A Vasquez Rocks picnic turns weirdly odd

Aaron Slingfact and his significant other, Melba Trousdale, were happy enough with the day they had planned. Melba knew how to deliver on the fine details, gleaned from reading Martha Stewart, Miss Manners and Liane Roth's articles on style in the Valley Press.

The Miss Manners column informed her gamely that Aaron could, courteously, volunteer to schlep the heaviest of traditional woven wood picnic baskets if she spent hours filling it. A good modest vintage from the Donato wineries would breathe nicely. The cherries came from Leona Valley. The brie from the sale running in the Sunday inserts.

It was a late spring day that felt like summer, so when they set the checkered ground cloth down, they found a shaded spot beneath the jutting escarpment that made the rocks near Agua Dulce a haven for outlaws like Tiburcio Vasquez.

"Beautiful," Aaron said. "Beautiful place settings, in a beautiful setting."

Melba smiled. More of an elfin grin, really. But she was so glad to be outside the high school district office that she felt really, really happy. She knew also the setting was beautiful. "Wine, cheese, and thou, my boy," she said, holding up a wafer-thin cracker.

He raised a glass. It was composite from Pier One or Bed Bath, and Beyond, but it was the right shape for the grape, and the local vintage held wonderful color. "It's nice to be outside, out of the office, isn't it?" Aaron said.

"Heavens, yes," she said. "I've got benefits and a lot of holidays, but inking press releases can be the dark night of the soul."

"Tell me about it," he said. "Almost as glamorous as subbing for middle schoolers during a budget cutback."

"Well," she said, and kissed him, airily on the cheek, and took a sip. "Here's to us, Aaron. Here's to right now."

Then the giant lizard stomped around the corner.

Aaron shrieked. Melba sprang over the picnic basket to shield her man. Then she screamed too. 

"What is it?"

"Eek!" Aaron shouted by way of answer.

The thing was about six feet tall and breathing through its nostrils. It walked erect, but in ungainly fashion. It was a biped, but definitely of saurian line of evolution. The thing kept stomping right past them, and just then a guy in velour spandex pajamas flashed past.

The thing hissed. Its eyes glowed. It was talking through two rows of razor sharp teeth.

"Surrender now," the lizard snorted. "Be reasonable."

"It's a Gorn!" Aaron shouted. The thing that was talking through its teeth and nostrils had released Aaron's inner Trekkie.

  Sure, he wore faded jeans and shirts from L.L. Bean with epaulets on them. Hiking boots, yes. A pedometer, of course. But it wasn't like Aaron Slingfact couldn't "man up," and now he was raring. He grabbed Melba, and where she had once been protecting him, he now assumed his rightful role in the food chain.

"It's a Gorn!" he repeated, and Aaron's eyes were alight with imagined glory.

The giant lizard stomped off, and the next thing the couple heard was the grind of machinery, and in the fading pink light of coming dusk at Vasquez Rocks they stood in the blinding flash of a flood lamp, sweeping over them like a searchlight in a war movie, or "E.T. The Extraterrestrial" on the run with his little short legs.

"Cut! Cut! Cut!" shouted the guy descending on a god-like chair from the crane.

"We've got civilians back here in the bulrushes, and they've messed up the shot."

Melba and Aaron blinked, temporarily blinded.

"Who let you geeks into the park?" the guy in the chair demanded. He wore a baseball cap with "Star Voyager" emblazoned in silvery glitter and a wispy beard that said he might be 25 years old.

"We've been here all day," Melba said. "Nobody stopped us."

"Well, honey, you just stopped us. You just lit 50 grand on fire."

The thing in the chair was an extraterrestrial all right, whelped right out, no doubt, from the USC film school.

The thing in the scaly suit lifted off the lizard head, and it was a bit of a washed-out blonde. Must have been using a voice box synthesizer.

"Can we take 10?" the lizard girl asked.

"I thought you were a Gorn," Aaron said, mournfully.

"Get me a grip," the kid in the ball cap on the crane chair said. "Key grip! Now!"

The big fella with the big belly and a "Spock Lives!" T-shirt that didn't quite stop at his belly button lumbered up like George looking for Lenny to tell him about the rabbits again.

"Get 'em off my set. We've lost the light," director boy said.

George picked Aaron and Melba up like they were sock monkeys and he walked through the Martha Stewart picnic like it was so much of yesterday's newspaper. Melba was outraged.

"Ouch!" she said.

Aaron was still mourning that the big lizard was a girl. They got dumped unceremoniously in the back of the crafts service van and George drove away like a guy who had flunked his limo license.

"Ya shudnt' a been there," he said, rounding the corner.

"We had a perfect right to be there," Aaron said. "Who's that twerp think he is?

"The twerp just made a quarter of a bill for Touchlight Pictures with a movie about a robot giant shark that developed artificial intelligence and ate the Malibu beach colony. He's a golden boy wunderkind director. In our industry town, it's might that makes right."

Just then, the van turned up on two wheels and started tumbling down the arroyo. George was about as bright as one of Lenny's rabbits, and not half so good a driver. He was obedient to authority, but not bright.

The van went crashing through the sagebrush toward a blue, glowing light that illuminated the bottom of a small canyon. In the glow of the canyon, it really looked more like a blue lagoon. And the van kept pitching forward.

George bellowed "Ummmm ... umm. ... Ummm. ..."

"What the! ..." Melba shouted.

Aaron was back to "Eek!"

And then they all shouted things you can't print in a family newspaper, but the green-blue light of the arroyo was swallowing them up. The vortex of light shimmered and a sound like a thousand boom boxes going down East Palmdale Boulevard reverberated with an unearthly and unbearable frequency.

To be continued Sunday, Sept. 20.