Soundbytes

Soho. In a trendy boutique desperately seeking the Yeti of the winter-fashion season--the top that is both ravishingly sexy but also long enough to cover the long underwear I'm wearing underneath my low-rise jeans.

She says: "Honey, God, I love, love, LOVE this skirt."

He offers hopefully: "Yeah, it'd look great with some--um--really high boots."

She says: "Right?"

As they leave she adds: "And we'll totally have to think about that cute sweater from before."

I try to imagine what it would be like to be part of a couple who thinks about sweaters.

***

Also Soho.
A perfectly lovely normal-sized girl emerges from a dressing room wearing a short skirt and top: "What d'ya think?"

Her boyfriend: "I don't know. It doesn't look like that on the mannequin."

The size 0 mannequin. With HUGE breasts, a metal rod up its ass, and no head.

***

My acting class.

An Actor: "Yeah, I rocked my audition this week. It was great. I totally brought it. I mean, I could see the energy. And I was open and in the moment and feeling it. My mantra and the character's mantra just melded into this one single mantra, which was just, "It's my turn." It's my fucking turn. And after that it was just about The Work. I mean that's what it's about for me. The Work."

An Actress: "Yeah. Totally. The Work was great tonight."

Another Actress: "What got me into The Work tonight--and it may sound silly?--but it was just, like, that I started to think of all of the emotions in the scene as colors? And, like, anger was purple? And love was, like, peach? And every time I felt my energy closing, I was like, Amber, go toward the peach. I just said that over and over. Like, Amber, go toward the peach."

Another Actor: "The Work brought up a lot for me today. And, frankly, I'm still caught up in our Christmas Message from last month. About affirming the Self and Positivity. There are really some things I'm looking at from my childhood, and I think The Work's going to really grow because of it."

***

Boy at bar trying to pick me up and doing a good job of it until: "So this girl and I just buy a bag of blow and go back to my place. And obviously I can't get hard when I'm that fucked up, so we just take off all of our clothes and keep snorting the shit. And then she finds this lipstick that she doesn't like in her purse, and we just start going crazy and writing all over each other with it. And we're naked and the shit was like everywhere. We showered it off later and when I woke up the next day my bathroom was just covered in red shit. I mean it looked like someone had been murdered in there or something."


(Female readers, of course, will find this story doubly disturbing because they will realize that no one keeps a lipstick they don't like in their purse. Lipsticks that one doesn't like are kept in plastic containers under the bathroom sink, or in the upstairs bathroom of your parent's house. Meaning that this particular cracked-out young woman spent the night writing on a naked stranger with what was undoubtedly her favorite lipstick. So sad.)

***

And finally, a group of teenage tourists that I passed on my way to the N/R Downtown train at 23rd Street.

Boy Tourist in hushed whisper: "Guys, Look! Cameron Diaz!"

I would like to buy this boy an airplane.