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marketing my new business
Monday, July 29 2002
This morning Gretchen cajoled me into actually making poster for my new computer repair business. So I sat down and made a flyer, complete with a photograph of me in my nerdy habitat.
I also made little cards to staple to these posters so that people could have something to tear off and carry with them, sort of a high-end fringe-tearoff system.
Next we went to the copy shop down on 7th Avenue and made 50 copies on paper of a color not currently being used by many other flyers. Then we assembled them in the copy shop using a crummy paper cutter and stapler.
With the help of my bicycle and an ingenious one-handed tape dispenser, I cruised around Park Slope putting the posters up in as many places as possible. One girl saw me putting them up on lamp posts on 7th Avenue and cautioned me that they'd immediately be ripped down by the jackbooted agents of Neighborhood Watch. "If only it stays up a few minutes..." I sighed.
I was walking behind this other woman who was putting up hot-pink flyers and noticed there was something amiss with her attire. She was wearing a skirt with a little gap in the back that would normally be cinched up tight. But instead, this gap was open about an inch wide, giving me an unobstructed view inside. Since she wasn't wearing underwear, what I saw was her lily white ass crack. Perhaps this woman always dresses this way and, since she lives alone, there is never anyone to tell her that she's putting her ass on display. It was a hot day and I could see it being more comfortable to be dressed this way, but it wasn't exactly in keeping with the standards of Park Slope.
Tonight Gretchen and I rode the subway up to 66th Street and Broadway to have dinner with a collection of her maternal relatives: her aunt Jane, her fifteen year old cousin Holly, Holly's father Tandy, her First Cousin-Once-Removed Linda, and Linda's
[REDACTED]
husband, who ended up paying for the entire meal. The restaurant where we ate was a fancy Italian place across from Lincoln Center. As we were walking in the door Gretchen turned to me and said, "This looks like the kind of place you'd want to be taken."
I mostly stayed out of dinner conversation, since I didn't have much to talk about other than my new business, which at this point isn't anywhere near worthy of boastful descriptions, even to the easily-impressed likes of Gretchen's extended family. I focused instead on drawing a rooster on the white paper tablecloth using some crayons provided. Holly liked the rooster so much that I later gave it to her.
The restaurant was so fancy that it didn't seem appropriate to order a usual Italian dish such as clam linguine. So instead I ordered the Atlantic Sea Bass, which came with some sort of chocolate sauce. I always forget the fact that I'm never all that impressed with fancy dinners built around a large slab of meat. Actually, at places this fancy, the slabs aren't even all that big.
Sometime during the dinner, Gretchen spontaneously had the idea to have Holly come spend the night at our place. It would give the poor fifteen-year-old a chance to slip the overprotective clutches of her father Tandy. Though somewhat anxious, Tandy was agreeable, but only after giving Gretchen a big lecture about how much he loves his daughter. "She's more important to me than life itself," he said. I'd heard him say this same line a year before in California.
It wasn't as if there was much craziness possible with Holly around. She's a good kid and doesn't manifest any of the normal rebellious adolescent tendencies common to kids her age. Letting our hair down consisted mostly of an uptick in the background level of conversational obscenities. We didn't get Holly drunk or sneak her into a 21 & over show. Indeed, since she's used to going to bed at 9:30pm, we didn't even stay up as late as usual.
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