A Chingona Plays Miss Dinah Brand

À La Mode, 1976, by Asco (photographer: Harry Gamboa, Jr.) I dare you to hear me tell just which and what sort of girl I was, always had been, and why. You may as well yes-yes me. You’ll get no chance to cut in. This is No Movie and I’m the leading gal, the femme fatale in cork platform sandals, mis- taking Woolworth’s plastic earrings for glam, mis-american, which and what sort? The kind who never introduces the top six buttons of  her dress to their holes, whose legs always cross when she sits on a table, who pats vanilla pancake over her rich, theatrical skin to lift dark hair, dark eyes, dark lips from the level of   East Los Common to revelation, and you’re all in my made-up fairy tale now, you & these suave muchachos, we’re all queasy in the where is it 40s  50s  60s 70s brown beautiful people pronouncing our perfect English, accorded zero-to-slivers of silver screen glory. I dare you, looking in from the tangled reel of the future, say out loud what I’m sitting on. Kitten-posed on a table top in Philippe’s Original Sandwich Shop, Los Angeles, ’76, next to the napkins and sugar shaker, I’m not afraid of the cleaning rag wiping me out of the frame, I take in the unedited numbers that tumble in one continuous shot from my Now to yours, and there’s a mestiza born every minute, I know where I sit: right on top of a pretty warm piece of sweet American pie.