Paradise Preoccupied

A little slice of island life you don’t see unless you live on one …

There’s an interesting sort of person one encounters when one moves from the real world to a small tropical island, the sort I call: ‘the re-inventor’.

Like an cartoon I recall from a 1964-ish copy of Playboy that made its way around Longfellow Junior High featuring an obvious Tart looking more than a little ‘rode hard and put away wet’ explaining to a girlfriend, “It’s okay. I’ll just move to a new town and start all over as a virgin …”, some people actually figure that an entry visa to paradise entitles them to create an entirely new life story for themselves, then pass it around like a tray full of canapes at a beach-side cocktail party.

Sure, this is common enough, and relatively harmless, on holiday. I recall a friend in California some years ago who bought herself a Club Med vacation in Mexico thinking that she’d meet some ‘nice men’, only to find that every single (and the single bit is iffy) one of them was a rich doctor with a Porsche parked in the garage of their swinging, pricey condo back home.

Yeah. Right.

All part of the fun and fantasy of holidays, perhaps, but it’s damned hard to keep up the game of “Let’s pretend” when it must go on past the usual yearly break. That takes some very good self-convincing … or sociopathic tendencies.

We’ve had a re-inventor here lately, and being way out of this loopy woman’s loop, I’m slightly amused. Others are less so, as she’s created rifts between friends and thrown around some mighty accusations designed to cast herself in some light no one quite understands the point of.

From stem to stern, she’s as phony as they come. Heck! She’s even made up a new name for herself … along with a load of BS about being dubbed the four-syllable, pseudo-exotic tongue-twister she prefers over her dirt-common real name by an African king who fell in love with her as she taught him to Tango.

Yeah, she’s an Argentine tango dancer.

OR a German psychotherapist with a ‘salon’ full of analysts running itself back in Berlin, making a fortune for her as she crashes out in people’s guest rooms after claiming a need for company or protection, or offering to put the function back in dysfunctional families for the price of bed and breakfast. (This apparently involves having sex with most family members, of course.)

Her story seemed to change with her audience … always a fatal error for re-inventors in small countries, as the rest of us love to compare notes — there’s not a lot else to do, you see — and inconsistencies glare very quickly.

Memories are long, as well, and apparently this is a return try for this fake tango shrink, so just before getting the hell out of Dodge last week her past was beginning to repeat on her.

She wasn’t exactly run out of town on a rail, but it’s assumed that she was feeling the tide turn. That can cause perilously shifting sands on a small island.