her parents gave her whisky
and that is why she loved them


Michal Rovner, Untitled, 1990

* From a 1973 Playboy interview of Kurt Vonnegut:

Interviewer: What was it like to be at the last moonshot?

Vonnegut: It was a thunderingly beautiful experience -- voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell. Martha Raye was there. Don Rickles was there. Death was there.

Interviewer: Somebody died?

Vonnegut: Life magazine died. They were down there with cameras that looked like siege howitzers. We hung around with them. We were down there on credentials from Harper's. When they go home with their pictures, they found out Life had died. How's that for a symbol? Our planet became Lifeless while our astronauts were on their way to the moon. We went down because a Swedish journalist at a cocktail party in New York told us he cried at every launch. Also, my brother told me 'When you see one go up, you almost think it's worth it.'

Interviewer: You said it was sexual?

Vonnegut: It's a tremendous space fuck, and there's some kind of conspiracy to suppress that fact. That's why all the stories about launches are so low key. They never give a hint of what kind of a visceral experience it is to watch a launch. How would the taxpayers feel if they found out they were buying orgasms for a few thousand freaks within a mile of the launch pad? And it's an extremeley satisfactory orgasm. I mean, you are shaking and you do take leave of your senses. And there's something about the sound that comes shuddering across the water. I understand there are certain frequencies with which you can make a person involuntarily shit with sound. So it does get in your guts.

* "It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams." - Don DeLillo