Friday, January 06, 2017

Free Cookie

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My boyfriend deserves a shout-out for giving me some fine Xmas presents this year - that Vincent Price signed check seen above would be enough to buy my love for maybe even several months even (I ain't cheap) but he went above and beyond and also got me a book by Miss Cookie Mueller that I have been clamoring for for ages and ages. It's a collection of her writings called Ask Dr. Meuller that was published in 1996, seven years after she had died of AIDS.

Mueller, if you don't know - and you should know! - was an actress and bon vivant; I know her from several of John Waters movies, but her life was A LIFE beyond that. A fantastic biography of her called Edgewise from the people who knew her best was recently released that I pushed on you people at the time - it is highly recommended.

Anyway after I read that I wanted to read some of her writing - she did columns for a bunch of downtown papers and magazines in the 80s while living her nutty life - but a lot of it is hard to come by. Ask Dr. Mueller collects the best of it, but the book is out of print and goes for upwards of 90 bucks on Amazon. So I probably never would have spent that on myself, but as a gift I will gobble it right up.

I do have a point here besides rubbing in how good I have it, though - this morning I was reading the book on the train on my way to work and there was a chapter titled "A Last Letter" that moved me to tears (especially knowing that AIDS would take her several years after she wrote down this piece) and I thought to myself that the internet needs to have this, and with the book being so prohibitively expensive it's a shame not a lot of people will get to read it. So I have it for you! It's only three pages but I'm too lazy to transcribe the whole damn thing so I took pictures, click 'em to embiggen.

"A Last Letter" by Cookie Mueller




2 comments:

The Bloody Munchkin said...

If I was not at work, I would be crying my eyes out. It puts such a light on the fights that were fought and the humanity we really did lose. The same fight that took my uncles so cruelly took these wonderful people too. We have to remember what we've lost. We have to keep it close and reading something like this reminds of this so clearly. THANK YOU for sharing this.

par3182 said...

that was truly beautiful - thanks for sharing

ps - i'm coming to new york to steal your boyfriend