Beach bust?

I'm doing a reading of my book tonight at the Cannon Beach Gallery. It's been on the books, as it were, for a couple of months. Beach time: they never got around to running announcements in the paper or putting up any of the thirty posters I had the publisher send them. Can't say I blame them: the weather's been beautiful, the beach beckons at any time of day or night. Who'd want to take the time to arrange things, much less show up on a Saturday night of vacation? I'm thinking I'll be talking to pictures on the wall. Which reminds me of one of the more bizarre evenings I've spent: on a trip to Death Valley, having heard about her somewhere, we stopped at a small auditorium in the middle of nowhere, desert on all sides for miles, heat shimmering even toward night. There, a woman named Marta Beckett danced her ballet every night, to music played on an old phonograph on the front of the stage, and with an audience of kings and queens and their subjects, sitting in fancy balconies, painted on the walls. That night, Judy and I were the only breathing visitors, except Marta's husband, who'd painted the walls and lifted the arm of the phonograph onto the record. That's love. Judy'll be there tonight, absorbing some of the echos.