashed. Everything went....
Well, depression is right enough, even though great doesn’t hardly apply. But I guess I repeat myself.
Anyway, a few months after that, once their affairs were settled, as soon as the weather allowed, I left Chicago. A woman driving, much less alone? Much less across the country? Mother would have been scandalized. Father, red in the face, would have been forecasting doom.
And he would have been vindicated when, on the edge of Winslow, the car broke down.
~~~
The last I heard, Winslow is a shadow of its former self. But in 1930? Another story, boy. Route 66—America’s Main Street, everyone called it—ran straight through downtown Winslow.
Where? Here in Arizona! Don’t they teach anything in school anymore?
Route 66. The railroad, the Santa Fe. And Lucky Lindy, Charles Lindbergh to you, had just designed the town’s new airfield. Transcontinental air service was only beginning. Back then that meant a bunch of short flights, and Winslow offered the only all-weather airfield between Los Angeles and Albuquerque. People didn’t fly at night in those days. The airline scheduled a flight to land in Winslow before dark. Anyone in a hurry hopped on the train, to travel through the wee hours.
Planes, trains, and automobiles (just why are you grinning at me, boy?), they all stopped in Winslow. That’s why Fred Harvey built La Posada, The Inn, and the jewel of his hotel chain, right there. Pueblo Deco, the architect called La Posada: geometrics and sand painting and fantasy hacienda all rolled into one. Seventy guest rooms. Three restaurants. Three private dining rooms. The great lounge. Lovely gardens, all around. Smack dab on Route 66 La Posada sat, and just across the tracks from the train depot. Call it a mile from the airport.
There I was, with a broken-down car, and no money to get it fixed. But I was pretty, not yet thirty years old, and, at least I so asserted, of good moral character. That, and being white—this was another era—was what they were looking for at La Posada.
That’s how I went to work as a Harvey Girl.
~~~
No one used the phrase yet, they wouldn’t for decades, but I was star-struck. I admit it. How not, when a big Hollywood star or three was at the hotel every single day. Mary Pickford. Shirley Temple. Gary Cooper. Clark Gable.
Oh, spare me that look. You surely know who Gable was, without Googling him. Whatever that means.
But my thoughts are wandering about even more than usual. Sure, it was usually the Hollywood folks who caught my eye. But it wasn’t just them and, anyway, so many years later, it was other guests who seem to have mattered.
Who? Funny thing, at the time I didn’t always know.
Oh, I knew Charles Lindbergh! It had only been three years since he had flown solo across the Atlantic. And Howard Hughes, though, truth be told, I knew him as a movie producer more than anything else. I hung on every word from his table, waiting for all the talk of aviation and starting an airline and whatnot to give way to Hollywood gossip.
But that wild-haired German man, who seemed never to be without his pipe? Or the reserved fellow who sometimes came by train to huddle with Mr. Hughes? If not for Mr. Hughes’s questions, I would never have guessed the colleague with the Boston accent was shooting off rockets in Roswell. Or the pilot who went on and on about using instruments to fly, about how cockpit gauges of some sort were more reliable than the eyes in one’s own head? I didn’t come to know his name till during the war, when I read it beneath his photo in the newspapers. Jimmy Doolittle.
Jeez-oh-Pete. The Doolittle Raid, 1942. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Google that.
At first, I mostly worked in the finest of the hotel’s restaurants, the Turquoise Room. Let me tell you, that was one elegant place. Heavy linen tablecloths, fine china, lovely candle fixtures, sprays of flowers all around. Lovely Navajo blankets, hung like tapestries. And the tips were... let’s just say if I hadn’t been on a six-month contract, I still would have stayed.
Anyway, the Turquoise Room was ever abuzz with conversation. I was a sponge for it all. I lived for the Hollywood gossip, I admit it, but I didn’t miss out on other things. Once the Indian Detours started—
I know that look. Indian Detours were another Fred Harvey innovation. Beyond serving people who had to travel, Mr. Harvey hoped to make the Southwest someplace people wanted to travel. So his star hotels, like La Posada, offered guided excursions. To the Petrified Forest. The Grand Canyon. And the pit not nearly as grand, but much closer, that the locals called Franklin’s Hole.
I’d not ever managed to see these sights, but every day, as I bustled among the tables, I’d hear—well, overhear—guests marveling about them. And I talked with the girls who were couriers. You’d call them guides, but on the Detours they were called couriers. They were college graduates, and they all studied up on things like southwestern art, geology, and history.
Anyway, I asked the couriers a lot about what all they’d seen. I borrowed some of the notebooks from which they studied. I suppose the hotel manager noticed my interest because one day, when a girl was under the weather, he asked me to fill in on a Detour. Or maybe he was just desperate. Lord knows I was no college graduate like those girls.
Back then, my memory didn’t leak like a sieve, not like nowadays, at least about anything that’s happened, well, in recent years. Recent decades. So, despite my nerves, I knew the Petrified Forest spiel well enough. I even had answers for most of the group’s questions.
Two days later, I was promoted to courier.
~~~
Have I ever told you about Terrence? Terrence Smith? Back in the old days, I’d have remembered a detail like that. No matter. And while I hope to tell you I loved your grandfather, that I miss him still, every day, well, that movie the other night brought another era, and another man, back to my mind. Someone I’d known years earlier. Someone I hadn’t thought of in ages.
Oh, but that Terrence was the handsome one! I noticed him almost as soon as I started at La Posada. He was too gorgeous not to have noticed. Oh, my, yes. He was much taller than average, with the most striking cobalt-blue eyes. He had straight black, slicked-back hair. Chiseled features. A strong jaw, a Roman nose, and thin, straight lips. No matter the hour of day or night, Terrence was always clean shaven. He didn’t seem to tan, no matter how much of the day he spent working under the desert sun.
Hollywood handsome he was, except that, well, it took me a dog’s age to put my finger on it. His features were too, too... what’s that word? Even? No. Smooth? Smooth? No. Symmetric. That’s it. His face was unusually symmetric. And his speech was a bit different. A bit... mechanical, maybe.
Anyway, Terrence did odd jobs at La Posada. He was good with his hands, fixing all manner of things that got broken. And that doodad in your hand that you don’t think I see you peeking at? Terrence had something similar, I think. I asked once what he called it, and he told me it didn’t have a name. Just something he said he’d put together.
Oh, how he flirted with all us girls. Terrence was as fascinated as anyone with celebrity, but in his case, it wasn’t the stars, but politicians and professors and business folk. One morning Terrence might ask what this one or that one had talked about the night before as we were serving the dinner. Or, after a Detour returned to the hotel, he might be curious what comments the guests had made. More than once he said that La Posada, not New York City, was the crossroads of the world.
He seemed more interested in me once I became a courier. But for all that, he was altogether too... respectful. Especially for someone otherwise so good with his hands.
Oh, that shocked look is priceless! I wasn’t always a crone, you know. And this was less than a year after the Crash. If I had never been a flapper, well, I came of age (do people still say that, I wonder?) in the Roaring Twenties.
Still, it did nothing for a girl’s self-confidence that Terrence would sooner talk about Howard Hughes—the aviation stuff, not his movies or his latest starlet—than about us.
~~~
The scientist guests gave me the heebie-jeebies. Oh, not them personally. They were mostly nice enough. But the questions they would ask on the Detours? Oh, lordy, how I dreaded those. And when I drew a scientist type for my first outing to Franklin’s Hole? Jeez-oh-Pete.
Well, let me tell you, I had the shakes for the entire fifty-five mile outbound drive. I did my best to hide it but my nerves must have showed, because all three guests in the touring car were determined to jolly me out of it.
When we arrived, when I saw this enormous, gaping hole, I was more anxious still.
I went into my memorized spiel. Franklin had been a scout for General Custer—yes, that Custer—and the first white man to report on the hole. The hole was about 4000 feet wide and 600 feet deep. The experts, I recited, said it was almost certainly a volcanic crater.
“I think not,” the German man said. He was the scientist of the group.
In waitressing as much as in retail, the customer is always right, so I was leery about correcting him. My notes, fortunately, gave me something to fall back upon. “Some people believe,” I remember beginning cautiously, “that this crater was the result of an impact. By a meteor or comet of some sort.”
These days, that is what they think. That big hole in the ground is Meteor Crater, no two ways about it.
Anyway, I told the three men on the tour that a Philadelphia geologist named Barringer had staked a claim to this area, hoping to mine meteor iron from beneath the crater floor. I remember I pointed out to them, way at the bottom of that gigantic bowl, a little dot: the mine shaft Barringer’s company had sunk. They never did find any metal.
Would Barringer have found anything if he had kept drilling? If his backers hadn’t pulled out? I don’t know. After the Crash, no one had the money for any such hare-brained scheme.
“Ja, ja,” the German told us. “I also that have heard. But the energies involved?” His eyes glazed over, as if lost in his thoughts. “To have such a large hole made? The meteor would have many thousands of tons weighed. Or....”
“Or what, Albert?” another guest prompted.
Albert Einstein: he was another visitor I only recognized later. I only knew he was on a visit to America, making his way to a meeting in California. Back then, I doubt anyone but other scientists would have recognized him. So, as he chewed on his pipe, I went back to the history of Franklin’s Hole, things the Indians had had to say about it. Well-memorized material.
“Or a very much smaller mass, into energy converted,” Albert finally continued.
“That can happen?” a second passenger asked.
“Ja, ja,” Albert agreed. Fussing with his pipe. “That is how the sun works.”
“Something small enough to be dropped from a plane?” the final passenger asked. A pilot. We often had pilots passing through. Maybe this was Jimmy Doolittle. I can’t picture anymore what Jimmy looked like, only the young Spencer Tracy cast in the movie as Jimmy.
“A bomb?” After much puffing on his pipe, Albert had decided, “Perhaps, I think.”
~~~
I found the whole day exhausting. When we finally got back to La Posada, all I wanted was a cold drink, a light dinner, and a long, hot bath. But Terrence found me first, and he wanted to talk. And talk. And talk.
He thought my day had been fascinating.
“Matter converted into energy?” he prompted me, more than once. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” I answered. Again. The third time, I added something else I’d heard that day. No matter that I was speaking by rote, I used the tone of voice that says: doesn’t everyone know this stuff? “E equals em cee squared.”
Terrence’s eyes went round. “Do you understand what that means?”
I managed to keep a straight face, pleased to have made such an impression.
“Why else would I say it?” Remembering the pilot’s question that afternoon, I came up with a wrinkle all my own. Mr. Hughes’s colleague, as far as I knew, the one working in Roswell, was still making holes in the desert. Combined with Albert’s idea, couldn’t Mr. Goddard blast much bigger holes? And so I tossed off, almost flippantly, “Soon enough we’ll be seeing devices like that on a rocket.”
Smug from seeing Terrence shocked speechless, I went off for that cold drink.
~~~
The day after my Franklin’s Hole adventure, Terrence didn’t show up for work. Nor, when the chief handyman went looking, was Terrence in his room. All Terrence’s stuff, the clothes and books and whatnot, were there, but I didn’t see any of his personal projects, the gadgets he tinkered with.
One of our maids, thinking back on it, remembered she’d seen a bright light in the distance from her third-story window, gazing out toward the desert. A few of us not on shift that morning trudged out the direction she pointed us. Apart from a scorched area maybe thirty feet across, about a half mile from the hotel, we saw nothing unusual. Certainly, we didn’t find Terrence. But on our return, about halfway back to La Posada, I spotted something familiar. It was standing on end, peeking out from within a clump of mesquite grass, behind a knee-high stand of buffelgrass.
Terrence’s favorite doodad.
That and a stained photograph are all I had to remember the man by. Somehow, don’t ask me to explain, I knew that something I’d said the evening before is why Terrence left.
I never saw him again.
~~~
And that was the last time I spoke with Grandma.
She passed away quietly in the night, propped up with pillows in her bed, hours after she had finished her rambling story.
She had never made it to California, never gotten any closer than Flagstaff. I had; that’s why I kept checking for messages, for my job in LA. Remembering stolen glances at my gadgets made me feel rotten.
Okay, more rotten.
Grandma’s room looked as if the reminiscing had set her to looking for... something. The battered old steamer trunk at the foot of her bed—the steamer trunk I couldn’t recall having ever seen open—stood agape. All but empty. Surrounded by ancient crocheted tablecloths, embroidered dresser scarves, and hand-sewn quilts.
Had she found what she sought? I wanted to think so. Clutched in her hand, in a tarnished brass frame, was a faded black-and-white photograph, a greasy thumbprint in its lower left corner, of a young man.
I didn’t know then that it was important—only that, there at the end, finding it had mattered to Grandma. That made it important. I made myself a promise to understand what it meant.
After the funeral....
~~~
The funeral was hard. I had been so focused the past several days (barring the occasional guilty email lapse) on being there for Grandma, that it hadn’t struck me: she was all the family I had.
Had had.
And so, it was three days till I got back to the nursing home to sort through Grandma’s belongings. Where, within the folds of an old tablecloth, inside a paper bag crumbling with age, I encountered a gray, plastic-and-glass rectangular slab. It was similar in area to my Blackberry, but thinner, and it had no keyboard. Terrence’s “doodad?”
Opening my laptop, I wikied plastic. There were no plastics, apart from Bakelite, in 1930, and this—well, doodad would serve—wasn’t Bakelite.
Grandma didn’t have much of an estate to process. The antique handicrafts I offered to the staff, to share among the residents as they saw fit. Ditto, her clothes and the few sticks of furniture. I packed up her photos and the doodad.
Then unsealed the box to look again at the photo that had been found in Grandma’s hand.
Was this Terrence? Slicked-back hair was the style back then; I couldn’t go by that. The image was too small to decide if the man’s face was “unusually” symmetric. But, I decided, his eyes were more widely spaced than average. Maybe they were what made the face seem just a little... different.
Then—because I was the one-man IT department for a small accounting firm, this was high tax season, and the Y2K deadline loomed—I drove home through the night to LA.
~~~
Now and again I would study the doodad and the photo. And then put them away, none the wiser. The latest time seemed no different.
My Blackberry and brick-like first cell alike were long since retired, replaced by a modern phone with a touch screen. Terrence’s doodad still looked slicker. Not that I saw how that could be an electronic device. It had no power switch that I could see, nor any port to accept a charger plug. Not that a smart phone in 1930 could have made any sense.
But nothing would keep me from musing....
Over the years, a suspicion had taken hold: Terrence had been a spy. If he were foreign, that would explain his speech being a little mechanical and his features subtly unusual. It would explain a handyman’s curiosity about certain of the hotel guests and his disinterest in the usual celebrities. A bit of Googling had long since confirmed that in the Thirties La Posada was a crossroads and a vacation stop, someplace where people might speak more unguardedly than in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. That a hostile foreign power—which? I had no idea—might put an agent at La Posada to eavesdrop on the unwary made a strange kind of sense.
Grandma had found the doodad off the path to the scorched area. In my mind’s eye, I saw the device accidentally dropped in the dark as Terrence toted his papers and other incriminating stuff to the desert to be torched. Scrub grass and bushes had caught fire, the blaze reaching out several feet before burning itself out. All the pieces fit.
Except for why Terrence had picked that night to flee. Except for the doodad itself.
All I could come up with was that the doodad was some kind of recording device. I pictured Terrence dictating into it each night the juicy tidbits reported by his unsuspecting Harvey Girl accomplices. Only I had trouble reconciling a recording device with Terrence taking enough paper notes that he had needed a desert bonfire to destroy them—
Or the notion that in 1930 any voice recorder could be as compact as an early iPod.
~~~
There matters remained until Apple released another generation of iPhone.
That’s when (as Grandma would have said) the penny dropped....
~~~
The doodad’s glass surface had, centered just above one of its narrow edges, an oval that suddenly struck me as a possible fingerprint sensor.
Uh-huh. In 1930. And if it were such a sensor?
Ridiculous. Right?
Except that removing the old photo from its tarnished frame, holding the greasy thumbprint near that oval, I found I had brought brightly colored symbols up onto the glass. Onto the screen.
App icons of some kind? Pictographs? Characters from an unfamiliar alphabet? Spider doodles?
I muttered, “What the hell?”
And the doodad responded aloud in... I don’t know what. It was half glottal stops, half sibilants. Wholly unintelligible.
“English, damn it,” I said in frustration.
“Yes, Commander,” the device responded. The swirl of cryptic symbols vanished, replaced with short lines of text:
Emergency power at 0.02 percent.
Replace fusor immediately.
“Status!” I demanded, wondering:
Commander of what?
And: speech recognition in a handheld device? Real-time translation? In 1930?
And: could a fusor possibly be what it sounded like: a fusion power source?
And: could any source but fusion have maintained any power for 84 years?
And: could a fusion mechanism possibly fit into a handheld device?
And: never mind compactness, did anyone on Earth have any fusion technology apart from really big bombs?
And, finally forming a practical thought: how long till the last power bled away?
“Commander,” the device said. “Your directives are confirmed. The courier ship relayed your latest report; the outbound transmission will almost certainly reach the fleet before it passes the commit point. The cold-sleep pod, as requested, has been prepped. As for your lander, at last report it had just de-orbited en route to the extraction point.”
No, the lander had come and gone, leaving behind only a scorch mark in the desert. Just as the courier ship had long ago departed orbit. Otherwise, some astronaut, astronomer, or military radar would surely have spotted it.
I had been more right in my speculations than I could have believed—and Terrence was a lot more foreign than I had ever imagined. Only I still didn’t understand why he had run.
Or maybe I just didn’t want to know. The mention of an alien fleet had shivers racing up and down my spine.
“Commander?” the device said tentatively. “I sense an anomaly. According to my internal clock, the date is—”
“Play back the report,” I ordered.
The device reverted to hisses and clicks, and I interrupted. “In English.”
“Yes, Commander.” Its voice quality changed subtly, as though to denote recitation. “The natives have progressed unexpectedly, beyond both the level Conclave analysts had extrapolated from Earth broadcasts and even my most recent findings. They are experimenting with rockets and, I have just determined, matter-to-energy conversion. The potential of these technologies is familiar even to the menials. We must assume that these capabilities, and perhaps additional weaponry, will be mastered during the years of the fleet’s final approach.
“It is imperative that you recall the invasion fleet immedia—”
Mid-word, the last dregs of emergency power had dribbled out.
~~~
Eighty-four years have passed since Terrence vanished—all without an alien onslaught. It would appear he succeeded in waving off the invasion fleet in time....
And so (I say to everyone on the Internet), that’s how—although she never knew it—“Judy Garland” saved the world.
If Grandma were still with us, I’m guessing she would say, “You’re welcome.”
But do you know what I’m certain she would say? Well, do you?
She’d say, “Menial? Hardly! I was a Harvey Girl.”
[“Judy Garland Saves the World (And I Don’t Mean Oz)” first appeared in Deco Punk: The Spirit of the Age (2015).]
~~~
When the invitation came for submissions to a deco-punk anthology, I was eager to contribute. (Deco punk, should it be unfamiliar, is at once a change from, a riff on, and an homage to the well-established steam-punk subgenre: Victorian-era spaceships and such. The art-deco era, depending on whose definition you choose, spans some or all of the Twenties and Thirties.)
Eager and have a story idea are very different concepts.
Eventually, I came up with a story that was set, more than anywhere else, in the Chrysler Building, an absolute temple of art-deco design, during the Great Depression. Alas, “Soap Opera” turned out to be way too long for the Deco Punk anthology. (Not to worry. “Soap Opera” found a home in another venue.)
Soon after, my wife and I flew cross-country for a driving vacation. After a visit to Meteor Crater (science-fiction author and onetime physicist here), we stopped for the night in nearby Winslow. In particular, we stayed at the newly restored La Posada, where we enjoyed an excellent dinner in the Turquoise Room.
Admiring this masterpiece of Pueblo Deco architecture; having toured nearby Meteor Crater and the Petrified Forest; discovering Albert Einstein, Howard Hughes, and Jimmy Doolittle to have been among the many famous guests of La Posada... pretty quickly, “Judy Garland” began to write itself.
Small-press titles like Deco Punk, alas, seldom get reviewed. That’s a shame—but no reason to exclude from this collection one of my favorite, and IMO best, short stories.