Chicago Memory: That Night I Became a Member of a Monarchy That No Longer Exists

I’m in Chicago now, staying with my friend Mitchell. We’ve been friends since college. Then we were roommates in Chicago, and the adventures we had are legion. Here, we had come home from some night out. We were not drunk, or not wasted, let’s say that. And for whatever reason, my outfit, and the lighting in our little crappy hallway made Mitchell want to take some pictures, with my cool camera. He said, “You look like some complete wastrel member of a defunct monarchy.” Like, what? He elaborated: “You know, like you’re a princess in the Hapsburg or Romanov line, and you have no throne to sit on anymore because your monarchy no longer exists, and so instead you spend your time drinking and doing coke and making scenes in Biarritz or Monte Carlo, dating criminals and compulsive gamblers and international asshole playboys, and your only ‘throne’ now is the tabloids who cover your drunken exploits.”

And I took it from there. Because isn’t that an evocative image? Wouldn’t you “know what to do”, too, if someone presented that image? “Okay, act like this.” “Oh yes. I know exactly who that person is. Here we go.”

Mitchell and I are (much) older now but we still do shit like this, merely for our own entertainment. Also, who else but Mitchell would look at a woman in a biker’s jacket on a cold wintry Chicago night, and say, “You look like a member of the lost Romanov clan”? I ask you, who.

It’s good to be back.