This story is so good it should be a movie

When she saw my business card—which said I worked for a software company—the young salesgirl, a tall, thin, washed-out blonde, told me that she needed some help with a problem, which was that a few years ago she had written on an Amiga computer the story of her experiences in Hollywood

(as a young actress trying to get a break, she had been offered the lead role in a film over several competitors, many more gorgeous and with bigger boobs, she told me, the story spilling out of her just as the tears spilled out of her pale blue eyes, but she had arrived on location for the first day of shooting to find that the set was closed, that the male star was complaining to the director that it wouldn’t work because she wasn’t responsive enough to him, and so on until she finally caught on to the fact that they were actually making a porn move, which required an innocent and frightened female victim—her—so she escaped by crashing her car through the gates, scared for her life, just like in a movie chase scene and ended up, totally traumatized, living on the beach on Malibu)

and now she wanted to rewrite the story—Gloria Steinham was interested and Hollywood, too, believe it or not—but, the Amiga being long gone, she could not figure out how to transfer the data on the Amiga disk onto her boyfriend’s Macintosh and of course she could not afford to buy another computer, so I looked actually into the problem for her, discovering quickly that without another Amiga there was no hope of recovering the data, and then, after telling the salesgirl the bad news, the years passed, and people probably don’t even know anymore what an Amiga is, but I never forgot her tale of how she had failed to make it in Hollywood and instead ended up working in a clothing store in my city, so I’m finally giving in to temptation and stealing her story

(the salesgirl had told me her story standing next to the cash register weeping, so it is now one of the weird experiences in my own life, isn’t it?).

by Nina Zolotov

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