This Place in Telluride is 25 Million Shades of Bland
No matter how hard they try, some places just don't get it.
Jenny Stone was brought on as a temp at the PR firm I worked for in San Francisco.
It was my first job, and I was the sole occupant of the lowest rung till she arrived. Since temp meant disposable, the rank and file treated her with an air of disregard, not meanness or rudeness, but just—subhuman status—that wasn’t applied to me. I felt bad because of it; because I was still new enough to this kind of animal kingdom that I could still see it.
Jenny stood out. I didn’t know what it was at the time, and I still can’t really describe it much better now, but she had a capital “I” It. She operated on a slightly different frequency than everyone else, and she knew it.
The thing with those people, and I’ve encountered a handful through the years, is they’ll often go on to surprise you regardless of how they start out. Some have gone on to write books, or movies, or songs, or plays. Others have started businesses, or built little empires, or opened bars on both coasts. They moved through the muck and the nos to become hoteliers, publishers, noteworthy designers—the lot of whom you’d love to build a dinner party around if those still existed.
And others just slip in tho the ether, into the back of the mind. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it. I think some folks just find the right group or one single individual at the right time who believes in them. They get lucky when others do not—or maybe nepotism, and that injection of capitalist insulin is all it takes. I don’t know. Like I said, I haven’t fully cracked the code.
When you’re around them, though, these rare birds, everything switches up a little—like the clearer lens on the phoropter machine at the eye doctor.
Appetites get bigger, facts are learned, and overall the insignificance that fills the days seems to hold more meaning.
My time in that moment was spent literally cutting and pasting newspaper clippings, sorting the mail, getting lunch, printing out labels, filing, faxing (oh the fax, and your curlicue fax paper I do miss thee!) and trying to translate the big boss’s handwriting and typing whatever notes from his discards were deemed important onto little notecards.
Jenny mostly worked the front desk. I didn’t really get it till much later that she was brought on to be the first person people saw because of me and my floppy hair and sort of faraway gaze—the kind that doesn’t get me past many first interviews today—just wasn’t cutting it up front. A temp hired to.make up for this admin’s deficiencies—what a country!
I think some of the other older guys in the office were doing their best to take a crack at the temp. I watched them up there leaning over her workspace in their pleated pants and dumb loud-print ties. But in the early days of instant intraoffice messaging Jenny gave me the blow by blow of their lines, and I laughed my head off, making notes in my own mental Rolodex what NOT to say to a female coworker (basically keep your mouth shut, bro.)
We talked all day; I don’t know what about. People. Music. Movies. Office equipment. Places we’d never visit together. Being trapped by choice. “We can walk out of here any time,” she’d write. “Or I can shut down the phones at five to five, set the coffee up for tomorrow, take out the mail and ...can you please come up and give me a hand?”
Jenny was kind of a mystery beyond the day-to-day ramble. She was from Atlanta and had a slight southern lilt, but only in certain phrases—one I later found out was more of a debutante affectation. She didn’t act like she came from money or privilege, but it came out in other ways, like in her dress or her scent or a sophisticated way of going about her business. Names were dropped, but casually. These were the folks she vacationed with or knew her family—father was a Coke distributor—or she dated. As dumb and fresh-born into the actual world as I was, I knew there was a backstory of this sojourn into the city.
I came to find out later it was a combination of things mostly it involved a shooting and the death of a fiancé. She only mentioned it once in passing over a rare lunch together (one of us always had to be at the front no matter what; we both knew each other’s bathroom schedules; married, but not.) She was in the mood to spill over her noodle bowl, and I was kind of zoning out just looking at her short dark hair cut at a severe angle curling up under her chin and her big right-hand side dimple that appeared and disappeared when she chewed.
One weekend she was house sitting in Oakland which was a VERY big deal to me. That’s where I was living in my parent’s unfinished laundry room, a concrete slab with four walls and an old twin mattress what didn’t have any sheets. It was a sort of depressing existence: laundry room, work, workout, burrito, bed. Rinse off. Repeat. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was getting up to do it all again to see her I’d have been completely rudderless. But this, this was an occasion, a night of nights—our origin story to unfold! I had it all planned out. I was going to go to the Fox downtown that Friday night to see a screening of North by Northwest anyway, and would she like to come along.
Jenny had an active social life in SF, one that seemed very far over my head, but in Oakland, she didn’t have a thing to do and couldn’t refuse. I picked her up in my Dad’s sedan and had Bauhaus blasting for some reason—I hadn’t been on a real date yet, clearly. I remember the song Dark Entries was on, and she shimmied in the front seat and sang along. I could've driven across the country and back just watching her and singing along and being so happy.
I kicked it off by driving fifteen miles to the closest In-n-Out; she wasn’t impressed, “This,” she said, “is your state’s best burger?” And we settled into our seats at the Fox ten minutes before showtime.
There was a trivia-raffle thing, which she won (she knew the real location of the famous Mount Rushmore house in the third act of the film), and we settled in to the movie. I did that thing where about a thousand times I felt that dumb, burning urge to reach over and brush her hand and tried to pay attention to Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint; this was a romance disguised as suspense after all. I felt every second of it.
And then I took her back to where she was house sitting. I think she leaned over the car's console and gave me a hug. I asked her if she wanted me to walk her to the door, and she politely said, “Not tonight, sweetie,” in a seductively sad way and got out.
And that was it.
One Monday not too long after, Jenny wasn’t at work. She’d gotten a permanent job somewhere else and let our boss know late on the previous Friday. That was all I was told. And that was it. It was the time before smartphones or texting or stalking someone’s social media or any of that. I figured I’d run into her in out and about in the city. San Francisco was small enough then where that happened, a lot. But I never saw her again. I wonder about the ghosts of the two people we were who spent that time together. I wonder if they ever made it past the In-n-Out. Probably not. Some things, some people, some would-be couples are better off with a story unfinished.
300 Royer Ln Telluride, CO 81435
The famous Vandamm house in North by Northwest was a soundstage in Culver City designed to look like a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed interior. Hitchcock and the studio didn’t want to pay the famous architect’s fee to use one of his actual structures, so the set designers took cues from Wright and designed a FLW facsimile set.
The exterior shots used paintings and other special effects to create the home put together by head production designer Robert Boyle and his team of William A. Horning, Merrill Pye, Henry Grace, and Frank McKelvey.
So old Jenny Stone, when she raised her hand in the third row and declared that the house in the climax of North by Northwest “didn’t exist” was right.
She won a t-shirt and a gift certificate.
I think about the old house in the context of what we know and what we think we know, about things, events, movies, people all the time, how facsimiles can feel real and real feels fake and how easily our eyes deceive us and all that.
But I also think that some people, some places, just are built differently and maybe to only serve as a temporary reminder that the best didn’t exist at all.
This home in Telluride seems just as ephemeral. A Frank Lloyd Wright tribute but with the more contemporary, spare, and bad-decision’y feel of modern Vegas conference space.
Built into a hillside where it doesn’t belong at a completely inconvenient location. It’s directly across from but a ten-mile drive away from the downtown or ski resort, so everything is a schlep from this place—reverse engineered to model only the most tepid business suite hotels or former dress shops repurposed as wellness mom yoga studios. Classy and classless at the same time.
It even comes (free!) with the pretense of a hipster Brooklyn-based designer’s quote: “Since being back from Telluride, I have been musing over the trip,” says the building’s designer Aybars Asci of the Efficiency Lab for Architecture, “both as a traveler and as an architect. It was a humbling experience. I cannot shake off the majestic red boulders from my system. The layers of the rock, the shelves, the projecting edges defying the gravity, are still resonating with me.”
Whatever. Like, I get it. It’s supposed to be one with and juxtaposed with nature. Like the Hitchcock/Frank Lloyd Wright simulacrum. It’s supposed to jut out from the land like a leading man’s jaw, be a highlighted passage in a precious and precarious setting—to draw the eye to it and the landscape around it. Is this example a masterpiece? No. Not really. It’s appropriately bland and uncaptivating to signal the Dark Ages we’re in. Innocuous to the point of loathsome. It doesn’t even need to be there, actually. The land was better off without it.
But that is the argument one can make for so many things and so many of us anyway. There’s only a handful of originals, and usually they’re gone from our lives before we even notice.