New York
Last week Amy gave Hugh and me a large plastic tankard of industrial cooking oil for deep-fat frying and this afternoon I carried it to the Laundromat, having mistaken it for the nearly identical tankard of detergent—same size, same color. The only difference was the spout. That’s what stopped me from pouring a cupful of it into the top of the machine. If I had, the best thing to do would have been to walk away, buy new clothes and sheets and towels, and never return to that Laundromat again. I’m guessing stuff would be pretty much ruined after going through an oil cycle.
July 11, 1997
New York
Last night was one of the happiest of my life. The play was sold out, every seat taken, with folding chairs set up at the back of the theater. I had no idea our Times review was out until Amy called to tell me about it. Then I heard from Drew, the choreographer, who read it out loud to me before I could stop him. It’s as if I wrote it myself as a joke. They mentioned Hugh’s set and his inventive direction. “Vulgarity just shouldn’t be this funny, but it’s being ridiculed, reveled in.”
Really, we ridiculed it?
I hoped they’d praise all the actors equally, and it hurts that they left out Toby and Sarah. I can’t understand their choices, but it’s a glowing review. After last night’s performance, the Lincoln Center Festival people took us to dinner at a swank restaurant. I was so certain this play would fail.
July 28, 1997
New York
Last night I watched Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction, a ten-minute program stretched out to an hour. “Is this genuine film footage of a visitor from another planet, or just a cruel hoax designed to prey upon our worst fears? We’ll be back in a moment.”
I kept waiting for the actual autopsy, but for the most part we saw the same shot over and over: a doctor in a protective outfit gesturing with a fountain pen toward the alien’s flesh wound. The alien itself looked like a child in a Halloween mask, its genitals blurred out with one of those scramblers. Interviewed were several people who had witnessed the Roswell crash fifty years ago. An unstable-looking woman said she was threatened by government officials to keep silent. “We saw the saucer on the ground and two little people who were crying and trying to resuscitate a third alien, who looked like he was more than likely dead. Then the two live ones ran over and clutched this metal box. I don’t know what was in it but remember thinking, That box means something to those two aliens.”
July 29, 1997
New York
Ben Brantley wrote an overall review of the Lincoln Center Festival in yesterday’s Times. “‘Astonish me,’ Diaghilev’s much-quoted artistic dictum, is the imperative brought by the sort of people who attend self-defined ‘cultural events’ like ‘Les Danaides’…But only the Sedarises’ ‘Incident’ provided astonishment. This brother-and-sister playwriting team has an unparalleled ear for American cultural clichés and an equally fine hand for twisting those clichés into devastating absurdity.”
The news of the review was ruined by a call from a People magazine photographer. They’re running a story about the book, and she phoned saying she’d like a picture of me either wearing a towel or peeking out from behind my shower curtain. This is what happens when you choose the title Naked over, say, Quiet Dignity.
August 31, 1997
La Bagotière
Hugh and I awoke to the news that Princess Diana has been killed, literally hounded to death by photographers. I’ve been listening all morning to the BBC. Correspondents interview one person after another, one of them an “agony expert” who said it’s often very painful when people die.
October 3, 1997
New York
Tiffany called collect this morning, sobbing and saying that she can’t leave the house. It happens every so often. Other days she can leave but still wakes up crying. I feel bad for her but can’t understand the problem. Isn’t there some kind of medication for this? She talks about Mom, about the school she went to twenty years ago, all this stuff from the past, over and over.
October 5, 1997
New York
Hugh and I went with Amy and Mitch to see Kiss the Girls, the worst thing I’ve seen in a long time. It was another of those “I think we’ve got a serial killer on our hands” thrillers. I sat beside a stranger, and twenty minutes into it we were nudging one another and rolling our eyes. Making it worse, I had to sit through another endless preview for Titanic. Who do they think is going to see that movie?
October 18, 1997
Columbus, Ohio
I was met at the Columbus airport by a fellow named Rick, who was kind and positive and announced with genuine excitement that he was taking me to a restaurant called Johnny Rockets for lunch. “You’ll totally love it,” he said. “It’s a fifties-style place where the waitresses chew gum and offer to draw things on your hamburger buns with plastic ketchup squeezers. They sing sometimes, too, and give you a nickel so you can play the little jukeboxes they have on the tables!”
It sounded awful to me, but I didn’t want to disappoint him, so we went, my teeth gritted. When the waitress did indeed offer to sketch something on my hamburger bun, I requested a swastika and then wished I hadn’t.
“Or a face,” I said. “A happy face would be great too.”
Rick, bless him, reminded us that before it was taken over by the Nazis and turned into something ugly, the swastika was a Celtic symbol of good luck.
After lunch he took me to Target, and I learned he’d recently won a year of free groceries by entering a sweepstakes at Big Bear, a local supermarket chain.
October 20, 1997
New York
Women are angry in New York tonight. On the corner of Houston and Thompson, I heard a black woman yell at her boyfriend, “Because let me tell you something, motherfucker, I don’t need you.”
Continuing south down West Broadway, I fell in behind a white couple, the woman walking several steps in front of her boyfriend. “Don’t you ever fucking shush me, you asshole, especially in front of an employee.”
Apparently he’d been trying to make a dinner reservation and asked her to pipe down so he could hear the hostess on the pay phone he was using. This was clearly the wrong thing to do. She went from being shushed to complaining about the stupid way he goes about giving and receiving information. “Like whenever we get into a cab and you ask the driver how he’s doing tonight. And nobody fucking cares how he’s doing, least of all him. All he wants is the goddamn address and there you are, trying to be his best friend, so don’t shush me.”