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The writer Douglas Carter Beane hired my sister to act in one of his plays and was later heard to say, “What do you call it when Amy Sedaris recites one of your lines? A coincidence.”
moment. “What was that funny thing you said yesterday
Doing so means beaming as they hold up a shorted-out curling iron with dried nail polish on it, or a crocheted blanket the color of sorrow.
“Who are those men who look like thugs?” Patsy asked the clerk at the front desk. “Thugs,” the woman answered. “They are here for your protection.”
There was also FaceTime, of course, which I supposed could be amended in this case to Sit-on-Your-Face Time.
With no traffic to stop me, the only time I’d paused was to read a sign someone had put in the window of a padlocked bar: I USED TO COUGH TO HIDE A FART. NOW I FART TO HIDE A COUGH.
It sounds petty, but if at any time during the meal a dinner guest used the word surreal to describe our current situation, or the phrase hunkered down, I would make a mental note to disinvite them from any future get-togethers. I hated the clichés that came with the pandemic, hated hearing the new normal. Oh, and heroes. At first the word was used for health-care professionals. Then for essential workers. Then we were all heroes. “Give yourself a great big hand, and stay safe!”
It was a golden era for tattletales, for conspiracy theorists, for the self-righteous. A photographer came one afternoon to take my picture. I was standing in the middle of East 70th Street, posing as instructed, when a woman with silver hair approached. She was on the sidewalk, a good twenty feet away, but still she felt the need to scold me. “Cover your face!” she screeched.
At the time, I was fifty-nine, meaning that the youngest I could go, new-boyfriend-wise, was thirty-six and a half. That’s not a jaw-dropping difference, but although it might seem tempting, there’d be a lot that someone under forty probably wouldn’t know, like who George Raft was, or what hippies smelled like. And, little by little, wouldn’t those gaps add up and leave you feeling even older than you actually are?
I thought that, in order to last, you and your wife or boyfriend or whatever had to have a number of mutual interests. They didn’t need to be profound. Camping would qualify, or decoupaging old milk cans. The surprise is that sometimes all it takes is a mutual aversion to overhead lights, or to turning the TV on before eleven p.m. You like to be on time and keep things tidy, the other person’s the same, and the next thing you know thirty years have passed and people are begging you to share your great wisdom. “First off,” I say, “never, under any circumstances, look under the hood of your
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My father did not pass. Neither did he depart. He died. Why the euphemisms? Who are they helping?
What do people without sisters do? Turn to someone like my friend Scott. “You have summer teeth,” he once told me. I said, “Excuse me?” “Summer here, summer there,” he explained.
The last show I did before COVID robbed me of my livelihood was in Vancouver, British Columbia, in a theater I didn’t much care for, a rock house with a grim, cramped lobby and the sort of dressing room you see in movies about performers who overdose on drugs because their dressing rooms are so depressing.
Hugh and I have vastly different senses of humor—this is to say that I have one and he doesn’t. What I need him for are the You can’t say thats and You’re disgustings he’ll interrupt me with on the few occasions that I make it beyond my opening paragraph.
That’s the way this country ran. If, at age sixteen, you wanted a bong, you went out there and worked for it. Now I guess your parents just buy it for you and probably give you the pot as well.
The America I saw in the fall of 2021 was weary and battle-scarred. Its sidewalks were cracked. Its mailboxes bashed in. All along the West Coast I saw tent cities. They were in parks, in vacant lots and dilapidated squares. In one stop after another I’d head to a store or restaurant I remembered and find it boarded up, or maybe burned out, the plywood that blocked the doors covered with graffiti: EAT THE RICH. FUCK THE POLICE. BLACK LIVES MATTER.
