Dedication and Concept

Call me an unsentimental bastard, but I have a feeling that dedicating an event to a friend who died young is really damn boring.

I mean, no offense intended, but what are you, the reader, supposed to get out of it? You didn't know her. At worst, you'd skim over the page, and nod, and go on--that's what I'd do, personally--and at best, you might feel a bit sad on her behalf. And Christ, Becki would have hated either of those things.

Likewise, I'm not going to tell you how she was "vital, and full of life"--she was, but she'd certainly have said, "Jeff, everyone's dear departed Great Aunt Tillie was `vital and full of life'. Why don't you say I was `morbid and randomly prone to cutting bits off of people with sharp left-handed scissors'? It would be infinitely preferable."

I'll just say this: Rebecca Jackson was a woman who pulled off the unusual with the sort of grace and style that I will never on my best day begin to match. When she did something strange, she did it to the hilt, with a craftsmanship I can only envy.

She was dying around the time of the First Overnight, though she didn't let on. She couldn't make it - but she sent me a hundred-dollar check out of the blue, just to support us. I haven't forgotten that.

I can't say exactly what Becki would have wanted in an event like this one. But I've dedicated the Final Overnight to trying to create the biggested, strangest, most beautiful, most disquieting, most ecstatic, most interesting, least-boring fucking event I've ever put on.

I think she'd have liked that.

-JM, 10/2/04

Oh, and, though it's not perfectly remembered, here's a piece of Becki that I think you might enjoy - it's one of her poems, as best my memory can recall:

You naughty boy, you must be spanked
And thrown in a dungeon dark and dank
While chains around your ankles clank
And kept there 'til you're lean and lank...
...why are you smiling?