Sarah Smile: Oh, Memories!

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Just shy of a year ago, I was having dinner with five good friends after my book signing at a Santa Ana Barnes & Noble —I have a book! Which you could buy!—when the hilarious and charming Leslie Washburn (wife of lucky Jim) looked around the table and asked, “Does anyone here think that baby is Sarah Palin’s?” MEMORIES!

No! Nobody here thought that baby was Sarah Palin’s!

The table erupted as we all enumerated the many, many reasons we didn’t think that baby was Sarah Palin’s. (My very circumstantial point, which I think has gone under-noticed, is that Palin returned to work something like two days after having him. Just an ambitious workaholic whose first priority is the state of her state? Maybe. You know how Sarah Palin loves to work. And you know how she cares about the state of her state. But also perfectly explainable if she was able to blithely leave that baby at home because she’d never bonded with that baby because that baby wasn’t Sarah Palin’s.)

(My other circumstantial point, which of course has nothing to do with anything but Spin and the Magic of Television Style Consultants, was that Girl Palin was a hot little tamale in her MySpace photos, all streaked blond hair and half-shirts and beer bottles, but for the Republican National Convention, once she’d been outed as a preggy teen, they dyed her hair dark brown and put her in a black pinafore, the better to hold her brother-or-whatever to her bosom and look like a Madonna instead of a whore.)

I bring this up, of course, because lunky idjit Levi Johnston has meowed to Vanity Fair all kinds of awful things about Mama Palin. Worst of all? She didn’t even like to hunt.

(When Ruth Marcus is defending Palin, you know a tell-all is a mean-spirited piece of shit.)

But, oh, here’s a little nugget that just doesn’t even make sense:

Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging—she wouldn’t give up. She would say, “So, are you gonna let me adopt him?” We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn’t want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.

Now, Girl Palin has never shown us a birf certicate for little Tripp (not Trig, although I don’t think we’ve seen his either); the birth was announced to People by her grandparents, as I recall, just about eight-and-a-half months after Trig was born, which was the definitive proof that Girl Palin hadn’t spawned her brother, or something. (You following me? Yeah, you’re following.) So in this scenario, would Palin have fake-birthed her grandson eight-and-a-half months after her own son? Or does “adopt” connote that she wouldn’t have tried to pass the baby off as her own, but would have passed herself off as the kind of angel with enough love in her heart and room in her mansion to adopt a poor child from nowhere?

I don’t know. Those people are crazy. And I just love to froth at the mouth and consider the possibilities.

This week, a man bit off another man’s finger at a health care rally on the mean streets of Thousand Oaks. MEMORIES!

My mama and I had a fine time—let’s see, carry the one—oh, 19 years ago, protesting the first Gulf War on those same streets. Every day, for weeks, the local jocks and meatheads would counterprotest on the opposite corner, and then, every time the light changed, would stomp across the intersection to wave their signs in our faces and shove my mother. You know: kill the hippies. It’s cool.

Except that someone actually tried to kill the hippies when he ran his car up on the sidewalk and hit someone. He was taken away, but wasn’t charged, because he claimed that in his fear he’d mistaken the gas for the brake while also managing to turn his wheel hard right (heh) to drive up on the sidewalk from his position stopped at the intersection next to us.

From the first-person reports this time, a health care proponent was on the LaRouchie/mean-old-white-people-on-Medicare side, when a health care opponent punched him in the face and knocked him into the street. Then the puncher/health care opponent put his finger into the guy’s face a bunch more, maybe punching him again, or just shoving him in the face (no one’s sure) and the guy bit it off, and then the guy with the finger bitten off went to Los Robles Medical Center, where my little brother was born. Yay, Thousand Oaks.

Sean Hannity is blowing a load right now.

My favorite part of this story is that I was one of the only people actually arrested at our protest. (They didn’t arrest the guys in monster trucks flying Confederate flags and racing REALLY FAST, DUDE, around the corner, because bad taste, sadly, is not against the law.) I was 17, and refused to leave the intersection long after everyone had gone home, because I was on acid and wanted to get arrested. Since I was 17, the cops couldn’t put me in a cell, and instead had me sit on the floor in the room where they all did their paperwork, and they made fun of me, and not once did I say, “Oh, you think you’re so smart? Well I’m on acid, and you didn’t even know it!”

As you can imagine, this was not easy for me. So I just tried not to look too long at my hand, and eventually my dad came and picked me up, and finally I had someone I could tell, which was such a relief! And he let me smoke in the house and everything, since I was going to be awake all night, on acid. MEMORIES!

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