Somewhat Saved by Pat G'Orge-Walker

celebrity impersonators. The camera crew had followed them from the courthouse, hoping for an interview with the two feisty out-of-towners who had thrown the airport into a frenzy. But the crowd in front of the Luxor proclaimed them otherwise, and many wannabe paparazzi took pictures that would later give undeserved, negative attention to Irma P. Hall and Mother Love.
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    A young woman watched all the hoopla going on with the old women and the camera crew. Their appearance seemed to stir things up a bit, as if the Luxor, or the Vegas Strip, needed it.
    During the past eighteen months, thirty-year-old Zipporah Moses had lived inside several crowded homeless shelters. On this particular day she’d come onto the strip to get away from all the doom and gloom a shelter often provided. She lived several miles away from the Luxor where some of the neighborhoods weren’t quite as affluent.
    She’d sometimes spend time reclaiming her sanity inside air-conditioned Las Vegas movie theaters. During moments of fantasy she’d honed from years of foster-home-to-foster-home living and trying to survive, she’d seen movies both good and bad. Although she had not recognized either of the elderly women, she certainly knew they were not Irma P. Hall or Mother Love.
    Zipporah felt a sharp push and spun around. She was small boned and stood only five-foot-six. It would take no effort to shove her from her spot. Life did it constantly. No one in the crowd gave her a sign of culpability. With no one to lash out at, she turned back to refocus on the two old women.
    Zipporah shook her head in disbelief at the crowd snapping pictures and gabbing about things they knew nothing about. This should be for me. They should take my picture, she thought.
    For a moment, she indulged in her lifelong dream of having that kind of success, a dream that served as her respite from life. The shelter she’d found in fantasizing often proved to be her saving grace. Though fame and happiness were constantly out of reach for her, she believed only that kind of recognition and that kind of money would deliver her out of the loneliness and homeless shelters. In her fantasy, she would command these adoring and now misguided people from a stage such as New York City’s Radio City Music Hall or perhaps even the Los Angeles Universal Amphitheater.
    Above the din surrounding the old women’s appearance, she imagined how it would be.
    Now, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and show some love for the incomparable voice of a young lady who the Queen of Soul, Miss Aretha Franklin, has dubbed, “my rightful successor.” Stand on your feet for Lady Z . . . Zipporah Mosessssssssss. The crowd would chant her name as she took the stage. She’d wear a sky blue dress on her shapely, size four frame. That color always came alive against her mocha-colored skin. Her long, shoulder-length, ash brown hair would fan her heart-shaped face and accentuate her lively hazel eyes....
    â€œAre you okay?” Zipporah heard someone ask. She turned to see a young security guard about her age ogling her. When she didn’t respond, he seemed to look past her in a dismissive way as though his lot in life were better than hers. “You’ll have to move along. You can’t just stand here. Either you’re going in or not.”
    She tried to rally by returning to her daydream against the backdrop of the continued noise, pretending he’d not interrupted. She’d hoped to retain a small piece of her daydream. However, she couldn’t dismiss the security guard’s nonchalant demeanor. It had quickly brought down the curtains on her dream without effort. “Excuse me.” She’d said it politely, trying to offer him another way to express his wishes for her to move on.
    He caught the attitude, so he used his baton to indicate what he wanted her to do while adding, this time politely, “I’m sorry but you