Queen Carlotta (Charlotte Cushman) was a transgender actor/ess in the mid 19th century who played Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and Lady Macbeth. Channeling men and becoming men, acting on the stage of the rich and elite on both sides of the Atlantic. In the pit, the hotel and factory workers of the time would bring their children.

bibi died on halloween of 2009. I knew she was on her way out, partially because i helped it happen. By this i mean that for years before it happened i cleaned up her messes and put her to bed and made her dinner and sat next to her on the couch while she asked me the same questions over and over, but she had done the same for me so now we are even.

yes, bibi had raised me some and put up with my shit for many years, so it was only fair that i put up with hers. On halloween of 2009 i knew bibi was on her way out so i came back to the house where bibi had helped raise me, my mothers house, bibi’s daughers house,

where bibi had been rotting for a while now.

I stood around the bed while bibi choked and moaned quietly and then i really knew it was time so i went into the back yard and i lit a candle and walked wittershins and i made a mound. The night before i had boiled an evening primrose root shaped like a lady just to get things rolling and i put that on top of the mound upsidedown to call the black-cloaked ones. Then in came the seven vultures with a flash of silver on the tip of each wing and they circled down around the eves and then spiraled up. I ran into the house and it was happening into the night and the next day the sad portugeese clowns came with the burgundy drapes and they dragged poor bebe away.

Bibi was irish catholic from rhode island and when she got old and demented she still managed to sit down and chat with the blessed virgin and all the dead people she knew like a good catholic. She grew up on an island in the ocean.

I know that a good way to speak to bebe now that she’s toast is by first having a little chat with the blessed virgin or the ocean. Then i hang a lucky piece of her blue jewlery from a string and ask it yes or no questions. You can’t see it under a microscope, but she will smack the jewelery carelessly one way or another to answer your deepest darkest, and she is usually dead-on, because now that she is a ghost herself she is also an angel and a vulture and she can see very far around.

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