Act Four to A Complex Apology:  The Bad News is Overwhelming

SCENE ONE:    So now you know how utopian and idyllic things were on East Como Boulevard in the early days of the Summer of 1997 when the Bad News hit like a thunderbolt and spread like wild fire:  “Did you hear Joy was arrested this morning!?”

Everybody knows the rest of the story because it made all the papers and was a lead story on the national news for the next year, but actually, come to think of it, nobody knows the full story.  Of course the first thing most of us thought about was Fred and the girls.  They were all right – or rather as all right as you can be under those circumstances, Fred assured us, saying he had tons of friends and family looking out for him and the girls, that he’d already talked to the girls about what all would be happening, that he had a good lawyer already retained, and that he was standing by Joy.  Later on in a private conversation he told me that before they decided to have kids, Joy told him there was something in her past that could come back to haunt her/them, but that he was better off not knowing anything more.  To which he said, I know the Joy I’m in love with and I’ll face whatever it is with you.

Fred’s state of mind helped all of us on the block to not question everything we’ve ever known about Joy.  From the news we learned that Federal Marshalls had taken her into custody on charges of having been part of a violent revolutionary gang involved with robberies, shootings, kidnapping and an attempted police bombing in the California area in the 70s.  Talk about totally unbelievable!  This certainly couldn’t be the Joy we know.  In the end it turned out it was and it wasn’t.

Tomorrow:  Scene Two