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mallorys_cameraThe big deal on NYC subways right now is ads that don’t mention the product they’re advertising.
What the hell is Makiage?
I’m one high maintenance B…
It could be makeup. It could be Ben Wa balls. It could be an app that reminds you when it’s time to pick up your drycleaning.
The only thing that’s clear about Makiage is that it’s something aimed at women.
The dude in the black shirt pictured here, who between 53rd and Court periodically sprang from his seat and crouched on all fours to perform pushups on the subway floor, was not at all interested in Makiage. He stopped doing pushups when we got to Manhattan.
There’s another product that dominates the vast underground grotto between the 42nd Street shuttle and all the other subway lines. Its ads were all about gorgeous and racially diverse individuals trying to look casual in various beautiful locales. Lots of children but no adults over 40.
I can’t even remember the name of the product this campaign was pitching.
But then, I’m 66. That ad campaign would probably be deemed a failure if I remembered the name of the product.
###
Also overheard on the subway:
Girl One: Do you do Father’s Day?
Girl Two: Not really. You know my mother used to watch Jeopardy twice every day. Once at three in the afternoon. She’d memorize all the answers. Then when my father got home from work, she’d switch to an affiliate station, and they’d watch together. And my father was always really impressed by her because she got all the answers right!
Girl One: It would be hard to celebrate someone that stupid.
Girl Two: Tell me about it.
###
I took my pesto ingredients and traveled into the city to hang out with (not her real name) Camille.
I decided V didn’t deserve my pesto because V showed up two hours late to a house-hunting assignation.
Meet me at 11am at De Laval Place, she’d messaged me.
So, at 11am, there I was at De Laval Place.
But no Val.
“The real estate agent called me up 10 minutes ago and canceled the viewing,” the woman who owned the house told me. “But why don’t you come in and take a look? Maybe you can tell her about it.”
She was an incredibly sweet-faced woman, and omygawd! That house! If I had $150,000 lying around, I would have bought it on the spot. A jewel of a domicile, lying back maybe 100 yards from the street with secret gardens and a vine-covered terrace and a greenhouse. Its interior was equally incredible. The owner is an artist and had decorated it amazingly. There was a bright blue colander instead of a conventional lampshade on one of the kitchen overheads! (I know that sounds weird but it was both whimsical and utilitarian.) She’d placed these glass shelves on her dining nook windows and put antique wine glasses on them, all different colors, so that in the morning, you could tell, her kitchen was filled with shafts of colors as the sun shone through glasses:
“Why are you moving?” I asked. “Don’t you know you’re my new best friend?”
“I know, right?” she laughed. “My kids are all on the west coast. And they’ve kept up the pressure. So, I guess it’s time for me to move to the west coast, too.”
###
V showed up a couple of hours later. She was barely apologetic.
The house was wrong for her since she has two about-to-become-teenager sons, and the house is tiny and jewel-like. But the faults she found with it were the wrong faults.
“I won’t be able to keep chickens here!”
“Well, Val,” I said, “You won’t be able to keep chickens anywhere within Poughkeepsie city limits. I believe there’s an ordinance against it. It’s okay in Hyde Park, though.”
V is one of those pals I’ve collected through… I guess you’d have to call it attrition. She’s someone I know from my circus days. There are people from my circus days I liked much, much better, but I am simply awful at staying in touch with people; I live in a kind of protracted present tense where past and future both are alternate realities tethered to the real world of here and now by the most insubstantial of valences. V puts her claws into people and never lets go because she’s never sure when she may be able to use them. So, I’ve stayed in touch with V. By default.
I like V okay, and I admire her resourcefulness. She’s also an immensely talented photographer. So, you know. Not all bad.
Still. I was not about to cook for her.
I took them instead to the Jamaican restaurant where my ESL student Imane used to waitress.
“Does Imane still work here?” I asked.
“Who?”
So Imane. Through the cracks. Hopefully, not into the sewer. Though I’m not optimistic about that.
I hadn’t seen V’s boys in some time. I’d known them well as babies; it was fun to see how they turned out. I thought they were behaving remarkably well considering how bored they must have been and wished I had adhered to my earlier plan, which was to bring them some comic books. (Whenever I meet up with pals and their kids, I always try to bring distractions for the kids. Grownups are so-o-o boring; I figure it’s the least I can do.)
But V was cutting them no slack at all. Dylan, the older and taller of the two, began drumming on the table with his knife and fork.
“I told you: Cut that shit out!” V barked. “You are getting on my nerves, and there will be consequences!”
Ah! So Dylan is the fuck-up in the family dynamic. See his skeptical right-looking, upwardly slanting glance away from the camera. NLP fanatics would say, Ly-ing! Nicolas beaming full-frontal is Mama’s little suck-up.
Over lunch, V caught me up on all the circus gossip and berated the boys’ father ten different ways while I studied her (new!) buzz haircut and wondered whether I was a baaaaaad person for speculating that she’d found a new gender preference. I mean, she could be getting chemotherapy, right? Or maybe she just likes the look.
“So, why did Juliet and Corey the World’s Best Tiger Trainer break up anyway?” I asked.
“Because Corey couldn’t keep it zipped!” V snapped. “Men and their fucking dicks. These two Australian contortionists joined Kelly Martin in Fort Smith. Twins! By Mountainburg, he was doing one of them. Or both of them. She walked in on him and a twin. Turned around, walked out of the room, packed up the kids and the dogs, and boom! She was back in Paris, Texas in 24 hours.”
“I can’t imagine anyone cheating on Juliet!” I said. “She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”
“Nice, too!” said V. “But crazy religious. Anyway, you probably heard: JDK bought Kelly Martin. So, it’s a piece of shit now.”
“No!!!!! Really? Is Fernando still working for him?”
“Fernando’s running the circus. But JDK isn’t paying him shit. Why did you ever work for him anyway?”
“Because I made sure he paid me a lot of money,” I said. “Are you still married to Fernando?”
“Yeah. That lying sack of shit.”
Dylan looked anxiously at his flatware.
###
In NYC, Camille and I spent the day at Rockaway Beach. A new ferry! It left from the old Brooklyn Army Terminal! It was fab!
So great to lie on a sandy beach and bake. So European! They don’t bake on California beaches. If you go to a beach in California, it’s generally with a specific purpose in mind: You’re going to surf, or dive for abalone, or collect shells, or if you are going to sunbathe, it’s a nude beach, and you’re showing off the results of three weeks on the Paleo diet.
I lay on the beach and emptied my mind of all thought.
I went swimming! For like five minutes, but still! The Atlantic Ocean experience! I got my hair wet.
For the rest of the time, I read and eavesdropped on various slice-o’-life groupings around us. Four Caucasian princesses who had obviously patterned their lives after the protagonists of Girls. A sextet of pallid, pot-bellied, French-speaking guys and their hot bikini-clad girlfriends. An older man and two younger men.
(“Father and sons?” I asked Camille. “Or aging homosexual and two young lovers?”
“Father and son,” Camille said. “And friend of son.”)
“The reason I started smoking dope is because I’m individual and different,” one of the young men was saying.
He launched into a long explanation of the many manifestations of his individuality and differences, but David Sedaris was more interesting. That’s one of the great things about Camille: She reads as much as I do, so we spend a great deal of time when we’re together reading rather than worrying about trying to make relevant conversation.
The young man did eventually hit the water. I watched him watching the shore; he wanted to make certain his companions were looking at him. He reminded me so much of RTT!
When we got hungry enough, we braved the line at the one food place on Rockaway Beach, an awesome Venezuelan restaurant, and then ferried back.
And I got to use Camille’s beauty products!
So, you know.
Just the best weekend.
What the hell is Makiage?
I’m one high maintenance B…
It could be makeup. It could be Ben Wa balls. It could be an app that reminds you when it’s time to pick up your drycleaning.
The only thing that’s clear about Makiage is that it’s something aimed at women.
The dude in the black shirt pictured here, who between 53rd and Court periodically sprang from his seat and crouched on all fours to perform pushups on the subway floor, was not at all interested in Makiage. He stopped doing pushups when we got to Manhattan.
There’s another product that dominates the vast underground grotto between the 42nd Street shuttle and all the other subway lines. Its ads were all about gorgeous and racially diverse individuals trying to look casual in various beautiful locales. Lots of children but no adults over 40.
I can’t even remember the name of the product this campaign was pitching.
But then, I’m 66. That ad campaign would probably be deemed a failure if I remembered the name of the product.
###
Also overheard on the subway:
Girl One: Do you do Father’s Day?
Girl Two: Not really. You know my mother used to watch Jeopardy twice every day. Once at three in the afternoon. She’d memorize all the answers. Then when my father got home from work, she’d switch to an affiliate station, and they’d watch together. And my father was always really impressed by her because she got all the answers right!
Girl One: It would be hard to celebrate someone that stupid.
Girl Two: Tell me about it.
###
I took my pesto ingredients and traveled into the city to hang out with (not her real name) Camille.
I decided V didn’t deserve my pesto because V showed up two hours late to a house-hunting assignation.
Meet me at 11am at De Laval Place, she’d messaged me.
So, at 11am, there I was at De Laval Place.
But no Val.
“The real estate agent called me up 10 minutes ago and canceled the viewing,” the woman who owned the house told me. “But why don’t you come in and take a look? Maybe you can tell her about it.”
She was an incredibly sweet-faced woman, and omygawd! That house! If I had $150,000 lying around, I would have bought it on the spot. A jewel of a domicile, lying back maybe 100 yards from the street with secret gardens and a vine-covered terrace and a greenhouse. Its interior was equally incredible. The owner is an artist and had decorated it amazingly. There was a bright blue colander instead of a conventional lampshade on one of the kitchen overheads! (I know that sounds weird but it was both whimsical and utilitarian.) She’d placed these glass shelves on her dining nook windows and put antique wine glasses on them, all different colors, so that in the morning, you could tell, her kitchen was filled with shafts of colors as the sun shone through glasses:
“Why are you moving?” I asked. “Don’t you know you’re my new best friend?”
“I know, right?” she laughed. “My kids are all on the west coast. And they’ve kept up the pressure. So, I guess it’s time for me to move to the west coast, too.”
###
V showed up a couple of hours later. She was barely apologetic.
The house was wrong for her since she has two about-to-become-teenager sons, and the house is tiny and jewel-like. But the faults she found with it were the wrong faults.
“I won’t be able to keep chickens here!”
“Well, Val,” I said, “You won’t be able to keep chickens anywhere within Poughkeepsie city limits. I believe there’s an ordinance against it. It’s okay in Hyde Park, though.”
V is one of those pals I’ve collected through… I guess you’d have to call it attrition. She’s someone I know from my circus days. There are people from my circus days I liked much, much better, but I am simply awful at staying in touch with people; I live in a kind of protracted present tense where past and future both are alternate realities tethered to the real world of here and now by the most insubstantial of valences. V puts her claws into people and never lets go because she’s never sure when she may be able to use them. So, I’ve stayed in touch with V. By default.
I like V okay, and I admire her resourcefulness. She’s also an immensely talented photographer. So, you know. Not all bad.
Still. I was not about to cook for her.
I took them instead to the Jamaican restaurant where my ESL student Imane used to waitress.
“Does Imane still work here?” I asked.
“Who?”
So Imane. Through the cracks. Hopefully, not into the sewer. Though I’m not optimistic about that.
I hadn’t seen V’s boys in some time. I’d known them well as babies; it was fun to see how they turned out. I thought they were behaving remarkably well considering how bored they must have been and wished I had adhered to my earlier plan, which was to bring them some comic books. (Whenever I meet up with pals and their kids, I always try to bring distractions for the kids. Grownups are so-o-o boring; I figure it’s the least I can do.)
But V was cutting them no slack at all. Dylan, the older and taller of the two, began drumming on the table with his knife and fork.
“I told you: Cut that shit out!” V barked. “You are getting on my nerves, and there will be consequences!”
Ah! So Dylan is the fuck-up in the family dynamic. See his skeptical right-looking, upwardly slanting glance away from the camera. NLP fanatics would say, Ly-ing! Nicolas beaming full-frontal is Mama’s little suck-up.
Over lunch, V caught me up on all the circus gossip and berated the boys’ father ten different ways while I studied her (new!) buzz haircut and wondered whether I was a baaaaaad person for speculating that she’d found a new gender preference. I mean, she could be getting chemotherapy, right? Or maybe she just likes the look.
“So, why did Juliet and Corey the World’s Best Tiger Trainer break up anyway?” I asked.
“Because Corey couldn’t keep it zipped!” V snapped. “Men and their fucking dicks. These two Australian contortionists joined Kelly Martin in Fort Smith. Twins! By Mountainburg, he was doing one of them. Or both of them. She walked in on him and a twin. Turned around, walked out of the room, packed up the kids and the dogs, and boom! She was back in Paris, Texas in 24 hours.”
“I can’t imagine anyone cheating on Juliet!” I said. “She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”
“Nice, too!” said V. “But crazy religious. Anyway, you probably heard: JDK bought Kelly Martin. So, it’s a piece of shit now.”
“No!!!!! Really? Is Fernando still working for him?”
“Fernando’s running the circus. But JDK isn’t paying him shit. Why did you ever work for him anyway?”
“Because I made sure he paid me a lot of money,” I said. “Are you still married to Fernando?”
“Yeah. That lying sack of shit.”
Dylan looked anxiously at his flatware.
###
In NYC, Camille and I spent the day at Rockaway Beach. A new ferry! It left from the old Brooklyn Army Terminal! It was fab!
So great to lie on a sandy beach and bake. So European! They don’t bake on California beaches. If you go to a beach in California, it’s generally with a specific purpose in mind: You’re going to surf, or dive for abalone, or collect shells, or if you are going to sunbathe, it’s a nude beach, and you’re showing off the results of three weeks on the Paleo diet.
I lay on the beach and emptied my mind of all thought.
I went swimming! For like five minutes, but still! The Atlantic Ocean experience! I got my hair wet.
For the rest of the time, I read and eavesdropped on various slice-o’-life groupings around us. Four Caucasian princesses who had obviously patterned their lives after the protagonists of Girls. A sextet of pallid, pot-bellied, French-speaking guys and their hot bikini-clad girlfriends. An older man and two younger men.
(“Father and sons?” I asked Camille. “Or aging homosexual and two young lovers?”
“Father and son,” Camille said. “And friend of son.”)
“The reason I started smoking dope is because I’m individual and different,” one of the young men was saying.
He launched into a long explanation of the many manifestations of his individuality and differences, but David Sedaris was more interesting. That’s one of the great things about Camille: She reads as much as I do, so we spend a great deal of time when we’re together reading rather than worrying about trying to make relevant conversation.
The young man did eventually hit the water. I watched him watching the shore; he wanted to make certain his companions were looking at him. He reminded me so much of RTT!
When we got hungry enough, we braved the line at the one food place on Rockaway Beach, an awesome Venezuelan restaurant, and then ferried back.
And I got to use Camille’s beauty products!
So, you know.
Just the best weekend.
