Lovely Saturday in the City: Going to Dance Class, Touched by Comments!

 
Aaahh... it is a glorious day in the city again, though quite chilly. I'm not quite energetic enough for Luigi class today, on top of which I am not sure if they take credit cards or CA checks, and the MBT fiasco ate through all of my cash... Thankfully, can write friend a check to see the psychic. Of course, anyone who knows me or simply looks at my info on FB, knows I am both secular and passionately anti--woo woo (Oprah philosophy, Shirley Maclaine (the books, not the movies of course), astrology as a serious predictor of human lives and the future, tarot cards and other such nonsense.

However, this woman knew nothing whatever about me. She asked me my date of birth and full name. No one was there and she was not hooked in to a Bluetooth or a laptop where she could have googled me. And there's nothing much there anymore. The AYA 15th reunion thing is gone. My essays on Denis Leary Discussions on FB are no longer listed. (I have 27 essays spanning his career , including his comedy ("No Cure for Cancer" and "Lock and Load"), TV (Rescue Me), film (The Ref and Recount--beware my GOP friends, I was not being diplomatic and yes, I realize Scalia is a brilliant man but he did come off as a dick in the film with the "irreparable harm" argument), and other Rescue Me related essays (other actors' careers). I also have essays on other posts, and unlike fans of Grey's Anatomy, who seem not to have lives or jobs and simply stay on GA FB all day long writing posts (some 1000 total in the last few years), RM fans are taciturn. So, it's sort of like VO Discussions , not DL discussions.

Apropos of this, I have never figured out the way public pages work on FB. Within 15 seconds of posting an essay (you always know which ones are mine, as the titles are long, with colons, and resemble literary-criticism essays in journals), it would say on the wall, "Denis Leary responded to X... on Discussions." This seems to be an automatic feature because back when Gilmore Girls still had a page, which mysteriously disappeared with no warning, causing me to lose all my essays sadly, the same thing happened. It did not, however, happen on the GA board and I have about 10 essays on that, including a few which are comparative analyses of these superficially different but fundamentally similar TV dramas (in my view one of the three best dramas of this decade, hands down).

But there was never a comment by his staffer. I don't think he writes all of the FB/Twitter one-liners. And I absolutely do not think he even reads his FB page. Adam Ferrara, on the other hand, the wonderful comedian, star of Top Gear (a funny show about cars on History Channel, amusing even if you don't care at all about cars), and actor on Rescue Me (Needles Nelson), does comment and "like" comments on his page. Of course, even after Top Gear, he had about 6K friends/fans, where DL has 60K. Vin Diesel has a bewilderingly high number: a million or so! He's so handsome (I love that muscular, masculine shaved head thing, provided the man has a decent face and normally shaped head), and he has an endearing manner in The Pacifier with Lauren Graham, Lorelai, the mom on Gilmore Girls, and now star of Parenthood, opposite the brilliant and handsome (and multi-lingual son of English teacher) Peter Krause, formerly Casey McCall on Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night (1998-2000).

But this woman knew nothing. And I was not the blabbermouth I usually am, giving away all kinds of clues. I told her nothing. I was wearing my favorite charcoal grey Nike sweatpants, a big blue fleece sweatshirt I stole from J (boyfriend) early on, the brown cashmere/wool blend Giulana Teso overcoat originally 800 I got for 50 , used, on ebay, and an FDNY hat. My hair was messy and I wore no makeup, just my normal jewelry.

She was eerily perceptive about my personality, passions, and past. She knew I'd had a bitch of a decade, talked about my intellect and my intellectual proclivities with great accuracy. She knew I had had a bad decade in the love arena. She knew that 2010 was the best year in 15 yrs or so and that 2011 would be even better. She said she felt I would finish dissertation but not for a few years and that I had wasted potential, though she put it much more nicely. She just said I had a powerful mind and loved to write, to express my thoughts with others, and that I had yet to achieve whatever success (not financial) I would one day have in life. She said I needed to remain focused on the intellectual pursuits in life--the "work of my life" is how she put it as I remember--and talked about emotional pain of the past with great precision. (She is enormous , just enormous and wasn't all that nice when I explained my banking problem, and just said, not wanting to chat clearly, "Come back when you've figured this out." But she was nice that day and I am sure when she has her 25 bucks in cash, she will be nice again. Oh, she does not take public transportation in NYC, as she feels "overwhelmed" by the stimuli on subway, in particular. Quite honestly, as my mother pointed out, for a woman of this size, a subway seat would not be terribly comfortable.) 

I was on FB then, of course, as this was just three months ago and we did not discuss FB. But a lot has happened:  Xmas and New Years with J, the Gregg Hilton thing, new books I had not even heard of then. And another phenomenal trip which is hard to see winding down on this glorious early spring day in NYC.

And I am so grateful for the support of FB friends who have complimented the setup of the blog (not my doing, entirely J's accomplishment), and said encouraging things about what is to come! And I had my brie and tomato omelette at Mon Petit Cafe, so life is perfect. No day which begins with brie and cherry tomatoes, and a baguette with sweet butter and French strawberry jam, plus juice and coffee can be anything but sublime!

I would love to take class and I will on  Monday for sure, but today I will just revel in the beautiful jazz that Francis, the most wonderful New York , gay Broadway dancer-type , plays from the Master Class CDs.