You choose a city beach because the ex of a friend is spinning at P.S.1. You find a lady-friend to handbag along with you. You arrive in Brighton Beach amazed at how quickly you arrived compared to what you usually endure in attending your usual bourgeois beaches. You choose a spot away from the crowd of blankets, each with a radio tuned to a different latin station. You leave enough space so that your friends can join you later.
Within a half hour your friend arrives with his lady-friend as well. Within 45 minutes you are no longer at a distance from the masses, but instead are part of the mass. To your front, a Russian couple, apparently very much in love. To your right, two gays (because you are apparently a magnet), and a quiet older latin couple. To your other right, a grouping of eight: one older man with radio surrounded by 4 children dancing, three others listening to other music via headphones. Behind you a woman with her child with an amazingly loud radio playing a different station to the man to your side whose music you have decided, must be superior to the radio station you are now yelling over. You consider getting up to turn the offending radio off as madre and hija have left it blaring and are now in the water. And then she arrives.
La Fabulosa struts through the crowd like a pint-size Iman, arriving at a spot just large enough for her to spread her yellow king-size sheet with a navy towel perfectly centered. From the size of the sheet, you anticipate that others will be joining her, yet they don't. The sheet is a frame for this piece of urban art in a emerald bikini. For the most part, she is not there to fool around or trifle with the riff-raff (which includes you and your mutually gawky friend). She is there to rub in the baby oil to her deep blackened tan, luxuriating in a supine, yet alert position. Her only real activity of the day is the smoking of Newport 100's and the answering of her pink RAZR phone, with her elbow held at a dramatic perpendicular angle to her phone. She is simple, yet striking, drawing in the attention of everyone around her in the precision of her movements. She is La Fabulosa.
On the train ride home, she is the main topic of conversation and you create a backstory for her. At P.S.1 you don't talk about the music, you and your friend tell more friends of her. You've agreed that she is in her early to mid 30's. Her three children are not allowed to come with her to the beach as they clash with her outfit. The oldest, eleven, has to act as a second mother for her two younger siblings, the eight year old sister, and the someday-gay three year old brother. The pink RAZR phone was a gift, and she doesn't talk to him anymore. The calls were from friends asking where she was, to which she answered, "the Hamptons". (One call from her sister with the same query was answered, "in the park with the kids".) She has cobbled together an existence that keeps a shiny veneer, and always will. She is La Fabulosa and you had better recognize.
