My Mother was a Horrible Dancer

            Every day of a cold has a different character as the virus progresses through the system. On Tuesday it had been a sore throat day. On Wednesday it had been a phlegm day with lots of sneezing. On Thursday when I woke up I felt it like a bowling ball was compressed in my forehead. There was more coughing this time around and I only exploded in one five-sneeze barrage all day. When I started singing it was clear that there was hoarseness and so I quite often had to shy clear of the high notes.

            There were two things that I needed to go out for. I had to take a shower and I was out of soap and so a trip to the supermarket couldn’t be avoided. I also needed to do laundry but I decided that I didn’t want to have to handle doing two things so I decided that I would wear ragged underwear for another day and do my laundry on Friday.

            In the late morning I rode to Freshco. I noticed that outside the supermarket they had two lonely Christmas trees left and that several sparrows were feasting on a cheese bun.

            When the wind whips leaves around they travel together in the same spinning stream of air much like murmurations of birds flying in unison.

            That night I was scheduled to work at Artists 25 for a first sitting of a two-week pose. At first the only artists were Cy Strom and a tall, curly haired woman that looked about 40 and who had a European accent that I didn’t recognize but might have been Eastern.

I warned them that I would probably get a haircut before the other half of the pose, if I wasn’t sick that day. Having missed the first half of the conversation, the woman asked if I was planning on getting sick. That reminded me of the joke about a guy who was driving along the highway and saw a mangled motorcyclist lying in the ditch underneath his hog. He stopped, approached him and asked, “Have an accident?” The motorcyclist said, “No thanks! Just had one!”

We were talking about the last Shab-e She’r poetry reading, which I’d missed. The other artist asked Cy if he wrote poetry. He said he didn’t but he had written a somewhat poetic prose critical response to a poem that Bänoo had written and asked him to respond to. He said that she’d read his response when she’d read her poem onstage. I suggested that it would have been good for him to have read the response onstage with her and he agreed. I said they could become a poetic song and dance team. He revealed that Bänoo isn’t really a dancer. That reminded me of my mother having surprised my sister and I with the news that our father had been a very good dancer and how years after her death I told Dad that she’d said that and he just responded, “Your mother was a horrible dancer.”

The night went fairly fast and I didn’t feel dragged down by my cold.

Artists 25 actually has a tip jar now for the models (or rather a little yellow tip teapot) and I got an extra $2.50. It was only the second time in my 35-year career as a model that I’ve gotten a gratuity.

I had a late dinner of a piece of chicken and two bowls of Chicago mix popcorn. The armour of one of the kernels got stuck in my throat until the next day and it reminded me of the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry David had one of his wife’s pubic hairs stuck in his throat for the whole show.

I watched another episode of Mike Hammer that featured the delightful Nita Talbot. This one was a bit of a comic story. Hammer went down to San Salvador to bring back a professor that had embezzled $100,000 from his university and who had written to him that he wanted to turn himself in but his life was in danger down there. One of the characters Hammer encountered was a French singer named Mimi. She spoke in a thick French accent but Hammer asked her what part of Brooklyn she was from. She responded in her accent, “Brooklyn? I would not be caught dead in Brooklyn! I am from zee Bronx!” Then she reverted to her Bronx accent for the rest of the episode. She is from New York but I don’t know for sure if her Bronx accent was real.