Michelle needs a break. A computer programmer who's fed up by what she
sees as the greed and idiocy of the World Wide Web (she calls it "the
new colonialism" and the "World Wide Dread"), Michelle requests and is
granted a month-long sabbatical from her job. Still recovering from a
break-up with her ex-girlfriend which happened after the girlfriend,
Sophia, cheated on Michelle, Michelle uses her month off to "come up
with a new idea," something she feels is groundbreaking and of actual
benefit to more than one person. Having lost a fair amount of faith in
the power of the mind and the strength of the heart, both her hatred
of technology and her cynicism are called into question when she meets
someone online and eventually falls in love again. Enter
Rocky. Rocky met Michelle a couple of years back while Rocky
panhandled the sidewalks of San Francisco. Rocky decides that, after
living with her sister in Portland and enduring the confines of a
nightly curfew, it's time to return to SF, particularly to live with
Michelle. Rocky's witticisms, one-liners, and idiosyncrasies (such as
her belief in the inherent fascism of crossword puzzles, her
observation that there's "nothing like a good delousing," and her
practice of wearing headphones with no music so that people won't
approach her), mask a deeper fear of intimacy. Enter yet
another character, April, Michelle's roommate (technically; she
essentially lives with her girlfriend, Patty). A third-grade teacher
by day and black-clad dyke by afternoon, April's dismay of being gay
and coming out lead to a double life, made more chaotic by the
cheerful advances of Trudy, her fellow teacher. Along with various
strange obsessions, as well as a penchant for drinking and bodily
display, April's station as a "victim of gayness" is mostly
self-inflicted: the only person in her life who thinks it's weird that
April is gay is April. After Rocky comes to stay with
Michelle and April breaks up with her girlfriend, the three women end
up living together in a hodge-podge of motherliness, angst, and bad
personal hygiene. After an unexpected letter, they must each decide
whether or not they'd "rather be...gone."
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