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2007-06-27 - 1:56 p.m. When we were at my parents� house after the Westchester reception, we found this in a small notepad in my room. It�s obviously from late 1991, as the pad also contains notes from applying to colleges my senior year in high school (also a lot of designs for machine gun-toting vehicles for the role-playing game Car Wars � fine, I was a big dork at the time). These are the first drafts of a poem I wrote for Nya, set down again in dimly-remembered and updated form in an entry here. Why is it called �Plastic Madonna Part 3�? I�m afraid I have no idea what parts 1 and 2 were. But I remember the origin of Plastic Madonna. In the late-1980s, there was a (somewhat dorky, in retrospect) high schooler I was rather taken by. He had dubbed himself �Val Veggie� and created a secret society called �Val Veggie�s New and Improved Police State�. Boys in the society were called �Val secret name and girls secret name Val�. I forget what my secret name was, but I wanted Nya to have one. So (this is before we were dating, in late-1987 or early-1988) when we were talking on the phone one afternoon, I asked her to close her eyes and roll around, then open her eyes and tell me the first thing she saw. She did and said she saw a nightlight shaped like the Virgin Mary (her father, whose house she was in, apparently had kitschy taste in decorative art). I dubbed her (as I recall, Val Veggie got mad because I had no �right� to give out names) Plastic Madonna Val. This poem is a response to a poem Nya wrote and got published in our high school�s literary magazine her senior spring (my junior), 1991. I submitted mine to the lit mag in 1992, but of course missed the deadline. Feh. Her poem started: It goes on to talk about the dangers of the glass child slipping. �Don�t walk in here barefoot dear, your daughter just fell.� It ends with: It�s funny, she noted that unplanned pregnancies are really no big deal and happen all the time. Maybe. But I know I used to dream about our kid well before Nya assigned it a gender (and the pregnancy was terminated way too early to tell this definitively). I felt like I had done wrong for years afterwards. (No, I didn�t go with her to get it done. But, as both of us recall, she didn�t want me to come.) Who is blowing softly on my cheek? Take a fucking guess� Anyway, here�s the early drafts of my poem (I think the shortness of the lines may be due to the small size of the pages they�re written on). Again, a contemporary version of this can be found here: This angel visits each night, ---> shriveled, wrinkly Cupid-prune smiling She is locked inside, behind your This angel visits each night, Can you see her � 2007 Geoff Gladstone
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