My husband and I are staring deeply into each other’s eyes.  But, I have to point out, this isn’t exactly the way you imagine it will be when you first fall in love.

To look at him right now, I have to stare into a mirror stationed at an angle to me.  This is because I am getting a goddamned MRI of my head today.  An MRI!  It had to be an open MRI, I had insisted to the neurologist.  “I’m very claustrophobic,” I pointed out.  “If it’s not an open MRI, you’ll have to sedate me like a jungle cat.”

Well, I certainly hate to complain, but if this is an open MRI, I don’t want to see a closed one.  My head is bolted into some apparatus and I’ve been laid onto a moving gurney that placed me in the middle of a machine that sounds, roughly, like a garbage truck with clutch problems.  I have a bulbous blue panic button clutched in my left hand.

“It’s in case you need to get out,” the technician says breezily.

“Do many people freak out?” I ask.  I just wanted to know what my odds were.

“Nope,” he says.  “Just listen to the music on the earphones.  You’ll be fine.”

Oh, sure.  Some people think earphones and music are the answer to everything — like they make you forget you’ve got some super-magnet parsing your brain into little slices, sounding all the while like a meat-grinder.  The music, I should add, is the aural equivalent of an icky sympathy card.

“Can you turn off the music?” I ask.  “It’s really trashy.”

He turns it off.  “Twenty minutes,” he says.  “Just look at your husband in the mirror.”

I look at my husband.  He also is holding my right, non-panic-button hand.  All this staring and intensity, this sense of his being my lifeline to the world, somehow reminds me of the births of our two children.  Then and now, I was flat on my back with nowhere to go.  His face, his voice, his hand calm me.  But childbirth was different: something that happened to healthy, young people.

Today, with no young people in the room, I am getting this test to find out the cause of a slight tremor in my left hand that’s interfering with my typing.  My greatest fear is that the tremor presaged the accelerated Parkinson’s my mother died from.  It probably isn’t Parkinson’s, the neurologist said.  But maybe a small stroke or something.  That was, I guess, supposed to cheer me up.

Rampant, undignified fear and high-tech medical tests snapping beauty shots of my brain — they both turn me into a quaking zombie.  Closed or open MRI, I am a mess.

Twenty long minutes pass as I practice my yoga breathing and try to relax.  For the most part, I keep my eyes closed and practice imagining I am anywhere but where I am.  The technician comes in and liberates me from the birdcage around my head.  My husband and I pause to inspect the snapshots of my brain.  “I’m not a radiologist,” my husband says, “but I think your brain looks perfect.”

As I said, this day, this time isn’t exactly how you imagine it when you first fall in love, when you’re young and invulnerable and the future is long and cloudless.  You say you want someone who loves you for yourself, for who you really are.  But somehow it never occurs to you this person will someday be gazing, well, affectionately at a photo op of your skull and its contents.

I love you for your eyes, your hair, your skin, your body, the romantic songs say.  Nobody ever says anything about the perfection of your brain scan.  But it’s a love song in its own unexpected way.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about the psychologist who thought he was a plumber

Don’t remind me!  I know it can snow and sleet in March — and probably April, for that matter.  I’m sure the streets and sidewalks can turn into icy deathtraps and the howling winds can freeze you to the marrow.  I know it, I know it.

Be that as it may, it was spring in New York this weekend.  The skies were a gorgeous blue and the air was cool, but almost warm in the bright sun.  Coats and hats and gloves were shed for lighter jackets.  The new spring color was introduced: Hint — it’s still black, but kind of a warm black.

People poured onto the streets and parks, walking dogs, pushing strollers, sitting on the rocks in Central Park.  I haven’t seen so much good cheer, goofy smiles and giddiness since the University of Texas football team won the Rose Bowl in 2006 and, for a few nutty days, life was perfect and everyone in Austin was happy.  Spring!

A woman walked an ancient fluffy, white dog whose tongue hung out of his mouth and who stopped to sit every few steps.  A young man carried a red armchair, accompanied by a young woman with a matching cushion.  Amateur photographers snapped shots of trees budding and the sunlight glinting through tree branches.

I met my husband at an art gallery show on the Upper East Side and we wandered through the exhibits.  Paintings, sculptures, collages, intense art-industry types in narrow eyeglasses and stark clothes.  “Her work is very much a part of her feminist agenda,” a man told a small crowd.  “It’s very confrontational.”

“This painting makes me deeply uneasy,” one woman told another as they peered at a painting.  “I can’t tell you why.”

“What do you mean, she’s an adult?”  a man asked a woman.  She shook her head fiercely.  “I didn’t say adult,” she snapped.  “I said Tri-Delt.”

The night before, my husband and I had just seen The Art of the Steal, a documentary about the art world.  It’s the story of Albert Barnes, a Philadelphia millionaire who, after he made his fortune, spent his life amassing an astonishing collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modern art.  It’s a lovely story of an uneducated man who simply falls in love with art and buys what he loves most.

But lovely stories can never last.  Barnes dies, leaving a supposedly ironclad will that will protect his priceless collection and keep it intact in a Philadelphia suburb.  With almost the same ferocity he loved art, Barnes hated the city of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the whole Annenberg family.  The film pointed out that Walter Annenberg’s father was a common gangster, which I found quite interesting, but when it reminded me Annenberg fils was a Republican and Richard Nixon crony who wore kneepants to the Court of St. James, that did it.  Gangsters I can appreciate, Nixon cohorts are dead to me.

The documentary told the story with a lot of dramatic sound effects.  Every time you saw the Philadelphia art museum, the background music was as ominous as if an armed killer lurked in the corners, waiting to murder art and art-lovers alike.  Through treachery and machinations and inept foes, the Philadelphia establishment managed to subvert the terms of Barnes’ will and arrange for his beloved art to be moved to the city he loathed.  “Philistines!” screamed one art-lover at a group of Philadelphia swells who had gathered to celebrate the eventual removal of the Barnes collection.

Well, I can get into blaming high society as much as anyone, as much as I blame the Nixon administration.  But, after being repeatedly bludgeoned by the heavy-handed documentary, it got a little tiresome.  Should only die-hard art aesthetes and serious students be allowed to enjoy great art?  Isn’t it better that more people will be able to see a remarkable collection of art?  And how long should the will of a man both enamored of art and embittered by a community be slavishly followed?

I don’t know.  I’m sure I’m one of those Philistines myself about art.  I left the art showing, not having lingered long enough or exclaimed enough about oeuvres and feminist perspectives and Tri-Delts.

We left and went outside, where the day was still glorious and an air of celebration lingered.  We’re all Philistines in some ways, we all find our art in different places.  Mine was out there, on the teeming, sun-filled streets, where spring had come and — who knew? — might be staying.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about owning up to being a human cliche

For some reason, my husband and I have both ended up fascinated by narratives.  He analyzes them.  I try to create them.  We talk about them a lot — much to the boredom of some people.

Why do you tell the stories you do?  What do you put in?  What do you leave out?  What do you intend — and what simply slips through?

The two of us are never more rapt than when we’re in a new place, trying to figure it out.  The day after we got to Buenos Aires, we went on a short tour of the city.  A young woman showed us the neighborhoods, the government buildings, a cathedral, public squares, where the river was now, where the river used to be.

Right offhand, I have to say my husband and I are massively ignorant about the history of South America.  Which made me wonder why most Americans go first, second and third to Europe and develop some familiarity with it — while we save the closer continent, part of our own new world, for later trips.  Or maybe we never get there at all.  Then, if we ever get there, we disagree about how to pronounce “Chile.”  (Spare me chee-LAY, por favor.)

Anyway, on the tour, we heard a sanitized version of Argentina’s history — how the country never owned slaves, how it was the nefarious Spaniards who cleaned out the Indians.  The Nazi immigration after World War II or the casita of Adolf Eichmann didn’t make the cut of stories our guide wanted to tell.

It’s the kind of narrative that could make you feel a bit culturally superior if you didn’t have a lurking awareness of the U.S.’s own tattered history of genocide against millions of Native Americans, slaveholding Founding Fathers, the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq, just to name a few historical shame pits.  (As one-quarter native American, I used to court the whole victimhood rap.  Then I learned that my tribe, the Chickasaws, had owned slaves.  Show me a slaveowner’s descendant and I’ll show you a very unattractive candidate for victim status.  Clean hands in this dirty, sins-of-the-father world are hard to come by. I need to be working on a new narrative of victimhood.  Oh, that’s right!  I’m a woman.)

The tour ended and we were dropped off in a shopping area of meat-laden restaurants and stores stocking furs, furs, furs for the upcoming cooler weather.  In one area, some daring and troubled soul with a blue paint brush had written “PETA” over drawings of cattle.

PETA?  Animal rights?  Veganism?  Will their narratives move from graffiti to the city tours and history books?

Who knows what the sanitized version of our own history will look like in the future?  Maybe our descendants will come here someday — to the new, militantly vegan Argentina — and hear stories about how the Spaniards or Nazis were so evil they ate meat and wore furs with impunity.  They’ll conveniently forget Hitler was a vegetarian and their vacationing grandparents bought leather and ate red meat every meal they were in Argentina in 2010.

That’s why this whole narrative business is so tricky and fleeting.  You clean up a place or a narrative and it just gets dirty all over again.  All I know is this: in life, in history books, in blogs, some of the best, most telling stories remain discreetly and deliberately untold.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Still confused about how to pronounce Chile? Read one of my favorite posts about never saying tomahto

See my column about a love affair with a state gone right and wrong.  Just because neither of us can help it, evidently.  It’s at

Still Dancing with Who Brung Me.

Question: Is there anything worse than walking with a man who has a GPS device in his hand and the absolute certainty he is right while you’re in a foreign city?

Answer: Yes!  It is definitely worse to walk with two such men and their crummy iPhones as they argue heatedly about who is right and whose blue dot is in the correct location.  In this situation, violence toward both the men and their blue dots may understandably be contemplated.

The two men who are bickering are my husband (at right) and his brother (left).  The strange city is Buenos Aires.  We have come here to celebrate my husband’s 60th birthday.  As far as I’m concerned, this is fine.  I’ve always wanted to come to Buenos Aires — and l’m a little tired of being the only person in the family who’s 60.  It’s about time I got a little company.

Maybe, my husband has said, since the water goes down the drain in reverse in the Southern Hemisphere, he won’t be 60 on his birthday.  Instead, he will turn 58.

We’re both going down the drain, I point out.  Does the direction really matter?

However, in the case of the iPhones and blue dots, the direction does seem to matter.  We have gotten lost on the way back from Uruguay and the farther we walk, the more unfamiliar it looks.  We plod along, through crowds, along dusty paths, inhaling exhaust fumes.  “I’m sure we’re going in the right direction,” one of the men says.  This is precisely the 85th time one of them has made a similar comment.  (Oh, yeah!  This time we’re definitely on the right track!)  I’m not sure which guy it is who’s talking; by this point, we’ve been walking so long, I can hardly tell the two of them apart.  I want to kill both of them equally.

I would ask somebody directions, but my Spanish is as shitty as the guys with the blue dots.  I have further been demoralized by the fact my brother-in-law has informed me that the double-l is pronounced with a “ch”-sound in Argentina.  This is exactly what I don’t need: To unlearn one of the few things I remember in Spanish.  I already have to work so hard to say “hola,” that I get a migraine by noon.  My Spanish, formerly bad, has become horrible.

“I think we’re getting close to the cemetery,” the man who may or may not be my husband says hopefully.  (Both guys are long on optimism, short on a sense of direction.  But I am listening to them!  What does that say about me?  Nothing good.)

But at least the cemetery would be good news.  It’s close to our apartment and we’ve already been there to see Eva Peron’s grave.  According to a shop-owner in New York’s Soho district, Evita was embalmed and looks quite natural — not at all like Madonna.  I would have asked somebody at the cemetery about the whole embalming question, but that stretches my shriveled Spanish vocabulary too far; I can barely say “dead” in Spanish.  This is of great interest to a woman who is seriously contemplating issuing an ultimatum to the two men she’s with.

Finally, one of the two guys, sensing he may not make it to age 60 no matter which way the water goes down the drain, waves his hand and hails a taxi.  We clamber inside and the taxi roars off.  The two guys chortle about what a great adventure this has been.  Getting lost!  What fun!  I try to indicate my total lack of amusement by using the universal language of women: The silent treatment.

We pass by the cemetery, which, of course, was miles and miles away from where we were.  Then we see our apartment.

Question: Is it a good thing — after all — not to get to the cemetery quickly?

Answer: Whichever way you’re going down the drain, in whatever continent, you might as well prolong the journey.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about who ever heard of a passport photo getting rejected?

I’ve never met Mark McKinnon, the Austin political media guru.  But I’ve always heard he’s a good guy — even if he did help to bring us eight years of George W. Bush.

Today, though, McKinnon moves from the political to the highly personal as he writes about the “gift” of his wife’s cancer in the Daily Beast.  (I hope to God he didn’t write that headline himself.)  In some ways, it’s a warm, touching story about a lucky guy who grows up and realizes the important things in life — you know, love and family — when his wife is diagnosed with a deadly form of cancer.

In too many other ways, though, it’s self-congratulatory bullshit and it made me want to scream.

The essay starts out with gratuitous references to McKinnon’s many successes, replete with famous names.  Then, after you wade through a trove of the prominent and well-known and reviled, it moves on to the heart of the matter.  McKinnon’s wife is diagnosed with a highly aggressive form of cancer with only a 15 percent survival rate.  Being a fighter, though, a “Lance Armstrong in skirts,” she raises her chin and says she feels sorry for the other 85 percent.  Because, you see, she has a great attitude and she’s going to live.

I’ve heard that McKinnon’s wife, too, is a lovely person.  I’m happy that she survived a deadly form of cancer — for her sake, her husband’s, their two children’s.

But doesn’t her husband understand what he’s saying when he writes about her miraculous survival the way he does?  Maybe he thinks he’s writing only about his wife, but he’s not.  He’s also implicitly referring to the other, pitiable 85 percent who didn’t make it.  And it seems to be their fault, since they weren’t as wonderful, as determined, as combative as his wife.  They didn’t have her attitude, they weren’t like Lance Armstrong in drag, they ended up dead, tough luck.

I’m one of the lucky myself — even if my odds were closer to fifty-fifty –  so I take this very personally.  It’s personal because I lived and so many of my friends did not.

Let me tell you about them: All in all, they were better people than I am.  They went through repeated biopsies, surgeries, chemotherapies, radiations with incredible, valiant resolve.  They didn’t feel sorry for themselves.  They just kept pushing and doing anything they could to survive.

Some went through excruciating rounds of experimental therapies that made them violently ill.  You hear about some of the “miracles” that occasionally result from these therapies; what you usually don’t hear is that the vast majority of them don’t work.

But their attitudes — God, they were incredible, indomitable!  They were some of the flintiest, most resilient people I’ve ever known in my life.  They “deserved” to live, but it didn’t matter.  They died, anyway — my friends Martha and Katherine and Clare and Roxy and so many others.  And Donna, who moved heaven and earth to live to see her three children grow up; her oldest child came to see her in the hospital, dressed up in his high-school graduation cap and gown, a few days before she died.

But McKinnon doesn’t seem understand it’s possible to write about his wife’s survival, to celebrate it and her and her tremendous spirit without impugning others who weren’t so fortunate.  Cancer is complicated, wily, unpredictable.  It helps to have good health insurance, supportive family and friends.  But attitude isn’t the panacea McKinnon seems to think it is.  He says he’s a lucky person, but it’s clear to me he has no idea what a great role luck, sheer luck, played in his wife’s survival.

It’s a wonderful thing to be lucky.  But it’s tragic and short-sighted and insulting to others who weren’t so fortunate to take credit for luck and call it attitude.  Life and cancer aren’t fair and they aren’t barometers of character.  Maybe someday, McKinnon will mature enough to realize that.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

See another of my favorite posts about survival of the fittest doesn’t always apply

Oh, sure.  Somebody like me gets a lot of questions.

Paper or plastic?  Credit or debit?  Tap or bottled?

You see what I mean.  But hey, I’m used to it.  It’s part of being a semi-public persona (i.e., someone well-known to at least a dozen people) who’s too lazy to do much of anything for herself.

However, this most recent query stopped me in my low-heeled tracks.  “Who,” a woman asked me recently, “is your fashion icon?”

My fashion icon?  I could feel my skull crashing in, my breath growing short, my balance teetering.  Just look at me, I thought, panicking.  Do I look like I have a fashion icon?

Unfortunately, it was a perfectly earnest question asked me by a style consultant.  We were traipsing in and out of stores in Soho so I could learn some insider shopping tips.  In theory, it had sounded like fun.  In practice, it reminded me of how much I dislike shopping.  All the styles start whirling together like a deranged merry-go-round and pretty soon, I’m working on a migraine or recalling how I’ve just left a novel I’ve been reading at a particularly critical point and really should get home immediately.

There is a reason I dress the way I do, which might be charitably described as desperately hoping to look classic.  As my husband has very unhelpfully pointed out, even when I buy new clothes, they look very much like my old ones.  This is because, I tell him, I have a certain style, a certain je ne sais quoi.   I possess  a signature look the same way I have a signature fragrance.  Neutral colors on my body and Quelques Fleurs on my pulse points and I am hereby set for the rest of my life.   Why mess with a rut if it’s comfortable?  After all, it took me a good decade for me to be pried out of maternity clothes (so comfortable!  so forgiving!); if it hadn’t been for my daughter’s insistence, I’d still be wandering around looking like one of these older women going for the oldest pregnancy record in Guinness.

In the meantime, the fashion icon question was ignored, then it reared its head again on a Soho street.  God, what now?  Who’s a fashion icon, anyway — and why don’t I have one?  Madonna, no way; Carla Bruni, I can’t stand; Michelle Obama, too young; Anna Wintour, too cold and unsympathetic — and I can’t afford the Prada.  Jackie O?  Too dead.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I mumbled.  “I guess I’ve never thought about it.”

This appeared to be shocking news.  No fashion icon!  No style focus in life!   Hopeless!

“You probably just need to think about it a little longer,” the style consultant said.

I trailed her in and out of a few stores, thinking about the matter.  It finally occurred to me that not only do I not have a fashion icon in my life — but I am also a little sick and tired of the whole word icon, along with derivatives like iconic.  Enough with it, enough with diva, too, as long as I’m at it.  (Diva used to be an interesting, expressive term.  Now, it’s just any fairly ordinary woman with a bad disposition, no talent required.)

I have no icons, fashion or otherwise, in my life.  Now and then, I stumble across a diva, then keep stumbling in the opposite direction as fast as I can.   Life’s too short for ill-tempered people and I’m too old and set in my ways to dredge up a fashion icon.  I headed home as quickly as I could.  My book was there, waiting for me.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about helpful hints for an unemployed kid

When you’re diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, you realize there are two different groups of people in the world.  There are the sick and the healthy.

You already know about the healthy.  (After all, you are a formerly healthy person yourself!)  But, the longer you are sick, the more you learn about the healthy — and it isn’t good.  They are so heedless, so superficial, so carefree.  Since they are so ignorant of their own good fortune in being healthy, they don’t recognize their appalling arrogance in assuming they will always be healthy.

You don’t want to be too hard on them — even if they do say the stupidest things to you, like how your attitude is the most important thing, blah, blah, blah.  You can remember how it was to be that foolish.

But now, being sick, you have been enlightened.  You realize how precious and finite and delicate life is.  Your eyes have been permanently opened.  You take nothing for granted — not a minute, a breath, a smile.  If only the healthy could understand what you understand.  But, of course, they cannot.

There is a problem with your permanent enlightenment, though.  If you are fortunate enough to become healthy again, it slowly begins to fade.  You become — sadly! — similar to the blithe, thoughtless, healthy person you used to be.

Your old enlightenment returns at odd occasions, though, like checkups at the doctor’s office.  It lasts long enough to give you a tantalizing glimpse of what you have lost — the vivid emotions, the fevered embrace of life, the gratitude for normalcy.  But, if your news is good, it vanishes once again.  You have returned to the other side, to life among the healthy.  And do you really appreciate it?  No, of course, you don’t.

The old enlightenment flares up at other times, too.  You feel it when you have news of an old friend’s critical illness.  How random and heartbreaking life is, you think.  You will yourself to remember that, but you know you won’t succeed.

Instead, what you remember is your old friend and how you were young together when you were in grad school.  Scenes shift through your mind — the country and western bar, where you all danced to Willie Nelson and Hank Williams, laughing and sweating and throwing back golden rivers of beer.  The holiday break, the trip in an old green Volkswagen bug.  Oh, yes.

You, the person who fails again and again at permanent enlightenment, know those days are long past, no matter what.  But at least you’re finally smart enough to realize that a small piece of you and your memories and your hold on life will be extinguished by his death.

Is this another lesson — that there are only two groups of people, the quick and the dead?  Hell if you know.

Godspeed is all you can think, even if you don’t believe in much of anything.  You know this one is going to hurt.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)
Read one of my favorite posts about plan now for your ultimate sendoff

Months ago, when we first came to New York, I recall whining in print (this is also known as writing) about seeing no celebrities.  It’s all gotten better since then.  To paraphrase Lily Tomlin in The Late Show, which you should see because it’s so damned funny, we’ve now done the whole star trip.

It started a couple of months ago at Hale & Hearty Soups.  My husband, who was standing in line next to me, started rolling his eyes and twitching uncontrollably.  It’s usually my role in life to do that — not his — so I knew something was up.

“That guy,” he whispered loudly to me, his eyes bulging, “is famous.”

“What?”

“Famous!”

“Are you sure?”

“He’s in the Senate!”

OK, so after this totally inarticulate introduction, I realized that was Al Franken standing two inches away from us.  I then disgraced myself by tapping him on the shoulder and gushing about how happy I was he was in the Senate.

“I know I’m not supposed to do that, am I?” I asked my husband later.  “I’m supposed to be cool and pretend not to notice famous people.”  My husband agreed, but later, my native New Yorker friend Grace reassured me it was perfectly OK to say complimentary things to famous people in public, as long as you didn’t make too big a racket.  “They like that a lot,” she said.

After that everything was quiet for a while.  We’re usually so intent on wandering around the city without barreling into other pedestrians or getting squashed by taxis that we simply have no time to look around for famous people.  Besides, I am just miserable at recognizing people.  They never look like I expect them to look.  If they want me to know they’re famous, they should be wearing nametags with extra-big print in case I don’t have my reading glasses on.

But then, we stumbled into a restaurant in the Theatre District after a play last night.  My husband hissed to me that he’d just seen Jack Black go to the bathroom.  “You know, that funny guy who’s on Jon Stewart,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure.”  He nodded vehemently in the direction of a big guy with glasses who was walking past our table.

“You mean Lewis Black?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

After that, we were on fire.  Forget the food, the drink.  Our heads swiveled like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist.   We were clearly in a celeb watering hole.

“My God,” I said to my husband.  “Don’t turn around and stare.  But I think that’s the young actor from the play we just saw.  His last name was Bogart, remember?  And he’s with an older woman who’s really glamorous.  It must be Lauren Bacall.”

“His last name was Robards,” my husband pointed out.

“Lauren Bacall was married to Bogart and Jason Robards,” I said.  (When my friends Joyce Harris and John Anders aren’t around, I’m always responsible for genealogical and marital information like that; it can be a lonely, thankless business.) “It still must be her.  My God.  Lauren Bacall.  He must be her grandson.”

I tried to look blase and concentrate on my salad.  Then, disaster.  “They’re leaving,” I said.  My husband and I pivoted in our seats, trying not to look obvious.  The turbaned grandmother and handsome grandson swept out of the restaurant like royalty.

The restaurant hostess walked by our table and I gestured at her.  “Did you see Lauren Bacall here?”

She froze.  “Where?”

“Two tables away from us.”

“I’ll find out from the waiter,” she said.  “That’s really exciting.”

When we finally calmed down and paid our bill, we stopped to talk to the hostess.  “It wasn’t Lauren Bacall,” she said.  “That wasn’t her name on the credit card.  It was Robards.”

“That’s because she was married to Jason Robards,” I said, wondering how many times I was going to have to go through this whole explanation.

The hostess waved the waiter over.  He reported the young actor had called the woman “Mom.”  He ran through his credit-card receipts.  “Her name was Lois Robards.”

“That’s her,” my husband said loudly and confidently.  “That was Lauren Bacall.”

“Anybody else famous here tonight?” I asked them.  “We know all about Lewis Black.”

“Tony Shalhoub,” the waiter said.  “You know, the guy in Monk.”

“He’s married to Blair Brown,” I interjected.  “She must be here, too.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” the waiter said.

Once we got home, I googled Lois Robards.  As it turns out, she was Jason Robards’ last wife, whom he was married to when he died.  Lauren Bacall’s successor, but not Lauren Bacall herself.

It was disappointing and all that.  But at least I learned something: New Yorkers are as slavish as any tourist when it comes to celebrities.  I’m no longer ashamed of being a celebrity whore.  I guess that’s what happens when you almost see Lauren Bacall.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about being nice to writers and journalists

Do check out this fascinating psychological research (and researcher)

here.