The astounding Yvonne Dickson of the soon-to-be outstanding threesmallapples.com popped to Echo Park for 44 hours to style a Dimples Dalton/Dimples Dickson photoshoot, take in Blitzen Trapper at the El Rey (at El Rey? Is the “the” entirely redundant?) and do an unnecessary amount of wheatgrass shots.

We had a Westminster reunion with Kirsty, the three of us giggling on the pavement outside the Sheraton Pasadena then midnite breakfasting at The Brite Spot, 5456 miles from where we met seven years ago.

Came home to find a house full of girls watching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (apparently I’m Casey–the depressed, drug-addicted, alcoholic, pregant, lesbian who dies–which is all right but doesn’t fit quite as perfectly as the previous week’s casting–me as Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls? You see it?)

In other news, I’m leaving on a jet plane for Kentucky at the crack of dawn. Oh!

Yep, that’s Miss Sally Fay Dalton on the Electromagnetic album cover — photo of her by me, contents of her brain by Henry. You can get it at shows, like the fabulous one with Magic Mirror at the Echo the other week.

PS — Here’s the original (sin), from a Sugar Town Vintage shoot:

Some random woman yapping into her hands-free (except that she was holding the phone, so the hands-free part was a bit pointless) entered the lift and halted her conversation mid-sentence to look me up and down and say “Isn’t that a little short? Jeez.”

When I replied “Excuse me?” she shushed me and, gesturing to the wire attaching her ear to the phone in her hand, mouthed “I’m on the phone with my attorney” before schlepping her calf-length-black-tent-wearing mass out on the tenth floor.

It’s from the night of blood and butterflies, of course, starring Mizz Dita Dimone, one of your favourite Crazy Girls of Echo Park (wait, didn’t they used to the the Photogenic Punk Rock Wonder Girls of Doom?)

Anyway, doesn’t she look lovely in website button form? Click there and click yessssss, pazhalsta.

The Aliens were in town for Detour and Brenda took charge of showing them a good time. Turns out Brenda’s idea of showing people a good time is Little Joy and Eliza Fay. What?

After-after-after “party”: House full of British men and American women, with my accent fluctuating wildly. What’s a countess in California to do?

Six empty vodka bottles lounging on kitchen counters, and me all newly sober. (The novelty’s bound to wear off.) Debates about my hair’s exact degree of waviness (or lack of it) can apparently only be concluded by up-close examinations. It grows, kids; it’s hair.

Next morning I was left with an envelope on the oven for mundane reasons that we agreed to keep obfuscated so as to appear at least somewhat mysterious. Hmm.

We had to drag ourselves away from TV boys with improbable names (like Santiago. Someone get me teddy bear or something so I can name it Santiago, k?) so we watched Factory Girl instead. Nice make up and all, but on the whole it just made us want to stop watching TV and do more interesting stuff like Cruise with Grandma and Hula Hoop Strip (on Skates!).

More on CWG and HHSOS later, if we don’t get sucked straight back into TV zombieosity. We have a hot plot hatched with super stylist Yvonne Dickson and the Queen of Yes is telling me I gots to meets with someone ’bout something, but at the very least Sally Fay hit the sewing machine and I got back to the laptop before the night was through.

In a real stretch, here’s my tribute to Andy Warhol’s American Indian, via Krakow, Poland.

[Yeah, my blacks are heavy.]

Sometimes, when it gets stupidly hot, I think about London.

I miss kebab shop cheese burgers and weather that allows for layering and even the customer service patronising bit-whiney-really tone of voice when you have to phone the bank or something, of course, but most of the time I spend thinking about random mental (mental like in my brain, or mental like mad?) snapshots of phone boxes and road signs and church doorways.

I used to wander by St James’s Roman Catholic Church, Spanish Place, on lunch breaks from my first office job at No 1 Marylebone High Street. I never went in or took pictures until six years later, on a trip back to my old life from my new one in Los Angeles, with an American in tow so I could be like a tourist.

The building actually sits on George Street, with Spanish Place around the corner. The first chapel on the spot (well, across the street) was used by the Spanish ambassador and his court during the reign of Elizabeth I, and served as a sanctuary for English Catholics, too. When the new structure was raised, an unofficial connection with Spain remained although the location was no longer directly on Spanish Place itself.

Can we raise some kind of English sanctuary out here in the desert? Wait, would I want to go there if there was one?

Good thing my morals aren’t as low as my prices, no? Even minor euro royals fall on hard times. I mean, I’m feeling generous. Tell daddy to buy you some cheap prints from countess.etsy.com, while I get back to editing pix from the Electromagnetic/Magic Mirror show at the Echo and the weekend’s backyard-til-four Coronado party with my right hand and petting Baby Bear with the left. Deal? Now, $2 maragitas…