Going To Church/Cut-Outs/Death By Coleslaw

The guilt is mounting. I haven't written in a week, and three experiences will flit through my fingers, unless I commit them to my blog. So here goes. I will start with the top down, or the most satisfactory experience to the most stinking and dreadful.

I attended the Tony's yesterday, and while I covered them many times in the past before, it was my first time attending the ceremony, and it was a lot of fun. Everyone was in their "Sunday best." It seemed to me that this must be the closest thing to going to church. Blasphemy? Scandalous? No, it's a comparison that works for me. People are dressed nicely, sitting in seats that kind of look like pews, and honoring their own type of God, or Godliness that comes on stage. The theatre is a type of religion that involves a whole lot of faith, reverence and worship, and really, the belief in creating and creation. Radio City was the House of God yesterday, and we were all the participating adherents, because we were honoring our fellow-man, neighbor, colleague. Now, what's more holy than that?

And now not speaking of the good, or the holy, or the even remotely human, let alone Godly, let me let you in on this depraved tale of a man so repugnant and arrogant that he reeked of the Seven Deadly Sins. He was definitely not in attendance yesterday. I will introduce him as "Cut-Outs." C.O. had B.O., boorish and odious. He is called "Cut-Outs" because that's in fact what he was doing, when at his bequest, I arrived at his studio to be interviewed for a possible job that I didn't even want. I was being courteous, he was cutting-out photographs for a collage. I spent the time dressing, transporting, and presenting myself. I had done my research on his company, he, did not even look up from his stack of cut-outs. Fed-up, I finally said: "What are you doing there? An art project? Our appointment was for 3:30pm, no? You asked me to come, now look me in the eye. I deserve, at the very least, your undivided attention, not to look at you divide paper." And then a great Clint Eastwood line from "Dirty Harry" came to mind, and while I didn't say it, I thought it. "So what do you say Punk?" Cut-outs looked at me for a second, almost as if he heard Clint's words behind my unmoving mouth. "How old are you?" he said, almost throwing-up the question. "I'm young, are you?" I said. He ignored the question, and surprise surprise, went back to his crafts. He continued to ask me what I had done, where I'm from, and again how old am I. To which I replied, "Cut-outs, next time don't invite an applicant to come, if you have no intention of knowing anything about them. Obviously, we don't see eye to eye." And then a beat later, as if he were in perfect comedic time, he said, "let me know if you want to do the two-day trial. It's of course unpaid. Tell me something, why did you call me cut-outs?" There was nothing to say. I looked at him blankly and left.


I was walking in the Chelsea Market the other day. It already wasn't such a great day. It was pouring, and I was poring over my non-permanent job status. And then the inevitable happened. I almost cracked my skull open, and then blood would be pouring out, instead of rain, and anger and frustration. I slipped on some coleslaw that some luncher had neglected to clean up after himself. I slipped, fell backwards, and then my mother who was walking next to me, caught me just in time, as mothers tend to do. And while my head was intact, my skirt was not. The violent slip backwards had tried its tender seams, and ripped all the way up; exposing some of my backside. The other lunchers laughed. Again, such schadenfreude! The coleslaw was the deadly kind - mayonnaisey and camouflaged in the imperfections of the Market's floor. What a terrible end, death by coleslaw. It would have been a little more comforting if death was a possibility by a food I actually enjoyed.