At Least They're Committed

Oh, man! Laura Thorpe is dead! Evidently she choked on her vomit while having a seizure in her bed in 1996. She’s now the second of two eccentric people I reported on in Farmington who died not long after I moved. I didn’t know.

Thorpe was the woman who in 1992 sliced open her breasts with a disposable razor and attempted to remove her silicone implants in the bathroom of her home. It made national headlines. She told her story on Maury Povich (it fell to me to compare and contrast what she said on TV with the truth). Kathy Lee Gifford had sent her money to pay her heating bill and Thorpe used it to purchase Native American Kokopelli dolls instead. Eccentric.

She’s dead now and so is Terry Ford. He was a conspiracy theorist who would bring me literature to read and videos to watch about the government’s clandestine and subversive activities. I, of course, was the one person who would listen to him. He, it turns out, mysteriously fell several stories off a girder at a construction site in the middle of the night. Hmmmm . . .

I learned an important lesson from Ford and Thorpe: Just because what they’re saying doesn’t make sense to you, it makes sense to them and so don’t try to infuse reason. In their eyes, you’ll get it wrong.

Bill P., one of the other reporters, had previously written about Ford. Bill bristled at me one day after Ford had paid me a visit. “I tried to make him look less crazy and he said I misquoted him,” he gruffed. “You took what he said exactly and made him look like an ass, but he loves you.”

Yeah, I thought it was weird, too, but I think it was because what Ford said made sense to him even though it didn’t make sense to us.

Laura Thorpe, who actually had made arrangements through the VA to have her breast implants removed in a hospital but then decided she needed to do it herself, brought me folders of Polaroids of her breasts — including shots of the doctors removing the implants. Ick. She soon after became furious at me over a story I’d written: I’d only used her comments that made sense to me.

To ensure fairness, I went to her home for a follow-up interview. I checked out her cool Kokopelli dolls and used, verbatum, the points she was trying to make. I think the last quote I used was something like, “Well, I’m not in my right mind, you know. I have silicone on my brain.” . . . a quote most of us wouldn’t make or would dread seeing in print.

She loved it.