Smokey the Magnificent

I am older thas you and have a BA, so you may perhaps be consoled by the fact that I, in my intervening years, have managed to do quite a few of these. I cannot catch a car key, but I do wear makeup on a semi-regular basis; in fact, the other day, in a fit of moop and at the tail-end of NaNoWriMo, I even went into Borders and sat in the health section wearing unmissable vintage red lipstick. The boy person turned up later and was visibly discomfited, but still.

I do not yet call people “honey”, but it is a very Pilates thing to do — the New Yorkers say it all the time — and I feel I am that much closer since I have started to say, “In with the air, out with the air,” for reals, to actual clients.

Mine tend to be

1. Telling subtle or semi-dodgy jokes. People tend to think I am a sweet thing and/or must have an arcane reason for asking, say, how neutrons reproduce when neither protons nor electrons are attracted to them; this has happened several times.

2. Hugging: I have several friends who hug, but I do inevitably feel that they have gone in to hug me, I have reciprocated over-readily, and they are perhaps thinking something along the lines of, “hey, lady, it’s just an expression, no need to go overboard”. I think I squeeze when I should pat, or something.

3. Greeting peoples’ dogs. It’s hard to convey, “Ah, what a fantastic dog,” and “Hey, doggie,” at the same time as a suppressed “I’m gonna die, don’t let it bite me”.

4. Sweating in public. I work out alongside someone from work: she looks like a Brazilian goddess, her hair glows, her sweat pools in attractive places, she becomes ever more flexible and strong; I get spots on my shirt, my hair plasters itself down like Mr Collins’, I look younger and younger until I am a red-cheeked eleven-year-old who needs a bath.

5. Blending in at concerts. Clapping, swaying, jumping, this type of thing.

6. Using the Starbucks conveniences without buying a six-dollar drink and without feeling as if they will knock on the door and kick me out halfway through.

7. Singing in public.

I had a slightly similar issue at Rialto when I was cleaning cinemas. People weren’t supposed to come in until we’d finished cleaning, lest they be sickened by the popcorn or steal someone’s abandoned purse before we had a chance to put it in the lost and found, or whatever. Plus I liked cleaning by myself, so I could sing. But if a sufficiently bolshie pair of old ladies with selective deafness came in and spent six minutes fluffing around arranging their handbags and sitting down, it was very hard to uproot them. Often I could not bring myself to do it, and meekly swept around their feet while they talked about their friend Vera in loud voices. Even putting up barriers and “Do Not Enter” signs at the foot of the stairs and closing the cinema doors didn’t help. It was awkward.