To vida, noxzema and chi chi, thanks for everything

I will break him out of school half day, slowing the car as he hops in. We will speed away, two people on the same road, age and authority disappearing as we sit side by side in the front seat. We will be alert and together, the excitement building as we approach our city, basking in the topography of music, vending machines, tolls and alphabet movie games between here and there.  

Next week my younger son and I are going on a road trip. We are driving from Chicago to New York City for a weekend, fourteen hours there, fourteen hours back.

This is not unusual for me or for him. I grew up in a family that migrated like immigrants in their own country, a new state every few years. We drove to a new home and then back to the old one, visiting family we had left behind. Some years, we drove west along Route 80 through Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, to Utah. Other years, we drove east over the Sierra Nevada’s through Truckee, Reno, Elko, Wendover. One year we drove from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Phoenix, Arizona. My husband and I also left home and drove until we hit ocean. We have driven our sons back to where we started as well as on long winding vacations inspired by AAA trip-tics and frequent traveler points. We are restless people.

But the combination of him and me is a first, worth considering. There will not be the two parent, two child dynamic, no debating and crocheting up front and gaming, dozing and bickering in the back. The chemistry may be volitile and we may not make it. I may end up leaving him to be raised by the Amish and reinvent myself in the tie-dye philosophy of Oberlin. We are strong personalities and despite our road trip experience, we are a whole lot of energy to compress in a small tin can, untempered by our more mellow counterparts. We need a template, a formula to ensure success.

I decide we need a road trip movie to model – I choose To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, a movie we recently watched together. To Wong Fu is the story of three drag queens with Big hearts! Big issues! And the most fabulous wardrobe ever! (One of the mysteries is how they transport all those clothes and accessories in a few vintage suitcases) They have a magnificent adventure and set a new standard for outward journeys that evolve into inward journeys. They will be our guides.

Here are To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar‘s five rules to a perfect road trip:

1. There must be interesting people in the car with hidden layers and dilemmas to be revealed and resolved.

The Divas of To Wong Fu are: Vida Boheme, a grand Southern belle concealing a deadly uppercut and the pain of parental rejection; Noxzema Jackson, too calculating and cynical for her own good; and Chi Chi Rodriguez, not even a true drag queen in the beginning, just “a little Latin boy in a dress” elevated to drag princess. She has to learn the four secret steps to becoming a drag queen, announced only as she achieves them.  

My son and I do not have fabulous clothes and accessories. I am the dowdy mannequin in ads for the Old Navy clearance rack. My son may sport a pair of sea foam shorts and a snazzy duct tape belt. But we can compete in drama. Mom trying too hard, adolescent not at all, negotiating personal and shared questions around disclosure and boundaries, advice and discovery, identity, definition, trust, authenticity. Similar quests; pendulum swing approaches to how we search. There is everything to talk about and nothing to talk about. Gratefully, when the topics inside the car are depleted or strained, conversation is sustained by each passing billboard blinking through the windows, an endless reel of distractions.

2. There must be a compelling destination or purpose for the road trip.

It doesn’t get much more compelling than The World Drag Queen Contest in Hollywood! Vida and Noxzema tie for first place in a New York City pageant and win two free airplane tickets to California. They cash them in so that they can drive and teach Chi Chi as they go. Vida wants to help Chi Chi. Noxzema harbors a dream that she will be discovered by a Hollywood producer. Chi Chi is just looking for love.

My son and I are going to New York City like the Joads to the Promised Land. Both of us are pulled east by an unexplained gravitational force. Some people grow up in NYC and are part of it. Some move there and wear it like a tight black t-shirt. My son and I share a love for the city that feels genetic, like eye color or temperament; we don’t have to live there to feel its hum. To visit is to align ourselves. We stand straighter as if the streets were a shim righting our souls. What was dormant begins to buzz; nerves come alive. To see the spires of Manhattan is to emerge from a drowsy expanse of poppies into the sharp, sudden edge of an emerald world, a vision of faceted clarity. All this and joining friends celebrating a new baby. My son dreams of Willy Wonka’s golden metro pass.

3. There must be a vehicle with personality and a great soundtrack.

In To Wong Fu, the girls must decide between a reliable Toyota and a parade-sized Cadillac: “it comes down to that age-old decision: style or substance?” Of course they choose the leopard print seat covers and the convertible roof of the caddy.

We will ride in a silver Honda Civic with cracked bumpers held together by pragmatically placed Carleton College and HRC stickers. But, we will have 3 iPods, an array of CDs, 2 sets of speakers and a jack to keep the power going indefinitely. Our vast music library has been tended to with the eclectic and educated hipness of a budding Brian Eno. My son is busy preparing, assembling playlists by jotting ideas in a notebook, listening to fragments, auditioning themes. Example mix titles: revolution, sin, hero, light and dark, time, creation, storytelling, exile, sex, elements, new world, justice, imagination, journey, logic, language and family. Oh, yes, we will have tunes.

4. There must be an unexpected breakdown, the characters waylaid, detoured, forced to a lost and found moment of insight where the travelers intersect with the locals and everyone learns valuable lessons.

This can actually go either way. I read a story once where this guy’s car breaks down in a tiny village, he gets picked up by the resident police and the townspeople eat him. It is a horror movie staple, alternating between bad travelers and bad locals. But in To Wong Fu, the caddy breaks down and they are stranded in a small town desperate for a style makeover and go-girl-stand-up-for-yourself acceptance. They transform the people and their environment from bleak, silent resignation to vibrant, Technicolor individuals more connected in their newfound diversity. The Divas represent the power of movement, driving beyond a set path toward a more confident horizon.

This is the part my son and I cannot predict. Our timeframe is tight and we do not want to be the entrée for a mutant summer BBQ. Yet, there are discoveries to be made. We will gather and record random quotes at roadside attractions, try and eat at neighborhood diners, scour gas stations for regional candy and chat with people. I once had a conversation about Che Guevara with an attendant of a “Gas and Go Oasis” deep in a cornfield sea of Southern Illinois.

5. There is a rapid dénouement that covers thousands of unseen miles because we never see the drive home.

The story of the road trip is process, not result and return; summarized appropriately in a bumper sticker, “Happiness is a journey, not a destination.” The drive home is traveling back to the usual. We slowly shed our borrowed pelt of nomadic autonomy and settle again to an agrarian cycle of work and season, changing from wild to provencial as the miles diminish. In To Wong Fu we see the Hollywood pageant, we see Chi Chi win the tiara supported by her proud Svengali mamas, but we never see the ride home, perhaps symbolizing that they will never go back to the way they were.

Somewhere in Indiana, my son will begin to use his earphones and I will drift into an audio book. Then we will resume homework, garbage night, business trips, middle age and teen age separated by gaps of responsibility and angst. Occasionally, our eyes will wander like Jack Kerouac; we will smile to the line of a song or a spoken reference and our trip will flash like a camera. Hopefully a trace of something permanent will stick as we sail through the impermanence of the road.

6 responses to “To vida, noxzema and chi chi, thanks for everything”

  1. Tim says:

    As lovely and insightful as always, Pandora. You capture perfectly the adventure and the formula of a road trip, ingrained in us as they are by hundreds of books, movies, and songs.

    And holy crap, what a great image this is: Some move there and wear it like a tight black t-shirt.

  2. Kirsten says:

    Dear friend, wave as you pass the Mishawaka exit. I’ll be thinking of you and W on your travels!!

  3. lane says:

    drive carefully, and remember No Doze can be smashed and snorted for a relatively harmless Hunter S. Thompsonesque road trip experience.

  4. PB says:

    Lane, I may need all the Hunteresque I can get by Pennsylvania. I was thinking about you when I posted this because it is probably way too long (perhaps like a road trip . . . ) and yet you ALWAYS surprise me. Keeps me guessing . . . hmmm, do you like Bowie yet???

  5. lane says:

    so glad you asked, no. still.

    a month ago i had ‘word on a wing’ cued up on my ipod. it began and i got into it. thinking ‘yeah he is really good, so ambitious and grand and then like 4 minutes later i wanted to puke, and then he just goes on and on and on. droning, crooning, trying to invoke some germanic fanatsia. THAT bowie is still really bad.

    my favorite bowie is still the let’s dance bowie with certain singles like “sound and vision” and “heroes” (the song) (and “helden”) and . . .

    whatever, . . .

    so how do you feel about like . . . meat loaf? or . . . queen, or, emerson lake and palmer? he wasn’t the only guy doing that schtick, thats the part about ‘bowie people’ they act like he ALONE INVENTED IT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Have you ever seen the Conchords spoof on “Bowie”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrnHwAxGzV0

  6. PB says:

    Dear friend, wave as you pass the Mishawaka exit. I’ll be thinking of you and W on your travels!!