Places I have been

This is a Lois Magnolia. There was a writer's group that I had to invite myself to. A friend by the same name started a group and I heard about it. So I called and got myself invited. We met at a Hamburger Hamlet in West LA and had dinner and read to each other out loud. I really didn't want feed back at this point in my life, I just wanted to go somewhere and read it out loud. The lady that had wrote for The Love Boat (that I've mentioned earlier) was in it and a lady that wrote romance novels- and a lady that wrote plays and humorous pieces. And Bobbie, who had run the group in the park years before. People came and people left, I kept bringing in new people: Lorraine and Annette and Rex and I forget who else. We met once a month for a thousand years. I began with the second draft of the book I've since published, then there was a screenplay about Robert Louis Stevenson's romance with Fanny and then three years on the Joe Strong novel- both the screen play and novel went through two drafts and these folks listened to good potions of all of it. They had very little to say except that I was too dark. (Another woman, a poet, that I had brought into the group as well, would try to leave before I read.) I included them in gourmet outings at my house and invited a couple of them over to listen in on the jug band and to check out a male single guy in the band who was their age.  Then something began to happen, I was being flaked out on, on my invitations, and then it became clear to me that they didn't want to meet with just me- like I wasn't really their friend. And they didn't seem to want to bother with me or anything I was doing.
We moved from one restaurant to another to another - I always drank too much and tipped too much and was always shorted on the check by everyone almost all the time. When I and another friend asked for something different from the arrangement, we were ignored.
It died. Lorraine is in assisted living in Indiana, Annette is in Sweden, Bobbie can't go out at night any longer. The poet that didn't want to hear my writing goes to bed at 8:30 now from the looks of her. The ones still in LA pretty much ignored my invitation to a New Year's day music party. The poet did come and left. She still doesn't want to see any of my writing.
What the hell, it was just me performing. I've just moved on into another form of performing. C'est moi.
They will miss the Daydee book.