Laguna Beach nutjobs

The nutjobs of Laguna Beach are the most disorienting yet charming surprise in this town. These are people who pop up around its corners dressed in bizarre costumes, toting dogs, umbrellas, large wacky purses or similar stage-show props. This has nothing to do with gender either. In our first week of our residence, Ive seen about four honest-to-god nutjobs. The first was around his late fifties to early sixties. He was tall, slim and surly, and had--that day--bleached-blond hair with multi-colored feathers in it. He wore short shorts and something sparkly to complete the look, and walked a small hot-dog dog wearing multiple bejeweled collars in pink and ruby. This was only the hardware store in the day, so I look forward to catching him in evening attire.
Nutjob number 2 was a lady around 60 (see a theme emerging here?) outside the Whole Foods store downtown. She wore a panties-high WIDE flounced miniskirt, bare legs with cowboy boots, a jeweled cummerbund around her waist, long, twisted blonde locks to her mid-back, and some kind of accoutrement on her head...the nutjob piece de resistance is always to be found on the head. Tony and I were both dumbstruck by this vision as she sashayed ahead of us, until he broke the reverent silence with, "That is awesome! Thank God!"
Yesterday was a big nut-job day, a Sunday rich with fine weather and nutjob-enticing tourists for the early pre-spring tourist season. First sighting? As we stood on front the patio of the Unitarian church, chatting after services had ended, a woman came whizzing up on roller skates, like a drug-fuled version of a witch from the Wizard of Oz. She wore fur buskins wrapped around her legs, a very short skirt as well, long hair, was around 60, and displayed multiple garments on her relatively fit body (another nutjob commonality). Her strange tall hat flaunted a "Dr. Dope" button and she carried a parasol. She was blathering and gibbering at top speed next to the doughnuts, and I worried that she was a late-coming congregation member. But she didn't enter, and she seems to have her own theology going on. You could feel the white-hot smoke and sparks shooting from her brain, her smiling and contorted face the portal to an energy as palpable as an odor or loud as an electic guitar. Someone gave birth to her, but she is a creation only of herself, a collision of femininity and chemicals and toxins and wild color found in this particular pocket of ocean called Laguna Beach. To top off our Sunday, there was one milder sighting downtown. Outside the gelato store, there were two middle-aged males who seemed to be friends, probably part of a "Puppy and Papa" playgroup, both respectably dressed, with their tiny dogs in baby strollers by the gelato store. One was acting the part of Daddy by telling his doggie the gelato was "All gone," making big sad eyes and flopping his hand-paws sadly at the dog as it begged upright in the stroller. Lat, I saw a young blonde woman with enormous cannon-ball-sized breast implants, but how boring she was in her tight jeans and black spandex tube top next to the old attention-seeking pros! Thanks to our nutjobs, a walk downtown is a potential rabbit hole of pleasure, but with a painful frisson of cognitive dissonance, as I wonder how they live like this. But whatever worries THEY had are dead and buried, and they live the way they want to. Now THAT is awesome.