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How to Become Unshockable
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If you're going to stay here,
you have to become unshockable.
Fortunately, it's easy. All that's required is constant exposure to unusual
sights and behavior. After that, it's second nature.
First, become oblivious to
styles of dress. There were three people in
Battery Park dressed in black, who looked Amish. Later, I saw them in Soho.
They were speaking Russian, and were trying to oudo the male-female
couple who dress in identical miniskirted white suits with dashing peplum,
wear white heels, and accessorize matching bald heads with bright red lipstick.
Everything becomes performance art. But performance art is disappointing
next to true eccentricity. It's no match for the man in the business suit
who
talks to the flying saucers from the steps of Federal Hall, the poets who
sell their work from shopping bags, or the man who has dressed in
Elizabethan purple (including shoes) for over twenty years.
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