“Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.” I don’t know if he said it first, but he said it best.
Late in the summer of 1991 I took the train to Wisconsin with my mother and my sister, to visit my great aunt Betsy, as we had done many years running. One night she invited me up into her bedroom to watch a show on the rollaway tv. Great-aunt Betsy was my mother’s aunt, her father’s sister, and the house had belonged to her mother, who we all called Nonnie. Sometime in the early mid-century Nonnie was separated from her husband through divorce or death (I like to think it was the first, she was the type to make choices) and never re-married, preferring to live in the two story Victorian (three if you counted the basement, which was cold and damp but held the only shower, added much later, when people stopped wanting to soak in a bath every day. Fools.) by herself and with visitors like us. She died in her 90s, a bright, intelligent woman who loved to bake and can things and left me with sets of matching shoes and purses, a thing I hadn’t known existed (one set was an incredible lavender leather), let alone thought would have been worn by my nonnie, who I’d only ever seen in polyester slacks and oversized reading glasses. When she passed, Betsy took the house and on this visit it had barely changed. I remember chenille bedspreads of the early 1900s and windows looking out into a large green yard, clothes always drying on the line. A few years before, I was doing a dance number in the living room and fish hook hidden in the shag carpet lodged itself into the meat of my foot.
The night of the tv invite, Betsy and I hopped onto her bed (she was in her 70s, I was 11) and, though I remember the sun barely fading outside, turned our attention to the tiny screen. So it was that I first came into the world of Twin Peaks. It was episode 3, the funeral for Laura Palmer, with subsequent reenactment by Shelly in the Double RR Diner, a matchbox coffin and finger-figure Leland going up and down in the grave and Audrey Horne in all her saddle-shoed teenage glory. And of course, there was Special Agent Dale Cooper, with his hair and his teeth and his metaphysical views of the everyday world. Even at 11 years old I knew he was the embodiment of Special.
I went back to Southern California a changed lady; I became obsessed with this other world of whispering pines and jukeboxes full of jazz. I cut my hair, bought sweater sets and plaid skirts, set my sights on cities like San Francisco where I might follow in the footsteps of Dashiell Hammett and become a private detective (working my way up to Cooper’s FBI status) in a place more mysterious than my beach town (I had yet to learn of all Laguna’s dark corners and historical secrets). When I moved to the city I hunted down every donut shop I could find, and have continuously believed that every day you should give yourself a present.
I was not brought up in a tv household but my mum had discerning, intelligent taste and saw something in this oddball show, letting me watch it weekly on our shitty little set for the two seasons it aired; I wailed when Leland admitted to killing Laura, I nearly lost my mind when Cooper went dark. I knew this was a world that wasn’t ‘real’, but that scarcely mattered; because of it I was thinking about astrophysics and investigating the strange love life of Percy Shelley and covering my bedroom floor with green and white checked linoleum tiles. I’d developed my style and was daring to dress like a winterized bobby-soxer in a middle school where most people thought a Volcom tee was status quo.
My obsession with Twin Peaks never died, though it’s varied in shape and intensity over the past 35 years. Added to this is a myriad of other Lynchian cinemascapes. I know I’m not alone when I say that I wouldn’t be who I am without the artistry of David Lynch. I know better now than to want to live in a Lynchian world, but I wish we didn’t have to live in a world without Lynch. RIP 🖤
