Jesshelga

The following are a sampling of the daily conversations I have with the group of 80-year-old men who smoke cigarettes and drink coffee every morning on the corner of my block. It took me two years and the acquisition of a dog to infiltrate their clique.

Ed: Why does your face look like that?
Me: What?
Ed: You look very tired.
Me: Well, I am tired I guess. I also don’t have on any makeup yet.
Ed: You should put some on before you go to work.
Me: Okay. (And I did.)

Tom: Do you have one of those phones that can take pictures?
Me: Yes!
Tom: Take our picture. (Gestures to himself and another Greek gentleman who only hangs out occasionally.)
Me: Okay!  (I take the photo.)
Tom: Now, can you send that to my computer?
Me: Sure.
Tom: From your phone?
Me: Yes. Do you know your e-mail address?
Tom: I don’t know what it is but I will get it from my son.
(Two months pass. I finally run into Tom on the street.)
Me: Hi, Tom!
Tom: I have something for you! (He pulls a wrinkled eighth of a page of notebook paper from a fanny pack. On it is a hotmail.com email address written out in all block, capital letters.) This is for the picture! Do you still have it to send to my computer?
Me: I do!
(One more month passes. I finally see Tom again.)
Tom: You!  (he gives me a giant hug.) I love my picture!
(I try not to sob from the cuteness.)

Ed: Why do you have on pants? It's going to be hot today.
Me: Well, they're not pants exactly. They're stockings. I guess I can take them off if it gets too warm.
Lou: ... will you need help with that?
Ed and Lou: (Wild cackles.)

Lou: I didn’t recognize you today!
Me: Really?
Lou: Well, you have glasses on.
Me: I do. I didn’t put in my contacts yet. But you didn’t recognize me by the dog?
Lou: I recognized the dog. I just thought someone other lady with glasses on was walking her.

Ed: Good mor-OH!
Me: What’s wrong?
Ed: Nothing’s wrong with me. Can’t say the same for you though. You don’t look good. You get enough sleep last night?

Ed: So ... the doctor tells me I have two choices for my follow up. Go down to Brooklyn or go to Maspeth. I tell him, I says, I’m gonna go to Maspeth because no way I’m getting on that subway.
Me: You don’t like the subway?
Ed: You see what’s happening down there?
Me: Today?
Ed: No. Everyday!
Me: No, I don’t know.
Ed: Everyone’s pushing each other onto the tracks! Every day they’re pushing each other onto the tracks.
Me: That’s pretty true. A lot of people are pushing each other onto the tracks lately.
Ed: You taking the subway today?
Me: Yeah, I have to take it every day.
Ed: Well ... that’s on you.

(After not seeing Ed for a week or so)
Me: Lou, where’s Ed?
Lou: He fell. He’s in the hospital.
Me: Oh my god!
Lou: He’s alright. He’s just upset because he can’t smoke.
Me: Well ... that’s understandable. Does he need anything? I can take it to him.
Lou: No he’s okay. His wife is taking care of him. Plus, you can’t go there alone.
Me: Well, I’ll be safe, I’m sure.
Lou: No, I mean, you’re not going without me as your date.
Me:  A date to the hospital?
Lou: At my age, that's as good as it gets sometimes.

Lou: Where’s your umbrella?
Me: Ugh, I forgot it. I’m going to just take my chances today.
Lou: They’ve been talking about the rain all week. How could you forget?
Me: I don’t know. I know, it’s bad.
Lou: (Shaking his head very sadly). I just can’t believe it. (Turns to Ed) She forgot her umbrella today.
Ed: It was on the news all week. What, you don’t watch the news? (Shakes head sadly.)

Previously: Sympathy for Liz

Lia LoBello works in public relations and marketing by day, but spends her nights crafting, cooking, and watching real-crime television. She tweets at @lialobello. If you know of any good shows about murder, revenge, or psychic children, please let her know immediately.

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Hi Hairpin,
I am desperately in love with someone TLC might call a "scrub." He's kind and sweet and smart and charming, but he also doesn't have a bank account or health insurance or a "real" job, and my parents think he's not good enough for me. I know he is good enough for me because he makes me so happy, but I do feel very anxious about this. I love him, but I'm nervous about what our lives would be like if we ended up together. I am a teacher, so I don't make tons of money either, but I sometimes worry that he is completely impoverished. It makes me feel so shallow to worry about money, but I know that money problems cause divorce and tons of other unhappy life problems. It would just be nice to know that you could be with someone you loved AND also take a vacation once a year and go out sometimes and all those other bougie things. My friends say that it's great that we love each other so much, but sometimes that isn't enough, and they know it hurts but I have to move on. What do you think? Is love enough, or is it more important to take into account practical concerns? Is there any way to talk to him about this without sounding like a shallow jerk?

Wrong about TLC, wrong for America. A scrub, or a "buster," is guy who mistakenly thinks he is fly. Being seated on one's broke ass is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a scrub — to be a true scrub, one must also ALWAYS be talking about what one wants. A scrub, eo ipso, cannot get any love from you. He cannot approach you, you do not want his number, to meet him, or any of his time. One's man not only can but presumably has approached. Numbers and time are shared. So we're good, right?

Ohhhhhh I see what the confusion was about, you were thinking of the B-Side, right? A Nice Guy Who Doesn't Have A Lot of Money And Maybe Isn't So Ambitious About Making Money Either? I was at this '90s dance thing in Gowanus last week and they put that on and me and my girls went craaaaayyyyy with extra vocal fry. My favorite part is when Left-Eye (May She Jam In Peace) breaks it DOWN and is like "it's not shallow/to worry about the role of money in a long term partnership but/the vicissitudes of life being what they are, shouldn't that really be a question/of shared attitudes, not discreet goals for income/and of course communication about changes in those attitudes and expectations." I don't know why they didn't release it as a single, really, the chorus is really a sparkling example of Marxist '90s R&B, where they're all "It's not like money is just a thing that there's some big pile of, and if you do the right things you can get at that pile, not even if you're a banker, and being happy with yourself and your partnerships probably requires reflecting on what abundance can look like for you and if there are surprises in that answer." AND THEN, that guy from Tony Toni Tone comes in and is like, "is he really a slacker, like doesn't care about anything, or does he just engage the world in ways that are not remunerative right now, and does it make a difference to you?" So rad.

Whatever, girl, get that busboy some Obamacare, pay for your own vacation, and wait for fighting about sex to break you up, I mean, that's REALLY what always does it.

Previously: He Is Gross

A Lady is one of several rotating ladies. Do you have any questions for A Lady?

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I was reading this elaborate (and reasonably fascinating) piece on the financial mechanics behind Phish (the jam band, as opposed to the ice cream with the little fudge fish in it) and by the end of it, I felt almost sad for not really caring about Phish on a deep personal level. I feel similarly about LARPing. This is not a reasonable thing to be made sad by. What it reminded me of, honestly, was Edith's piece about Kreayshawn in New York Times Magazine two years years ago. If you missed it, it is basically a very wise treatise about the nature of death and the loneliness of aging out of the cultural zeitgeist, but it's also about Kreayshawn. I will quote from it briefly:

The Internet is basically like being at a house party and trying to find the bathroom and opening up a door to a room where a bunch of kids are playing a game or doing a drug or having an orgy (metaphorically) or something and you get all flustered and say, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry!” and they all look at you like, “You pervert,” and you quickly slam the door shut. Everywhere you go on the Internet there are rooms you don’t understand, people playing games you don’t know the rules to, teenagers doing drugs you’ve never heard of and can’t even pronounce. And you just walk through the halls of this house party, aging in fast forward, until you open the one last door at the end of the hallway and it’s Death. Ha, ha.

The difference being, of course, that Phish and LARPing aren't, per se, cool. The people who do them certainly think so, or have attained that magical state in which you do not care about being cool at all. In the wider culture, however, if you mention you're a huge Phish fan, the reaction of your listener is more likely to be "cooooool," as opposed to "COOL." But there's such a marvelous allure to being utterly and totally interested in something that a certain group of people is really into and no one else cares about. I mean, to go back to that piece about Phish:

Some people in this world love Phish more than you can possibly understand. This author’s wife is one of those people. As a compromise, one Phish song was selected to be performed during the dancing portion of this author’s wedding reception. When that song came on, half the dance floor cleared out. They stood to the side and stared with befuddlement as the other half of the attendees danced to a slow, strange, and seemingly undanceable song. The Phish fans were in rapture because their favorite band was blasting through the speakers and they knew that if Tweezer was performed now, that Tweezer Reprise would make an appearance at the after party.

Doesn't that sound just a little wonderful? Wouldn't it be a little great to mill around to a weird, undanceable song, making eye contact with the other people who were really into that song? Anyway, halfway through the Phish article, I went on YouTube and decided I was going to get into Phish, so that I could make eye contact with Phish fans at weddings. It didn't work. I specifically picked concert tapes to watch instead of studio songs, because Phish fans are very clear about that, and it really just didn't work for me. And it's not like I don't like drugs, either. I love drugs. Or did, because now I am a mother and all mothers live in the untouched parlor from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy, sipping tea and embroidering things until they go to the great high-waisted jeans store in the sky.

There are people who respond to other people having fun in ways that are alien to them with inexplicable rage and contempt. This is, honestly, one of the worst things you can do to yourself as a person of something resembling character. I kind of do it around things like Burning Man, which is silly. Obviously, if people really love Burning Man then they should just burn their little hearts out with great joy and abandon. And we should remember that other people probably feel this way about things we like. If you're a Doctor Who fan, and you've ever tried to show someone an episode of Doctor Who, and it's been a dismal failure, and they've tried to get YOU to align yourself with their vaguely snide amusement by saying things like "so, I assume the special effects are deliberately bad on purpose, right?" or "wait, how many of these have you SEEN?" or, worst of all "how does anyone stand the Doctor?" then you should know better. Perhaps the single greatest summation of this concept being "don't yuck on someone else's yums." LARPing is a perfect example. I don't do it, but on face value, if nothing was cool or dorky yet and we had to decide which was which, who wouldn't want it to be cool to get dressed up in period costume and run around in the woods playing with swords and horses and armor? Here we are, expending tons of time caring about watching Game of Thrones (as I assuredly do), which is totally socially acceptable, when there are actually people getting accidental cardio in the process of physically doing something outside which reminds them of shows and historical eras they find interesting. Perhaps the LARPers and the Phish fans (I'm sure they have a weird name for themselves) really have it all figured out. Teach me.

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It’s hard to imagine Catwoman played by anyone besides Michelle Pfeiffer or Harrison Ford not in the iconic role of Indiana Jones. But it almost happened on several occasions. Whether the actor was fired from set or just pulled out last minute due to the always convenient “scheduling conflicts” excuse, the person never made it to the big screen in these films.

1. Aliens

Original Star: James Remar
Replacement: Michael Biehn

James Remar left the film a week into filming when his creative differences with James Cameron couldn’t be resolved.

2. American Psycho

Original Star: Christian Bale
Replacement: Christian Bale

This one is a bit bizarre. Christian Bale was originally offered the role of Bateman but then the studio decided to go in a different direction. They hired Leonardo DiCaprio the role but he dropped out after the success of Titanic. The part was then offered to Ewan McGregor, but he turned it down after Bale asked him to. Finally the studio returned to Bale.

3. Apocalypse Now

Original Star: Harvey Keitel
Replacement: Martin Sheen

Even though Martin Sheen was originally offered the role of Willard, he turned it down due to scheduling conflicts and Harvey Keitel landed the part. But a week into shooting, Francis Ford Coppola replaced Keitel with Sheen.

4. Back To The Future

Original Star: Eric Stoltz
Replacement: Michael J. Fox

Four weeks into filming, director Robert Zemeckis determined that Stoltz has been miscast. Zemeckis and Spielberg decided to reshoot the film with Michael J. Fox once his schedule opened back up.

5. Batman

Original Star: Sean Young
Replacement: Kim Basinger

Sean Young broke her arm after falling from a horse during rehearsal. Tim Burton scrapped the scene and continued filming the movie with replacement Kim Basinger.

For our anniversary, I surprised my wife with tickets to see Blythe Danner’s one-woman show about bone density.

WHO is “sponsoring” this, exactly? The de Medicis? I bet this feral monster’s name isn’t even Richard. INTERNET, HOW DO I GET YOU TO GIVE ME MONEY?

The Women of Parks and Recreation | People’s Most Beautiful issue

willowmansdaughter:

Martin & Cracker