Outlaws - Camilla Basham

She is sitting at the Viceroy in the armpit of America: Los Angeles. Mind numbing house music is eating her brain. She can sense the stares in her direction, she is an unknown beast in some cage for viewing. She is wearing a modest swim suit and reading an obscure object; not a manuscript, not a tabloid, but something called the New York Times.

She is aware of her rare state here as someone who can maintain both boobs and a brain. No silicon has gone to her head. She is absent the tramp stamp; the fake double D's, the orange tan; the bleached blond locks and the frozen forehead. She is not sitting alone obsessively texting so people will imagine her more popular and important than she really is. She is not buzzed before noon. She is not sitting with a metrosexual man who spends more time on his hair then she does. She is not giggling incessantly at the very fact that she is at a pool in L.A.

She was not neglected as child and therefor seeking attention from any and everyone who walks by her. She doesn't care that Oliver Stone is in the cabana next to her drinking champagne with teenage girls; she doesn't know him; he doesn't know her; she doesn't care. She does not need to know that the man next to her was in an episode of Entourage or that the woman next to him is auditioning for a new reality show. She doesn't care that someone is interested in the waiter's script or that the bartender is starting his own indie movie company called Outlaw Productions.

She refuses to admire the cougar who has had so much plastic surgery that not even she knows when she is smiling or the middle aged man sporting Speedos and hair plugs. It suddenly dawns on her why the rest of the world sees us as shallow and morally bankrupt; and with that epiphany and a shake of her head she turns the page.