Five tour dates in the life of a booth bitch

I should probably start this off by telling you all who I am. My name's Gwyn. I'm twenty-one. Catherine Cartwright-Jones aka the Reverend Bunny is my mother. If you tell me how much you admire my mother, I might hit you. I just finished spending three years as a stripper. This gives you amazing sales skills, patience with idiots and a black belt in the fine art of niggapleeze. If you don't know, don't ask.

My story pretty much begins this past June. I've gone to visit my mom, and we're talking in the office. She tells me she's gotten offered a contract to pick up five regional tour dates doing henna at Ozzfest. I tell her that's great. At some point in the conversation, it becomes apparent that she needs someone to sit in the front of the booth, be pretty and pleasant, answer the questions, and make people spend money so that all the henna artists need to do is sling henna. Mom tells me that my strip-club-cultivated sales skills, patience, and black belt are much needed. Never one to pass up a free concert, I say yes. Thus, I become the booth bitch.

July 26, 2001. Blossom Music Center, Cuyahoga-Falls-but-Everyone-Calls-it-Cleveland, OH.

This venue is local, and I've been here before. I'm reasonably functional, despite having rolled in to set up at seven-thirty this morning. We get the booth together with the help of my incessantly cheery husband, we eat breakfast, and we sit in the booth. I think nothing is going to happen. And then the gates open.

The local-band stage starts up first thing in the morning . . . very near our booth. I have to yell to be heard. The stampede of adolescent girls in the tiniest shirts and hugest pants humanly possible never stops coming. They are underdeveloped and skinny- the huge pants give them sort of a triangular appearance. You can't see their shoes and they look like hovercrafts when they walk.