On the streets of New York…
Especially on the streets of New York, where most people walk rather than drive, you’re constantly rubbing shoulders with complete strangers and being bombarded with snippets from conversations whose starting points and destinations you will never know. I heard a great one today:
One fortyish woman to another outside a restaurant:
“Well, when your husband has an affair with a 72-year-old woman…”
I’ll often note down the more memorable ones. Here are a few of my favorites.
Father, about 40, with a small child on each hand walking past a nail shop:
“Look. This is Madison Avenue. Look in there. Nine women getting their feet worked on. This is New York.”
Woman to three companions: “She wasn’t dead yet.”
“She wasn’t dead yet? Oh my God!”
Woman on cell phone: “I gave up Christ for you, and now you’re telling me this?”
Outside an East Side boutique, two twenty-something women:
“But right now, you look so good.”
“He says I have no ass whatsoever.”
A big, thirty-five-ish, very well dressed black man steps out of a delivery van carrying several bags of laundry. A woman with her nine-year-old son gawks at him from the sidewalk.
The kid says, “That really your job?”
The man laughs. “I’m working off my laundry bill.”