Sunday in the Park with Mimi

So the people have popped in the park, along with the buds exploding. I remember there would be a day in Paris, an 'indifferent city' according to a journalist I met when I first arrived there, who had been exquisite, Garbo-like, with that kind of bone structure, and a job on the Trib no less, who had aged badly and so was lonelier than I, when the sun would suddenly shine on the Seine, and it was like a chrysallis had burst, and poured out a colorful populace, all of them walking alongside the river. That did not make the city any friendlier, but it was good to see there was a kind of rejoicing, just in the wonder of being. That happened today in New York.
Yesterday, with the air still chilly, a man with a beard in wedding dress drag stood alongside Central Park South with his white miniature poodle dyed several colors on its poor little head and ears,waiting to have his picture taken by tourists. I am happy to report that we have a better class of tourists than that, and most of them passed him by, or averted their eyes like a virgin in Hamburg. Today though, people thronged, a George M. Cohan word that actually applied. Many of them had children, and some of them had dogs, a favor to the children whose eyes lit up at the sight of Mimi. There was a Japanese man with an Erhu, a four stringed instrument that whines, on which he had learned to play Andrew Lloyd Webber, making it even worse. Two men sat on a bench with a chair facing, and a sign that said 'Free Advice,' so I took them up on it, and joined in a discussion of why New York is so isolating. One was in advertising, one in film, so no matter how he may be suffering at least he is not in LA. They gave me a really solid piece of advice about how to get Mimi to stop picking up garbage(she especially likes gum, which sticks in her beard, so it is rather uneven with cutting) and that is to train her with a ball and say 'Drop it' and give her a treat. We will see if it works.
We had a general discussion about loneliness, my citing being a writer giving you no workplace, the advertising guy countering with the fact that people with a workplace tire of the same faces in the workplace, so they, like me, actually go online in the hope of meeting someone(I really hold no hope but my cousin Lori met someone nice so her eleven year old daughter downloaded my hot pic from Bali onto jdate and I reeled in a pervert.) It was Joan Rivers, an old sort-of colleague(we did a record together, The Other First Family, the Kruschevs at home to counter the Kennedy-Baughan Meader album, and I was Mrs. Kruschev and she played my maid, though she reversed that casting in her autobiography which for some reason got published) who first told me about JDate, short for Jew. We passed on the street one day and she said to call her and we'd go on Jdate. It must not have worked for her as she was a guest at the wedding of Charles and Camilla, which would have to be G-Date.
Mimi had a good roll in the dirt so I just bathed her and she's sulking in a towel. But it was a really glowing day, and having sulked myself for the past few weeks, I thought I'd tell you about it, and say 'Hi.'