T A B L E_T A L K Have you visited China? Discuss travel and life in China in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Angela, the Upside-Down Girl By Emily Hiestand First encounters with Boston -- and with a stripper extraordinaire named Angela (08/27/98) My junior year abroad By Edith Pearlman A 60-year-old's adventures in a classroom called Jerusalem (08/26/98) My Hawaiian honeymoon By Cintra Wilson Of a 1,300-pound pop-ukulele star, teenage bikini queens and the best wave on earth (08/25/98) Sex, death and beauty in South America By Melanie Goldman Week Two of the Camel Trophy (08/24/98) Oh when the gays come dancing in By Rebecca Bryant The physical -- and emotional -- revelations of Amsterdam's Gay Games V (08/21/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		BURNING LOVE | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Some months later, Mary sends Patty an invitation to her annual barbecue. This year, she says, her impersonator contest will be a look-alike contest of Elvis as he would have been today if "he hadn't left the building." (No one really likes to refer to Elvis as dead, which is odd because the death seems key to the whole Elvis experience.) Neither Patty nor I can figure out how aging Elvis to 63 will change the demeanor of the impersonators we saw there last year, many of whom were passing middle age and didn't look in the best of health. As it turns out, we never find out, because when we arrive we see only three impersonators at the party, one of whom is Bud and one of whom is a woman. There are no reporters at the party this year and no television cameras. It's as if we have walked right back into the end of the party last year, except now it's this year and it's the beginning of the party. The sky is overcast again, it's threatening to rain and the mother is inside. Seats arrive in the backyard, hundreds of seats, but there aren't many people to sit in them. Larry Geller, Elvis' spiritual advisor and hairdresser, is in the backyard autographing books. One of the members of the "Memphis Mafia" (a group of men who used to hang with Elvis) is there with a gun strapped over his T-shirt. He introduces his very young Italian wife to Geller. She is a woman of considerable beauty and eyeliner. "That's his wife?" I say to a woman standing next to me when I overhear the introduction and I'm informed that they met via the Internet fan club. I go back to the living room where Patty is photographing the new wall that's wallpapered with a huge print of late Elvis. Bud tells us that there's only one of those prints in existence, only one made, and it's worth $43,000. This seems impossible to me. Who would make only one wallpaper? Only one print? But before I can question Bud about this, a short man with blond curly hair that, like mine, thrives a bit too much in the humidity, walks into the living room, sits down at the spinet piano and starts to pound out "Shake, Rattle and Roll" in what I think is a very good boogie. (I later find out this is Joey Welz, composer of "Rock Around the Clock," who was also the piano player for Bill Haley & the Comets.) With the piano player is a woman in a tight black lace shirt and tights who begins to shake, rattle and roll while the rest of us mandatorily become an audience. Personally, I am the type of person who doesn't know how to arrange her face when spontaneous entertainment erupts. The woman sitting on the couch across from me seems to be having the same problem -- she grabs the Bible on the coffee table in front of her and starts to page through it. The woman in tight lace grabs the young Italian woman who has also come into the room and subtly forces her to dance with her. Fortunately, the song ends before the rest of us share the same fate. Unfortunately, the woman in lace then starts into an Elvis impersonation that consists of many thank-you-very-much's, then follows her impersonation with a speech; she says she is an Elvis channeler. Elvis came to her in a dream and said she was his little sister and somewhere along the way she found out she really was a 12th cousin of Elvis and now Elvis guides her. The woman with the Bible in her hand takes offense at this, and says are you saying that the spirit of Elvis guides you, because only the Holy Spirit can guide you -- and this sparks a debate that I don't even want to attempt to replicate. Patty and I meet Pam Woods for coffee after the Bridgewaters'. Pam has been attending both academic conferences in town this week: Vernon Chadwick's, titled "The Dysfunctional Family & Elvis," and the Memphis University Conference, where Greil Marcus, author of "Dead Elvis," is keynote speaker with an address on "Elvis, Warhol, & Clinton." Pam liked the Marcus address, but is mad that the Dysfunctional Family conference included a panel on bipolarity but not on addiction. Pam is a psychiatric nurse and intensive fan who has several theories about Elvis and addicts, Elvis and recovering addicts and people addicted to Elvis. She thinks about this pretty much all of the time as far as I can tell. Pam carries a portable Elvis shrine around with her and is part of a small cloister of women who, each sunrise, when they are in Memphis, visit the meditation garden where Elvis is buried, but Pam is one of the few hard-core fans I meet who crosses over into the academic arena. Patty and I like her. Somehow it's refreshing to meet someone who can speak of theory without irony. "What'd you think of the Bridgewaters?" we ask her, as she had arrived at the barbecue just as we were leaving. "I just went and stood on the ladder and looked over the fence," she says. "I stayed there for about 15 minutes. I think someone should write a book on looking over the fence. Just interview people about what they think about when they look over the fence." "What do you think about?" I ask her. "I really like looking at the barn," she says. "What barn? I didn't see a barn." "Did you climb up the ladder?" "Last year. I took notes. How could I have missed a whole barn?" "There's a barn," Pam says. I make Patty drive back to the block behind Graceland to the house of another woman, who, like the Bridgewaters, moved to Memphis specifically to live near Elvis. We are to photograph a sliding glass door that permanently fogged up years ago, apparently with the image of Elvis. I don't know what substance is covering the door, but it's icky and I see no image whatsoever, but when we finally get out back, sure enough there is a barn, a big barn. You can't see it from the grounds of Graceland during the summer on the official Graceland tour because of the trees. It's only visible from the yards of those whose lives back up against Graceland. SALON | Aug. 28, 1998 Some of the names in this article have been changed. Gale Walden is the author of a collection of poetry, "Same Blue Chevy." She teaches at the University of Illinois.