milk, people moving, and the theatre

Tuesday, sep. 17, 2002   |   0 comments

I like my lattes lukewarm so I can chug them right away, no waiting. A lot of the time, the pretty coffee lady (or la bella barista, as I love to call them) already has the milk piping hot and frothed and ready to go (like I like my men, and my fruit stand vendors). So I just order my lattes “not too full” and top them up with cold milk at the bar. But today I learned that all this time my cafe has been stocking its carafes with half and half, not milk! So essentially I’ve been pounding a milkshake every morning. No wonder all my pants have been riding so snugly these days! Boy.

While I’m here, I have a small, milk-related confession to make: You know those huge, metal milk dispensers they had in the dorms? Where, to get the milk, you had to cup your hand under a heavy, organically shaped metallic ball and lift it ever so slightly? I don’t know what it was — the shape of the ball or its notable heft, or maybe it was the production of milk itself — but there was something very sexual about the whole thing. Not enough to fuel an actual fetish, but enough to put a smile on the morning.

Anyway, other than the milkshake discovery, it’s been a good day so far. The elevator was there waiting for me, the doggies were in the window, the train arrived just as I reached the bottom of the escalator (which usually runs up, but today was running down!), and every single car was baby blue. So I’m pretty much lucked.

And the luck seems to be spreading like butter. Or a criminal suspect. Leslie, who just this week moved out here from NY, has already landed herself a fabulous apartment. In my neighborhood! And that’s not all. After over a year of riding couches, lucky Heidi is moving into Leslie’s old place in Manhattan. Meanwhile, in some sort of continental game of Red Rover between New York and California, Jeffrey, who for years has been getting his luck from a rotating foot down the street from his house in LA (the foot has a happy smiling face on one side, a weepy face on the other, so whichever face you get as you drive by determines the thrust of Jeff’s day), is moving to Brooklyn. Does anyone know where the luck is in Brooklyn? If so, you should totally let Jeff know. (Unless it’s inside some weird tree hole that smells like vagina chicken.)

Let’s see, what else? Oh! Kari, who’s looking particularly model-esque these days what with her stirring green peepers and that upflip, and I went for a lovely, stomach-packing meal at Greens on Friday — we both had the “phyllo purse” (I know!). Then we rolled over to the Magic Theater to see Josh Kornbluth‘s “Red Diaper Baby,” which was funny and sweaty and titillatingly cringetastic (specifically the “first-time oral sexing” reenactment). Kari had landed us tickets on one of two possible nights — it was only being staged so they could film it for Sundance. (I would have never even know about it on my own — Kari is the one person standing between me and philistinedom, theatre-wise.)

The show was interesting because I could easily imagine it produced as a toothsome written memoir (ed: turns out he actually did turn it into a book), and that isn’t always the case, really. The stories in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman are great, but they make Feynman sound kind of pompous and all-knowing. However, if you listen to the stories as they were originally told, with all the drumming and so on, he comes off as endearing and self-effacing. And Seinlanguage just sucked. In short, a success on stage doesn’t automatically parlay into good reading.

Anyway, that small thought spawned all sorts of half-baked thoughtlets about why someone would choose to write versus perform something, and why is it that writers are expected to read their work aloud when most of them started writing to avoid having to speak to anyone, and more third grade blablah, all of it babbled directly at poor, cornered Kari. And yet she still offered me a ride home. Lucky, lucky E!