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so self-enforcing
Monday, July 22 2002
[REDACTED]
Tonight Gretchen and I planned to see another women's basketball game at Madison Square Garden, but we headed into Manhattan early to hang out with Mary Purdy beforehand. It was a little after 5:00pm and she was seated on a blanket near the front of a crowd of thousands of others in Midtown's Bryant Park, where free movies are shown every Monday night throughout the summer. The movies don't start until 9pm, but if one doesn't set up hours early one will not find a space. It strikes me as strange that so many people would willingly piss away four hours of their lives waiting for a movie to start, especially in a city that seems founded on the equivalence of time and money.
Gretchen had brought along some snackfoods and I'd just bought $2 worth of semi-rotten strawberries, and in combination with Mary Purdy's variety of healthy snacks, made for something of a picnic. I paid almost no attention to Gretchen and Mary as they chatted about whatever they chatted about and mostly just watched the people. This one guy had brought a chair to sit in while watching the movie, but he was ordered to put it away by a police officer. I looked around the park and saw that no one was seated in chairs at all; evidently the rules of this particular free movie viewing forbid the use of chairs. Authorities seemed to be trying to keep it as uncomfortable as possible.
I was amused to notice one couple of young adults some of whose fashion sense seemed to have just emerged from a warp in space-time. The girl was wearing an acid-washed denim skirt and a blouse featuring a big buckled brown leather patch at the neck. Her male friend, meanwhile, sported an improbably cheesy mustache (no beard) and deliberately two-weeks-unwashed greasy hair. Strangely, though, the two didn't look like they'd just come in on a bus from West Virginia. She didn't have permed blond hair and wasn't wearing excessive makeup. Aside from his mustache, he wouldn't have looked out of place among a collection of conventional Union Square slackers. That's the thing about New York - there are people of all kinds, each of whom carry their own subtle and not-so-subtle defects. You know how the Universe is so big that you can imagine a planet where someone is exactly like you but has an arm protruding from his forehead? Well, New York is almost that kind of big. You can imagine a hip young couple whose only fashion mistakes are a cheesy mustache and an acid-washed denim skirt. Though the oppressive power of saturation advertising and peer pressure tends to stamp out such fashion fires as they flare up, New York is so large that there are always just enough weirdoes to carry the torch for any fashion heresy until the day of its inevitable return to orthodoxy. If you know acid washed denim is coming back, it's just a matter of time, then why not start wearing it today so you can be credited for heralding its return?
We arrived at Madison Square Garden early enough for our free pen holders and at our seats early enough to not rise for the national anthem. As I surveyed the stands, there were precious few with our lack of patriotism.
Tonight the New York Liberty were playing the Cleveland Rockers (as in, "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame" - irrelevant though that might be in modern times). Gretchen had bought expensive seats, but we were nonetheless able to upgrade them on our own. I looked up at the unfortunate fans stuffed just beneath the Madison Square Garden rafters and asked Gretchen why people would voluntarily sit way up there in the stratosphere when there were clearly empty seats down in the front. Then I answered my own question, "I guess people just do what they're told in this country." Indeed, if I was a sports fan without the benefit of Gretchen's example, I myself might think I'd be somehow "caught" if I tried to sit in the wrong seats. My British friends have told me on several occasions that the population is not nearly so self-enforcing in the UK, where "please take only one" newspaper vending machines would be an impossibility.
As usual for a Liberty game, the dykes were out in force, but also as usual, I had trouble "seeing" them. There was a couple right across the aisle from us whose members Gretchen quickly diagnosed as being involved in a butch-femme relationship. The "femme" half looked like a conventional Republican Senator's wife, complete with a manicure, makeup, and slightly permed hair. Her date was a big gentleman of a woman dressed in plaid and blue jeans. "He" even came equipped with a no-apologies bull dyke mullet. Gretchen theorized that "he" might be a so-called "stone butch," a term I'd never heard before. According to Gretchen, stone butches get all of their sexual enjoyment from pleasuring their lady friends; they have no desire to have any attention paid to their erogenous zones (such as they are) whatsoever.
Tonight's game wasn't much of nail biter, with New York quickly developing a 20 point lead and never losing much of it. The conclusion was so foregone that people began leaving a few minutes before the end so as to beat the rush.
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