[Morrigoon]

Okay, here's one on that photo I posted the other day:

The problem was, Celia was always pulling crap like this.

My grandma always insisted we call her by her first name. She thought it more democratic that way, like somehow taking note of her seniority over us made us inferior citizens or something. Of course, just because we called her Celia didn’t mean we were her equals, it just meant that we satisfied her desire to pretend that she treated us as equals.

My grandmother the activist. Wooo.

Most kids have fond memories of their grandmothers baking them cookies or taking them to Disney World. The only reason Celia would ever be caught dead in that part of Orlando would be to protest “the man”. But there was plenty of that to be had right here in Miami.

As a teenager I used to dread my parents going away on business trips because it meant Celia coming over to watch us. So instead of chilling on the couch with a bowl of chips and several hours of MTV after school, we were subjected to hours of television news and Celia shouting at the top of her voice about how it was all lies, and how they never reported anything that was actually significant in the world. You know, in retrospect, I have to agree with her there, but it doesn’t change the fact that as a teenager I just did not care or want to hear it.

Weekends were the worst though. Inevitably there was some protest going on somewhere, and we had to be a part of it. How many pamphlets did I hand out to unwilling strangers; how many rallies did I attend, bored out of my gourd while Celia got her political freak on? I swear, attending protests were like church to her. I started to appreciate her more as I got older, and came to understand what she was fighting for.

Well… until she started up with the performance art. She wasn’t doing it for art’s sake, of course. This was just a new and creative form of drawing attention to herself- oops, I mean “rallying for the cause”. She read some article in one of those liberal newsletters she subscribed to, talking about PETA and the crazy forms of protest they used to get publicity for their cause. Not that she ever got involved with that group, luckily (Celia liked a good steak as much as the next person, preferably free-range and from a small co-op of ranchers, served in a mom-and-pop steakhouse). But she loved the idea of artistic protest.

She went through a lot of body paint and feathers in the ensuing decade. Anyone who didn’t know her might have thought her one kinky old broad. You could say she was an activism fetishist. Wow, hearing myself say that, it’s really a perfect description of who she was. Protest for protest’s sake. Okay, so they were good causes, but really I think she liked the romance of fighting the man. She hungered for the validation of belonging to one beleaguered group after another, always for cause good enough to justify stepping outside the bounds of acceptable human behavior. Only this wasn’t a one-off, doing-it-for-the-cause thing for Celia, she lived the lifestyle.
I guess that’s why nobody was surprised to see her laying on the sidewalk in front of the Sheraton, clad in a teal shower curtain and tennis shoes. To anyone that knew her, she was probably trying to bring attention to the homeless in protest of some program that failed to be funded by congress or something. If she was, well, it worked. Her photo made the main page of the Herald’s website the next day, with the tagline, “Homeless woman lies dead on sidewalk as hundreds pass by, uncaring.” She had passed in the night.