vapid celebrity sighting post

FROM September 17, 2004

It was going to be on some humid cosmos shit, as Elliot put it. Storm brewin', as a Steinbeck character might grouse. In my parlance: the breath of Ivan's monsoon was both cold and humid in the city tonight, so sweatshirts were necessary—but ten minutes in, you felt like nougat after some quality time on the dashboard of a sedan. When it's weird like that, on humid cosmos shit, frame's slightly shifted, and you see things. Things like unbelievably tailored French people, and gorgeous Italian men hollering "You are number one" in accented English to their lucky paramours across the way, and ASHLEY OLSEN AT THE TASTY D-LITE.

Ashley Olsen is shorter than Elliot Aronow, which puts her at about 4'11 with a scrunchy pug face, and her dye job is INHUMAN good: glossy woven flax, gilded in soft white sand. Kudos to the colorist. She was trying to buy a $2.50 cup of Tasty D soft-serve with a credit card. I should have checked if she was carrying uber-exclusive skull and bones American Express plates; instead, I just started laughing, because that is what I am conditioned to do, is laugh. And also, I have seen New York Minute.

Luckily, the guy on line behind us inherited most of my assiness when he asked, "Are you an Olsen?" "No!" she yelped, and as she sped through the front door, he called back, "Do you know Carl from LA?" And I felt incredible sympathy for this teeny tiny freshman -- who was afforded a private, normal-person-life for about 32 seconds post-womb before her parents plopped her on the Full House baby-cam -- because creepy guys probably cat-call her stupidly all the livelong day.
Wait a minute, though; stupid creepy guys cat-call EVERY WOMAN I KNOW all the livelong day. And she is a crazillionaire. With her own penthouse. And New York Minute was racist! Fuck an Olsen twin!

And anyway, the best part of the night came on the park bench, inhaling the dewy calm and flowering clusters of the drunk and the beautiful and the stumbling, when Elliott turned to me with honest eyes and asked, "You know what's really gangsta?"

"No, what?"

"Leopards."