Mercies

Given my rough experiences with cold TSA personnel lately, I was thrilled to come across the woman who checked my ID today at SeaTac. Rather than the subtle chastising that the guy in front of me deserved, jokes about his call were all the TSA rep had for him.

“A virgin you said? Must be nice!” she quipped after he explained he was on the phone with the airline.

She offered trails of the laughter when she got to me. When I pulled out my
picture she stopped.

“You look incredible. So photogenic in this driver’s license.”

“Thank you, I appreciate that!”

“It’s the smile I think,” she said. “Yeah you have one of those winning smiles. That’s what it is.” In the few seconds I took to be startled, she turned her attention to the woman behind and to my right and said, “Look at him, doesn’t he have one of those great smiles? Go on, turn and show her.”

I offered the passenger behind me an awkward grin.

“You’re right he does,” she cooed.

“Well that was a daymaker,” I said on the way to x-ray portals. “I blame it on my folks. Good genes.”

Not entirely true. There was substantial cosmetic wiring to push my enamel around when I was a teen. But there is an unofficial vanity quotient in the phenotype from way up that specified a level of stunning appearance.

It is one of the legacies of my grandmother Lurlean, whose passing was the reason I was going through this particular TSA security gate. She was quite a looker at 16 when she met my grandfather, an equally gorgeous counterpart, and had my mother, whose eyes helped people to see the corresponding envy.

The gift of course, is that I got some pieces of some of this, a God-given plus to balance out my general refusal to invest time and energy in my appearance (“Do you even look at yourself in the mirror before you leave the house? And why are you wearing those sweatpants, they are hideous!” is a common Brian Brooks complaint). So I am elated and tickled by the compliments at TSA.

It’s one of the reasons I would lobby for a closed casket. Lurlean would show up in church – as she did backstage at “The Color Purple” when we were on Broadway – dressed to hurt somebody and as coordinated as insurgent-removal plans. This is the memory she would want, the one that kept her from going to church before the second stroke in ’04, when she could still make that decision for herself.

The turn for the worst started amidst some other developing tragedy on the Dallas side of our family. Lurlean’s only remaining sister set aside her health concerns to take her 80-year-old husband into the hospital for profuse vomiting. That got worse before it got better, but the doctors declared him out-of-the-woods of dangerous surgery they initially thought necessary to remove the bile causing internal issues.

Then I made it back to Seattle from a weekend work trip to South Carolina. The first message I got when I turned on my phone at 12:30 a.m. was that my great uncle had passed from heart failure and that my grandmother was in the hospital with pneumonia, a collapsed lung, and a body jarred from a third stroke/heart attack combination.

Mom and I spoke for a while thereafter and the drive to Portland the next day to teach a master class with my sista-in-dance-crime Kemba and see other family was testy. By the end of the night I had reluctantly told my great aunt in Dallas that her sister was in the hospital fighting. Uber strong, my great aunt instructed me to tell my mother not to even consider a trip to Dallas for the funeral.

The next morning, after a delightful visit with Kemba’s two-year-old and a nap, I learned that my mother and I would be busy planning a different funeral.

As trite as it is, I took peace in the fact that my grandmother is in a better place. The worry is for those of us who are still here dealing with it all. I am relieved, Lurlean’s widower is decimated, and my mother see-saws between the two.

And we all send prayers to Dallas for the last aunt, who has lost both her husband and sister in a 36-hour period.

The woman at TSA was a mercy, along with the fact that although Trisha, my (ahem) secretary, was not available to help me reconfigure my life during the return drive to Seattle, Ryan’s secretary (wow) Gerard did some airfare surfing for me.

There is the other mercy of course: wherever she is, my grandmother is flawlessly faced, couture-worthy clothed and covering—as she always said—every inch of ground she stands on. That’s reason enough to smile.

Wrong (as if it's the only time)

To thwart cabin fever, I moved my notation and rehearsal planning operations to the lobby of the Homewood Suites Hotel, where I could eat the complimentary dinner and try continuing to ignore that it was a day off. This Fifth Avenue production of “Oklahoma!” has its first preview in only a few days and my job in the dance department is to help make the journey merciful.

Once I sat back down, plate cozy on the table, laptop completing the picnic, I had an odd feeling, as if harsh spirits had invaded the dining room. Two tables down from me were a couple, elderly, Anglo and seemingly farther apart from each other than their chair positioning could afford. They looked smug, indifferent, cold. They reminded me of the Germans who stared with disapproving eyes at my bald, dark friend Kemba in a café when we were on tour in Berlin in ’01.

I decided that if my instincts were right and the spiteful energy in the room emanated from the couple, I could dismiss it totally. They were far enough away to be irrelevant.

Ten minutes later, my shriek of joy about a problem solved invited the laughter of a tall black man on his way to get more food. He asked and I was happy to tell him about the challenges of identifying from my Flip footage which twelve of the forty folks on stage were in a square dance behind the principals.

“What show is it?” he asked.

“’Oklahoma!’ Are you a local?”

“Yes I live close, I’m just visiting some friends in town staying here.”

“You should definitely come to see the show,” I told him. “It’s a very different perspective on the story because the creative team truly considered the choreographer’s research. It turns out that there was a large population of black people in Oklahoma during the time period for the story. So for it to have any integrity we needed to be present on the stage. Even one of the leads is played by a black man.”

“Wow, that does sound interesting. When does it open?”

Somewhere during the course of my dissertation/sales pitch I caught the brunette at the table to my right rolling her eyes and shaking her head. The optimist in me wanted so badly to provide her a few benefits of the doubt. But the realist in me caught the reaction, noted its timing adjacent to the words “black people in Oklahoma,” measured the change in the pace in her eating that seemed oddly synchronized with my sentences, felt the energy.

The gentleman I had sold on the show returned to his table shortly after I sold him on my book too. I had five long seconds thereafter to tighten my lip. Still, I’m not one to rely on assumptions, and at the end of the day I had no concrete evidence about what was going on in that woman’s head, only a bug-bite irritation that she may have soured the dining room Chi.

What I’m certain of is that the culprit wasn’t the couple. It became clear when the elderly man approached me.

“Hi sir,” he said. “I’m so sorry to disturb you but are you a musician?”

“Oh no intrusion at all. I played a little piano back in the day but I wouldn’t call myself a musician.”

“I see, I just saw that you had sheet music open so please forgive me, I had to ask.”

I shoved embarrassment down my esophagus as it threatened to come and take over my face. Obviously there was evidence in plane sight to make his question totally reasonable.

In a few seconds I gave him the same spiel about what I was doing, why I was in Seattle at all. He asked where I’ve danced and I gave him a brief resume.

“My grandson is a musician and he loves it,” the man said, “and he plays with a band around town here and there. But it must be hard for artists nowadays.”

“It is,” I confessed. “My big challenge is to figure out what jobs will pay the rent and how to get them so I can afford to do the occasional job just to feed my soul. Sometimes you get two for one. What does he play?”

“He played guitar for a long time and then he switched to bass. I guess he wanted to practice for seven hours a day rather than ten.”

We laughed on this for a while. I realized as we spoke further that this man is genuinely concerned about whether his 20-year-old grandson could have a sustainable future supporting himself. Yet rather than enmity of the arts and resentment, there was only concern and love.

He eventually returned to his table, determined not to keep me from what I was doing any longer. When the couple left five minutes later, the man thanked me again as they passed. I was able to look at his wife’s face and see their concern more prominently.

“He’ll be fine,” I said. “He’s young and he’s got time. It will all work out for him and he’ll be so happy in the long run.”

Her eyes shined through her glasses and she reached her arms out to hug me. I stood and stepped into them.

Not in a while have I been so happy to be wrong.

Through challenges of jumping into a busy conservatory five weeks into the semester, the students remained my biggest joy. A few of them got beneath my skin in the endearing way.

Of course, it is always the one that tries you the first week of class that becomes an instant member of your family.

I was busy giving a difficult combination across the floor that involved a lot of turning. As usual, my feet were protected in the sock-clad ballet slipper.

“Easy in socks,” Whitney mumbled. “Try it barefoot.”

She didn’t think I heard her.

“Huh?” I shouted. “What was that? I should try it barefoot?” I made a production of taking off my socks and ballet slippers. “Well let’s just see.”

Even as I approached the chaine turns that shut her up, I realized in an instant that I had a special kinship for this short spicy chile with a mouth.

Over the next few weeks I got to discover quite a bit about Whitney. She’s a beautiful young lady who cleans up very nicely, but would be perfectly content in a world that did not require from women more dolling up than a pair of sweatpants and an oversized sweatshirt. She gets away with it because she has the “it” factor.

She takes more pride in her ability to case a logistics challenge, find a way when there isn’t one and create one if necessary, as is the case with this parallel parking situation. She is not afraid to use bumpers. Whitney can drive. She is a natural driver, one who – like my mother (and Tamica Washington) – can shift gears, eat a sandwich steer the car at once.

Whitney has parking tickets galore, so many that the Office of the Registrar at the university began sticking the fees on her student account. Yet her car has never had a boot.

“Don’t you want to let me use your faculty pass when you’re not using it?” she asked me via text.

“And when would that be, given that I’m married to the conservatory just like you?” I replied. But I had to give her mad props for gumption; nobody else asked.

Other dancers in the division have to miss an occasional rehearsal because they are members of the university dance team. Whitney is seldom available because she is a Kansas City Chiefs cheerleader and has a second job at Victoria’s Secret.

She learns choreography at breakneck speed, which is almost always an indication of quick adaptability.

My mother constantly came to mind.

In fact, my mother, too, is a beautiful lady who, to this day, does not wear make-up, lipstick or any other cosmetics whatsoever but has the “it” factor. She would rather not dress up nicely at all, ever.

My mother is a master problem-solver. To deal with her aversion to computers and her inefficiency as a typist, she exploited her nine-year-old only child’s interest in computers to cajole him into taking a typing class. This way he could transfer articles for the student newspaper (for which she was journalism advisor) via her dictation. Brilliant.

Mom is a fantastic driver. When trying to evade authorities who wanted her to return her child cousins to a drug-addict relative, Mom led the police on a TV-worthy car chase, so good a driver is she. I suspect she may have on occasion created an even more questionable parking spot than the one on this page when she was Whitney’s age.

And of course, my mother has a mouth. When she was a few years older than Whitney, at the height of The Black Power Movement, Mom was arrested (yes, I’m telling all her business in complete admiration) for giving the racist officer a heartier piece of her mind. It helps to understand that she had an Angela Davis fro and resembled her in physicality.

So I guess I saw my mother every day at work. It explains how Whitney wore me out and yet I love her to death.

Funeral

It wasn’t just that there was a death in the family and an incipient funeral that forced my determination to attend. His daughter, my first cousin once removed, is one my favorite people on the planet.

And something told me as I walked behind my family during the processional, perhaps I should not sit in the first two rows with them. Maybe I should just sit one row back.

I’m glad I did; I didn’t realize until ten minutes into the service that I had never been to a Catholic funeral.

The pastor’s large face with prominent features framed with thick silver brought to mind Moses right away.

When he came to the microphone singing in Latin, I was intrigued. When he motioned for us to repeat after him the words he spoke, I followed instructions. When he sang more I was further intrigued.
When he asked us to sing the Latin line behind him, I was bewildered.

And inept. Suddenly, I realized I was grossly unprepared to help celebrate my cousin’s passing justly. This was a full out Catholic service, replete with Ave Maria sung to guitar backup on the side.

I scanned the pews in front of me, careful not to actually turn my head, and then reproduced the notes the Moses doppelganger made.

Before my inadequacy could swell, a random man sauntered up the outside aisle of the pew. He wore raggedy black shorts cut (or ripped) below the knee, tighter black fabric underneath, a zip-up jacket and an old jersey of some sort underneath. The hair was matted and dreaded perhaps, but who could tell? He swung a plastic bag with what looked like groceries, and his tennis shoes had seen better days.

When he made it to the front of the church, he looked to the left and right as if for traffic in the street.

I noticed the Black History Month displays on easels to the far left and right of the pulpit and decided that maybe he was going to do something staff oriented, like move things. It would not have been an appropriate time as the church’s unphased leader was busy with Liturgy of the Eucharist activities: Holding up the cup. Putting it down. Kneeling. Standing. Holding up the cracker that would be the Body of Christ. Putting it down on the chalice. Moving the chalice. Kneeling. Standing.

And not necessarily in that order. I add in haste, lest I accelerate my trip to the real estate I have on the East Bank of the Sea of Hell.

The stranger then walked in front of the family, beyond the casket in the middle of the aisle, past the pallbearers on the other side of the church, and then over to the third row where he scooted clumsily toward the center aisle.

I was so distracted by the intruder that I missed important liturgy. By the time I got back to the priest, he was sprinkling something on the casket. I should know. I should also know why.

Maybe there is a view of the West Bank fires from my Hell River terrace…

In words that ran faster than I was able to pick up, the priest explained that those who wanted to receive a piece of the Holy Body could line up and that in the event we wanted a blessing instead we were to fold our right arm across our hearts as explained in the program.

I rummaged around the pew area for my program before I realized I did not get one on the way in.

People began to line up.

If it had been appropriate to use my phone to text at that moment and ask Krisha if I should open my hands or cross my right hand over my heart to ask for a blessing, I would have. I looked around in hopes that the general activities of my kin would provide answers, but alas they did not.
Brian always complains that people don’t use enough context clues. This time I employed visual ones: what were the other people doing, Jamal? Act like you know…
But a lot of the folks in here were actually Catholic, so they had more sophisticate variations of communicating their desires to the priest. And was the cupped hands about Baptism or blessing?

Sigh.

When I got to the front, I had my arms properly folded enough to get the blessing. The priest dabbed my forehead and I was relieved.

When I got back to my seat, there was more liturgy.

And then the singing started. The odd interloper took over air with song. A sort of bastardized version of the acapella cantus the priest had us sing pieces of earlier.

He twirled his plastic bag a little, lobbed the notes into the church let them take his head and body seismically with them. It was as hard to not stare as it was to pretend not to hear the four or five keys he was singing in.

My cousin, who was incredibly composed through the entire event up until
this point already, promised later that this interloper was the spirit of her father having one more joke to lay on us.

He wasn’t done yet. When it was time to follow the body out for one more viewing, the interloper stood leaning over my cousin.

“Excuse me,” another cousin said, “Could the family please get another chance to say our goodbyes.’

“Dammit don’t you see what hell I’m doing here shit I don’t know what the hell your…”

The kind of crazy pills can’t fix.

We will be telling this story for quite some time.


P.S….

My cousin Rosalyn was impressed with the fact that the funeral was a short one, that it did not drag on and on like some of the Baptist ones she’s been too.

“You’d still be there right now,” she said. “They’d be on closing remarks.”

“Probably.”

She then reminded me that she and Rosa Parks were distant cousins and she attended the civil rights icon’s funeral in Detroit.

“It lasted seven hours,” she said. “And when Jesse Jackson spoke at hour six, he started out with, ‘I know its late but we should still honor Ms. Rosa Parks’.”

“Well, yeah that’s long,” I said. “But it WAS Rosa Parks after all.”

“It was her third funeral.”

“You’re kidding.”

“She had one in D.C., then they shipped her body to the Alabama since that’s where the bus boycott happened. Then they had a last one in Detroit so she could be buried next to her husband.”

Point taken.

Bargains

After our celebration over my first presentation to a college class of students who were assigned and read my book, my mother had errands. Of course I was the designated runner and the first stop was Target.

“What do you need, dare I ask?”

“Just some Swiffer stuff.”

When we got to the Swiffer aisle, Mom picked up boxes of Swiffer fillers. She put on her glasses to read the boxes with calculated precision, the way a scientist might examine mitochondria on a slide. Then came the mumbling.

“Oh, uh hunh I don't want to pay this, $8.99, that's crazy, don't they have anything less expensive than that...maybe this box...you know I can go price check it...”

I was impressed to see that she knew not only where the price checker was, but how to scan with it as well. Impressed, and a tad bothered. Disposable time and shopping tolerance had finally met in this 62-year-old's consciousness. She's at that age where winning means she saved fifty cents. The next stage is when winning means she's saved fifty cents on something that she doesn't need. And please know that she demonstrated a better working understanding of this machine than Christine O'Donnell has of the Constitution (not that this is saying much).

“...Oh this IS $8.99. I'm not paying that...ooh, look the $11.49 is a better value, right?”

“Yes,” I confessed. “Are you turning into Grandy?”

“Hmph.”

Not as complete denial. When my mother's mother was only a few years older, she made a habit of going out of her way to find the deal.

When we finished sorting out the Swiffer items, we moseyed to the other side of Target where we could look to see if they have movies worth buying, movie Mom hasn't seen and that can be enjoyed at home.

“You know I stopped renting movies because they're all widescreen.”

“What's wrong with widescreen?”

“I don't like seeing that extra six inches of space on the top and bottom of the screen because that's just a waste of screen space,” she said.

I explained to her that the picture on full screen settings is truncated on the sides in order to fill the screen the way she likes to see it. But she was ahead of me.

"Well maybe you can look at the DVD player and figure out a way to set it differently."

I looked at the two vids I had in my hand and could find a full screen option nowhere on them. I confessed that I hadn't seen many new DVDs with a full screen option.

“I guess I won't be watching any new DVD's then.”

I could only muster a long sigh as the bubbly cashier collected my money for the videos I'd purchased.

“Yeah it sort of sucks," she said, "that they've stopped making DVD's with full screen because they want everybody to buy new televisions."

“I shouldn't have to buy a new television," my mother said.

"You shouldn't," the woman said. Then she changed the mood. “That will be $22.14."

“What??!” Mom was aghast. She looked at the woman as if she'd asked Mom to pay her mortgage in full.

“That makes sense,” I told her. “Only one of those items was a deal, remember?”

“Oh, well that's awful,” Mom said. She stopped and thought, as if taking the time might alter the price of the two items she wanted to purchase. Just when I was about to be embarrassed that we were holding up the line, Mom dug into her purse and grabbed a stack of coupons.

Before I could get cozy in my horror at this, Mom proceeded to hand the stack of coupons to the young woman behind the register.

“Could you go through these and see if any of them work for this stuff, hon?” she said.

Now I was astonished. Who was this woman inhabiting my mother's body? And where was my credit card so that I could eliminate this nonsense right away? Matter of fact, why didn't I just go ahead (against my mother's wishes) and ask the cashier to scan her Swiffer stuff with the two DVD's I bought that Mom probably won't watch...

“I'm sorry,” the cashier said with genuine regret.

“Oh, don't worry about it,” my mother said.

She then pulled out a crisp hundred.

“Really? REALLY??”

She knew she was wrong. She understands why. She has something like three degrees and loads of common sense. She just finished helping me clean up my lecture on a book I wrote. She gets dramatic irony.

“Well, every little bit counts,” the cashier said.

“That's right girl.”

Course she says this. She did not have to spent forty minutes with her mother on two cleaning items at Target that she could not get a deal on. I don't know that. Maybe she did. Maybe all children go through this with their mothers. And if I were to suddenly make zillions of dollars to support her shopping, even gave her a budget, she might still scan items at the price-checker...

She is now ebullient about the 140-point play she just made on Scrabble against the computer. “Yes! 140 points for the word “coasting” which does exactly that across two triple-letter tiles...”

Tight
by Jamal Story on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 3:56pm

"Il est toujour bon, sur ma fois d'avoir les femmes avec soi." - Remendado and Dancairo trying to convince Carmen to go with them (Quintet, Bizet: It is always good, upon my word, to have women with you.)


The first thing important to know is this: in exchange for our bottomless offerings of support and willingness to be surrogate boyfriends in times of crisis, gay men get to be polygamous. I have four wives. Three were little sisters who upgraded to wife status when Krisha Marcano came along with the declarative, “I am your wife, you will act accordingly.”

This very humbling scenario does not begin with her, however. It starts with the sunny afternoon when Hollie, another wife, escorted me to the car repair joint down the block so that I could handle the loose ends of my Saturn's demise. Well, no that's not true. I asked Hollie to go with me since she was hanging out at the house and I have always understood the latitude that older men give younger men who have beautiful, upstanding women near us.

It worked. My mechanic was charmed, giving me ample time to sort out the mailing of the title so that the car could be released to a non-profit or church that needed one. “Don't worry about all this,” he said. “You two have a great time in Vegas.”

Of course I hadn't said she was going with me.

A week passed. I returned from Vegas for a few days and this time I confiscated Krisha's entire afternoon, included her in on my madness. A sunny day again, a jaunt to the car repair joint down the block. This time to collect my things out of the trunk. When we walked into the garage, the first thing I did was motion toward the woman I was with.

“Hey man, this is Krisha.”

“Oh yeah, we met before.”

“No," I said, "that was Hollie.”

Um, was there a reason he called me out? Didn't he know better than to ignore my lead? What player handbook was he reading from? I was glad that I'm not actually sleeping with any of my wives.

I asked Krisha to go ahead of me to the adjacent junkyard to see if I'd left the jalopy unlocked yesterday. After she was out of visibility, the mechanic came behind me with the key.

“Man, I hope I didn't mess you up just now. Sorry about that.”

“Nah, it's all good. My game is tight.”

Yeah, I said that. I went with this. It was a man moment, meant to be kept right there, between men.

When I got to the car, Krisha looked at me, her eyes showing me the folded arms she didn't feel like making.

"I know exactly what happened just now. He apologized didn't he?”

“Uh yeah he did,” I said, hoping that she simply applied an amount of common sense to get there.

“Your game is tight? Really?”

Wow. Had I said that loud enough to be heard? What player handbook was I reading from?

“And the extra bass in your voice, really? Where did that come from?”

The fact that she wasn't done made it clear to me that I would never live this one down.

“What extra bass?”

“Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about,” she said, emptying the glove compartment. “Let me tell you something, you are a gay. A gay, a gay, a gay!”

I pointed to the items she used for emphatic gesticulation.

“Leave the owner's manual in there for the new people.”

“Did you hear me?”

This would be shared with the other wives of course. And although the stakes of my player moment were not Pastor Long high, I still haven't lived down a particular hop over the fence a few years back (no hypocrisy up there, just barbed wire, who knew?). Granted, I can keep both my gay card and my village, but perhaps my game isn't so tight after all.


"Et sans elles, les toutes belles on ne fait jamais rien de bien."
(And without them, the very lovely ones, one never does anything right.)

Stripper
[Names have been changed to protect the innocent]


After the 7 a.m rehearsal for the HP industrial, nothing looked more fetching than the buffet at Mandalay Bay. Don and Sam were sitting at the table while Missy and I waited at the omelet line when a random bald guy, short and muscular, came up to me and started a conversation. He mentioned that he had seen the Cher show last night and that he enjoyed it a lot.

“Thank you. I was in it.” Immediate regret.

“Oh cool, I remember you now. Fantastic show dude." He looked at Missy. "Are you in the show too?”

Missy was quick but skeptical.

“No, I did some other shows on the strip and we're doing a gig together,” she said, pointing at me.

“Cool, I'm a dancer too, just not the same kind.”

My years at SMU subjected me to several conversations with people disappointed that “Which club?” was not an appropriate response to “I'm a dancer.” I fell into no such trap now, this time on the other side of the Q & A.

“What kind of dancer are you?” I asked.

“I'm a stripper.”

As I deflated, his grin grew in mischief and pride.

Missy, whom I'd just met but understood right away was one of the few other professionals on this gig born in the 70's, exited the area. Back during the rehearsals for my first big tour, Mark, one of Mia's assistants, would always encapsulate the odd, insurmountable, absurd or draining with the words, “I can't.”

Right now, Missy couldn't.

But I had to; the eggs had not yet been added to the vegetables...

“Oh cool,” I said, alone and jealous.

“Yeah I have my own company in Houston and we have a whole team of strippers...”

At this point he must have received a text because he began the unsuccessful effort of multi-tasking our talk with Blackberry operations. I stared at the top of his head trying to decide if there was any possible means for escape.

“I mean I can't dance like you but we don't just take our clothes off, we really dance, like give it, hardcore, you know?”

His hips started to move.

“Um, do you have a business card or something?”

“Not on me,” he said. “But you go to Outlaw Entertainment on Myspace. Here, look...”

He slid his phone upward through the air to show me the “website.” The rude texting might have been less obnoxious it turns out.

“Yo, do you mind if I take a picture with you?”

“It's fine.”

He took the picture. He asked where we were sitting and if the rest of our party included dancers. With no real will to lie, I pointed to the table where Don and Sam sat eating in peace. The stripper promised to stop by later.

Stop by he did. He introduced himself to the table, a permanent grin swathed across his face.

“I saw you on So You Think You Can Dance and man, you should have won,” he said to Sam.

In the internal filing drawer called issues-j-needs-to-work-on went the embarrassment about the fact that as much as I strive to keep current I had no idea this whole time that Sam was from the show. Anyway, before Sam could react, the stripper asked if he could take pictures with us. Before we could respond he produced a Canon. The Blackberry would not suffice.

The boys' approaches to posing exposed their reactions. Sam put the fork down and stood up: necessary evil. Don remained seated and worked like Wednesday Addams (a la Cristina Ricci) to make that smile happen: horror.

It went further south.

“Hey I remember that battle between you and the other guy, you should have won,” the stripper began.

There is a breath that happens in the entire body when we posture to discuss that which we have only skimpy (or less) understanding about. The minute he took it, Missy got up and left the table. The stripper did not embrace the cue.

“The other guy was more smooth and had good moves but overall you had a better groove...”

Ready to laugh, I had to exit after Missy. When we convened near the asparagus and cold cuts Missy and I were shameless, casting

ourselves in a full guffaw about the crazy stripper.

Then guilt swam around. I was leaving those kids unattended with the crazy stripper. This was my fault really. I had invited him in a way. Accountability in check, I re-stocked my plate and returned to the table.

The stripper was now cozy in my chair, his whole body leaned toward Sam in an effort to better show him the pictures on his phone.

“Oh sorry man,” the stripper said, getting up. “I'll leave you guys to your meal but listen thanks for the pictures.”

After the Lestat-style disappearance, Sam shared what I'd not rescued him from soon enough. The stripper wanted to show Sam a picture of his beautiful girlfriend.

“Isn't she beautiful?”

“Yeah, sure,” Sam had said.

“She's like the most beautiful girl in the world.”

“Okay, sure.”

“Guess how old she is.”

“I don't know, man.”

“No, no, guess.”

“Um, I really don't know how old she is.”

“Just try.”

“Uh, 28?”

“She's 35!”

“Like I said, I couldn't guess.”

The exchange had continued in this fashion. We sat at the table amazed at Sam's endurance.

By this point Missy was back and I apologized profusely for my crazy-person karma. About five minutes into our story swaps, I told them about my Memphis moment with Sarah Palin/Tweet in the Denny's (“Yes, I was wearing violet” - send me your email address if you didn't read about her). Before the wrap up, a random beaming woman came to the table.

“Hi! I'm so sorry to bother you but could I please have pictures with you guys?”

Why not? Her strategy was less invasive; two of us in each photograph with her vs. just one.

She thanked us and ran off, leaving us confused about whose karma was at work this time.

But then, the stripper returned.

“I had to come back you guys. I just wanted to let you know that, um, well, one more thing...”

Had he developed a speech problem? There were too many pauses and breaks in thought that his previous trip did no prepare us for.

But then our eyes dropped lower. Our new friend had transferred the conversation to his pectorals, which were flexing alternately.

“Wow.” Missy was appalled.

The stripper laughed. “I just wanted to make sure you guys remember me.”

“Oh we will remember. We will never forget as a matter of fact,” I said. “Mission accomplished.”

Our cue to leave was the return of the beaming woman to take pictures again, this time with her and her husband...