Emmuska · Orczy, · Baroness · Optional

My dear ones,

America is not all Hollywood.

I'm certain you're traumatized to learn this fact. Even now, you are saying, "But Emmuska, Emma, darling, what about what we see on Entertainment Tonight? When we watched Justin and Cameron carry out their whirlwind romance, it was in a haze of sunshine and the twinkle of beautiful lights shining on their perfect skin!" But no, I am here to tell you today, as I ride a train through what appears to be tundra more apropos to Russia under Stalin:

America is not all Hollywood.

My darling Pancakes - a Pomeranian, and tiny enough not to have much body heat - dislikes the cold here, and is hiding in my handbag rather than his cage, as he likes it so much better. It's not that either of us is unprepared; we've been skiing before, in Banff and Aspen and all the rest (Aspen merely being a colder extension of Hollywood). It's that we dislike the cold here, thrust outside of polite society and into a land where the Pilgrims progressed to find a land cold and forbidding enough for their tastes to take root. It is a land where you burn witches to keep warm, and I cannot say that it is at all inviting.

Not Hollywood.

There's no one fascinating here, only an old man who is drooling as he sleeps sitting up in the cati-corner chair, and two unruly children who keep ritually hitting one another. It's the girl who's the more violent, winding up and smacking her slightly-larger brother with a toy and repeating "Stoppitstoppitstoppitstoppit." They're smudged from eating candy the entire journey. This is not the American adventure I pictured; there are no handsome strangers, no banalities washed away with a rush of glamour, no intrigue whatsoever. I should have waited as advised; should have gotten my little car, my Panda here and driven through this landscape, making awfully delightful side-trips and arriving fashionably late to my new place. "Icaria's an awfully small town; it's easy to get lost." But first you have to plan so hard to actually get lost. You live, you learn.

If this were Hollywood, I'd be lost by now. There would be spies, or at least a handsomely ruffled Ethan Hawke to ride with me and spend just one night together before he had to fly across the seas.

Wait, I've got that backwards. He goes back to America, she stays in Europe. Never mind!

The point is, I am disillusioned, mes cheris. I cannot think this bodes well for my arrival at Eupheme High. We shall see. Perhaps this is only the obligatory normal prelude before the original, the uncanny, and the delightful takes over. Adventure awaits.

But not in Hollywood. Hello, Massachusetts. Aren't you droll.