#308 Joking with the staff

#309 When you're sleeping and the sou... #307 The Sniff Test

#308 Joking with the staff

I eat out a lot. I'm

not proud of it but living alone downtown surrounded by greasy

burger joints, neon sandwich signs,

and late-night pizza places means I'm often tempted to trade a

crinkly fiver for a waxy-wrapped package in a paper bag. Sometimes

I step into the zone of an empty sub shop or barren

pizza place and it feels like I'm walking onto a

late night talk show stage. Someone's filling napkin dispensers

while another chops tomatoes and they'll be joking like

Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. They'll

be in tears

laughing at something funny from a few moments before and I won't

know if someone dropped a jar of olives on their foot,

a customer ordered a slice of pizza for their

cat, or the boss got beet red because nobody ordered

receipt tape for the register. No, I won't know

what's going on but if I'm lucky they'll invite me onstage. Just a

few nights ago I walked into a greasy hole in the

wall with my friends Nick and Julie and two guys

behind the counter were having some sort of hilarious engaging

argument. When we walked in they turned to us quickly and one of

them immediately yelled out "Hey … what's a

perm?" We laughed and Nick jumped in quickly to

clarify: "What, you mean like in someone's hair?" "Yeah, exactly bro.

Like, one of us thinks it's when you make your hair curly and the

other think it's when you make your hair straight. Which one is

it?" He leaned on the cash register with his fist under his chin

and with the furrowed brow and squinty

eyes sort of looked like a modern day version of The

Thinker, only wearing a paper hat. The other guy was

laughing behind him while pulling a dripping basket of wet

fries from the bubbling hot oil. "I dunno, I think it

stands for

permanent," Julie

started up. "Like, anything you do to permanently change your hair

in a new way. So … you're probably both right. Or both horribly

wrong." A few seconds later we were having

mock-serious debates and laughing out

loud in a tiny hilarious connection in our dusty neon world. It was

a great moment and it made me realize that joking

with the staff is always a great time. Yes, whether

you're laughing with the ladies at the laundromat,

trading barbs with the barbers at the

shop, or joking with the jail guards in the joint –

well, it just means you nailed your cameo appearance onstage.

Congratulations on a great walk on performance. Today you win the

Best Supporting Actress of AWESOME! Thank you to Erin, Hillary, Heather, Ashika, and Sarina for being the first five

pre-orders

yesterday!