The Ongoing Adventures of Stupendous Girl!

A Whiter Shade of Beyond the Pale 13 Dec 2008

The bright red of the light-emitting diodes inside the wall-mounted clock flash their warning of a night growing ever later with an insistence that, although it is obviously constant, seems to grow with each second. Around the rented room, walls covered in maps and pinned-up file folders, paper scattered on every surface capable of holding paper, notes, pamphlets, phone scripts, half empty coffee mugs and serviettes covered with muffin crumbs, the detritus of an election campaign everywhere to be seen, sit four tired looking women. They are the brain trust of the insurgent mayoral campaign of Julie Nyerere (the Apparat-Chicks, as a recent newspaper feature had dubbed them), and their posture, the bags under their eyes, the slumping and tired way of sitting reminiscent of a wounded animal trying not to let you know it is wounded, all speak to a once winning campaign that has lost momentum.

“It’s the fucking rumours about you and York. It’s queer-baiting, is what it is, and we ought to be out front complaining about it!”

This was not the first time Alex Shipley, campaign manager, had so opined, but it was the bluntest she’d ever put the case.

“You’re right about how repugnant it is, but we can’t be seen to be complaining about it. It’ll seem like sour grapes. Besides, we knew Richards would play hardball when we started this thing, right?”

The reply came, also not for the first time, from official agent to the campaign Sophie Trudeau.* Their friendly but spirited disagreement on how to respond to the Richards’ camps sleaze campaign was long standing.

“We’ve been over this ground before. The question is, what to do about it?”

With this interjection the third of our quartet of progressive pols, city councillor and long time Nyerere ally Pam Zielinski. For many years, she and Nyerere had formed an informal bloc of two, a strongly left-leaning minority on the council fighting mostly rearguard actions against out of control development, sprawl, crumbling social services, an out of touch police department, spiralling poverty – so she understood how important it was to take this rare chance to get a committed reformer into the mayor’s chair. She had put the important question, indeed. With only four weeks before the election, anything they did to counter the whisper campaign about Nyerere’s lesbianism would have to happen now to have time for the impact to filter through to undecided voters. Hence why the exhausted women, having put in superhuman hours each night for months on the campaign in any event, were still here talking at 11:34 pm. (Okay, perhaps not literally superhuman hours. I mean, this being a fiction blog about an actual superhuman, we have to be literal in our descriptions.** But the hours have been impressive and long, and most importantly tiring.)

“What we do about it is fight fire with fire.”

Now this was a new development. For the first time, the candidate herself was decisively interjecting.

Page 1 | Page 2

* – Yes, I steal character names from members of Montreal alt rock bands sometimes. What of it?
** – Contrast to when I briefly wrote a blog about my favourite coastal areas, and had to be littoral in my descriptions. I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your server!