Confessions of a Psychic: Excerpt

(Written in June, 2008. Copyright Peri Lyons, all rights reserved.)

Last night was kind of the exception to every rule I have as an intuitive.

Started the day off right by doing a (thank heavens, spot-on) reading for a nice new client, an attractive and articulate British artist. It was a relief to get verifiable facts right, as lately the psychic stuff had been feeling stuck. Now, for whatever reason, my mental clouds cleared and I couldn’t talk fast enough to convey the torrent of information I was getting. Artists are often much easier for me to read. I suppose that’s for a few reasons: one being that artists lead less conventional lives and therefore have fewer things to”hide”; another being that visual artists think in very vivid images, and those images often show up for me “verbatim”, if you will. In this reading, when I was telling the artist about his immediate family, I was trying to get his niece’s name. Immediately, I saw a picture of an English Garden.”Her name is ‘Garden?’” I asked, incredulous. He grinned.

I looked closer, and started naming everything I saw in the image in my mind. “Garden. Stone wall. Bunny rabbit. Oh…FERN!! Her name is Fern!”

He was laughing so hard he couldn’t speak for a moment, but when his mirth subsided a bit, he gasped out, "No, actually her name is Stonewall Bunny Rabbit.  It's an English thing. Yeah, her name is Fern"

The rest of the reading went well, although we were both confused when I got an image of his late father, in which the lanky English gentleman was wearing a white sleeveless sweater and white shorts. "No" he said decisively. "He never wore that."

A bit crestfallen, I said " well, okay, I can be wrong,I guess, but ...",  and bid him Adieu at the door of my shoebox-sized flat.  A postscript to this: a few days later, he rang me up."Peri, remember my dad showed up wearing the white sweater and shorts?  Well I rang. my mum, and was telling her about the reading, and she said " you idiot, your father, played tennis religiously for the last 20 years of his life.  That was his tennis outfit."

There was a slight pause "I had left home by then, but I should've remembered that."

"No worries," I reassured him. I was in no position to rebuke anyone for forgetfulness. The day before I had temporarily puzzled a friend when I asked her to close the, um, the, um “rectangular shaped wall thing."

She stared at me, then a light went on, and she exclaimed, "Oh, the DOOR!  You mean the DOOR!"

"Uh, yeah. Door. I knew that." I said touchily.

She looked at me with narrowed eyes. "Why can you remember the word ‘rectangular’ and not the word ‘door’? I'm just curious."

“I was testing you," I lied briskly. “Come on, let's go."

As the British artist left, my phone rang. It was a party entertainment agency.  Somehow they'd heard of me, gotten my number, and asked if I would do a last-minute ”Tarot reading" gig. Since I had decided that day that there was a new pair of rather spendy Louboutins that I needed in order to keep breathing voluntarily,  I said "Abso-LUTELY”, with a fervor that took the nice woman from the agency a bit aback, because there was a pause before she recovered, saying brightly “Ooo-KAY then!"  She gave me an address, said " It's a party, thanks for doing this, bye!"  And hung up with a relief I could hear 20 blocks away - On reflection, I should probably have paid a little more attention to that.  However, pausing only to change into a cute dress, feed the prowling catbeasts and mentally spend the eye-popping sum she had promised, I headed to the Upper West Side.

The building's lobby was gleamingly ostentatious.  The doorman had obviously gotten high marks in the “eyeing visitors suspiciously” part of the doorman exam.  When he finally put down the tenant phone and announced grudgingly, “They'll see you now", I heard the unsaid warning "…and don't track anything on the carpet with your Payless MaryJanes there, peasant."

The building elevator was bigger and much better furnished in my apartment.  Which made sense, when I got to the party place and found that their co-op was measurably bigger than the actual town I grew up in. It also seemed oddly deserted, until suddenly a cacophony of high-pitched giggling broke out in a far distant room.  I set out to find the noise, reluctantly abandoning the idea of leaving a trail of the ChexParty Mix so I could find my way back to the living room, and came upon a party, all right…it was a 12 year old's birthday party. Yikes. The nice agency lady didn't mention this. I don't read for people under 18.

While I was undergoing a St. Augustine-size crisis of conscience--"Dear God, give me a way to keep my professional ethos intact and yet still be able to buy shoes", was my shallow yet heartfelt prayer-a professional kids party entertainment troupe was organizing a"Murder Mystery" for the young ‘uns. Wow. Those children managed to reach a decibel level that would make Def Leppard weep with envy.

Meanwhile, I  walked in and greeted the assembled parents. I was led to a kitchen table by an immensely patronizing mom, who made it clear that she thought I was a…well, a Tarot reader sent by a party agency. (Which is why I don't work with agencies, there's just too much stigma to overcome and it takes energy away from the reading.) She sat me down in front of her extremely nice friend and said, "Here. DO her."

[Note: She meant "do a psychic reading for this person", lest you think this story is going in another direction entirely.]

I thought “O-kay. Let's see if we can take that smirk off your puss, my dear." Sat down, took the younger woman's hand and said ,"Disc problems, neck, two discs, for operations in two years. Also lower back, L2 and L3 discs, especially affected."

They both gaped at me. Well, that was fun.

The older woman said, accusingly,"Who told you that?" She was a little angry.

I turned back to the younger woman."Your mother issues are entirely valid; she WAS enormously controlling and she WAS verbally abusive, but you have to remember that you were her only daughter, and she did love you tremendously but-due to the situation with her father, especially-she simply didn't have the emotional tools in her toolkit to show love. And she didn't love your three brothers better."

Silence.

The other woman said."Look, someone must've told you she has three brothers."

I took HER hand and said,"You work in an agency of some kind; your specialty is coordinating various groups of people in some way; you work, with each group separately and then coordinate them. You work for the greater good. You went back to work recently after taking time off. You just got a promotion, you sit here [drew diagram on the tablecloth with my finger] and the man who is your boss and yet is not directly your boss, sits over here. He has a tree in his office. The woman you don't get along with sit here: she's bossy, but doesn't actually know what she's doing. Short black hair. Bad lipstick choices."

Silence.

Then suddenly, I'm a bit ashamed of myself. Everyone has their buttons, and mine is being condescended to. I have way too much pride. And psychics are supposed to be accurate, but we are not really supposed to show off. -Or are we??

More silence.

Then suddenly the older woman begins to laugh. She's delighted, like a kid who's Justina really good magic trick. “That's TOTALLY RIGHT!! OH MY GOD!! That's AMAZING!! How do you DO that?"

I said truthfully, "I have NO idea."

I finished both their readings, and as always happens after I do a reading for someone, we felt sort of bonded and would smile warmly across the room. When we caught each other's eyes at the party. Meanwhile, you put a visible Tarot deck in a room with a bunch of 12-year-old girls and soon you will be surrounded by an imploring, lipglossed tribe of supplicants. No way I could say no, but man, is THAT a tricky thing… Many, many ethical considerations. I do not do readings for the under 18 crowd. Finally, I figured out a way in which I could do it with ethics and integrity. This involved reflecting back the most obvious positive aspects of the child in question, and telling them that if they take breaks during studying to say the magic phrase." I am now remembering and understanding this perfectly!" that they would do even better in school. I also made a point of telling them that there's no such thing as hard-and-fast "fortune-telling": that we each make our own luck and destiny, with hard work, honesty and respect for ourselves and the folks around us. [Re-reading this, I sound a bit like a sanctimonious pill, but it was the best I could do at the time.] -Just to satisfy ‘em a little, I would tell them how many brothers and sisters they had, or if they had a pet and what kind of pet they had and even sometimes with the pet's name was. They LOVED it. BUT--not a single girl, even the 13-year-olds, asked about boys. Is the latency period longer than it used to be? What's UP with that?

Then, just as I was leaving the older woman came up with her five-year-old boy. He was a "Leave It To Beaver" outtake with huge blue eyes, total sweetness radiating from his every pore, and a Mets hat on.

"Max says something to ask you" she said.

"Will you read my fortune?" he said.

[Oh, boy. Yikes. God? Help me out here.]

I knelt down."Hi Max! I'm Miss Peri!"

"Hi," he said in a suddenly wee voice.

"Max, I see with my magic powers that you LOVE baseball!"

His eyes got really big."Wow!" he breathed.

"Well, you ARE wearing a Mets hat, Max. So that's not magic, it's just paying attention, which is really all I do."

He thought for a minute. "Can you tell me what my favorite subject is?" he challenged.

" Math!" I shot back. "And you're good at baseball because you're really great batter and have great hand-eye coordination."

His mom laughed. "He just tested really high for that."

Max looked down and blushed. "I AM a great batter", he admitted in a whisper.

"And I bet you have so many friends, because you really care about other people's feelings and that's great."

"Yes." he whispered.

"Max, you're going to have the best year ever. That's my prediction." I shook his hand and prepared to rise but he caught my arm.

"Miss Peri?”

"Yes, Max?"

"Will I have children?" His eyes were big and his face was solemn. He really wanted to know. It was such an odd, unexpected question, that my eyes welled up.

"Maxie, you can have all the children you want, you can adopt some too. But promise me something?"

"What?" He looked relieved, but still anxious.

"Please don't get married until you're at least 11"

I kissed the top of his head and ran out the door.


********************************




For more information on what I do, and to book an appointment, please visit http://www.PeriLyonsIntuitive.com 
Thanks and love
P.

Last Letter From Stalingrad

Last Letter From Stalingrad, January 1943
by Peri Lyons, c 2012 all rights reserved

(In 1976, a mailbag came to light in the archives of the US Army. It was filled with letters.
These letters were written by German soldiers. In 1943, the German army abandoned the soldiers it had left in Stalingrad, leaving them to die of exposure and starvation.. These letters were written by the men, when they knew no one was coming back for them.
I found these letters in a book, and, although of Austrian Jewish descent, I was moved by the words of men I grew up thinking of as enemies.
.This is a reworking of one of those letters.Who this man was, and why was he was "avoided by men", I will never know.-PL))

Last Letter From Stalingrad

Dear Monica
There are four of us here
For the first time I have friends
other than my friends, the stars.
(I couldn't look up from my telescope, Monica.
Not then. You know why. I was avoided by men.
So I looked at the sky.)

This letter will take two weeks to reach you
It will all be over by then
Do not believe what you read in the papers
of what they say has happened here:
What are the judgments of others, to you and me?
Monica, the time is too serious now to joke:
You were always my best friend.

I have always thought in lightyears
But I felt in seconds.
On this beautiful night
Andromeda and Pegasus are right above my head
I have looked at them for a long time
I shall be very close to them soon
My peace I owe to the stars, Monica
Of which you are the most beautiful to me.

Around me everything is collapsing
An army is dying
Day and night are on fire
And four men busy themselves with their job
We measure temperatures
And report on cloud ceilings
Here too. I have much to do with the weather.

No one, no one will come for us, Monica
There is no one to come
The clouds are rather low this evening
They make a pattern I have not seen before

I want you to know my secret, Monica
No human being has ever died by my hand
I have never loaded my pistol
With live ammunition.
I should like to have counted stars
For another few decades
But I suppose nothing will come of that now.

I have always thought in lightyears
But I felt in seconds
On this beautiful night
Andromeda and Pegasus are right above my head
I have looked at them for a long time
I shall be very close to them soon
My peace I owe to the stars, Monica
Of which you are the most beautiful to me.

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Eddie Sebastian,Private Eye: A Cat Appreciation

Eddie Sebastian, Private Eye
note: Today would have been Eddie Sebastian, Private Eye"'s 25th birthday. This was written four years ago. Eddie left this planet in 2008...I think to go back to the planet he came from.

Ed is a twenty year old cat. He is the oddest animal I've ever known.

Ed is, in his own mind, many things: a Bon Vivant; a Devil With The Ladies, an Internationally Acclaimed Sculptor...also? the Official Greeter for my building, a Fighter of Dogs, and (as we shall see) a MAJOR Player on the New York Real Estate Scene.

In real life? Eddie is a skinny orange-striped eunuch with white eyebrows: his fancy fur is the exact color orange of the hip leatherette vinyl jackets worn by Starsky and Hutch-type private eyes in 1970's copshows. But Ed has never let reality bother him: when a pretty lady friend walks into my apartment, he strolls over to her, his inner Barry White Love Soundtrack obviously playing a seductive disco beat, and then, when she is seated, he lies on his back across one of her feet, the better to show off his belly. 

"Hey baby", Ed says."Betcha never seen nothin like THIS before, huh? I think you wanna be my Lady NOW, am I right? I know I am, darlin. You...are my Forever Lady. ....PET me."

And, indeed...the Ladies go crazy over him, proving yet again that confidence is everything. One pretty lady friend of mine, the glamourous TamTam, actually stitched Ed a heartshaped red pillow- stuffed with catnip!- AND, with the words "I Love Ed", embroidered on the front in white cursive script. I was touched. Ed never said thank you. But he loves his comfy token of devotion: sometimes he uses it as a pillow, sometimes as a toy... but sometimes? I find it under the bookcase, because Eddie likes to make it clear that no woman can own him, baby.  He never made no promises. He is a free n easy swinger. He is his own man. Or would be, if he was a man, rather than, say, a relatively minuscule quadruped with orange eyebrows, and an ego the size of Detroit.

*****************************************************
Some years ago, my friend Adam, an artist, asked if he could borrow Ed, the better to deal with a sudden Mouse Problem in Adam's studio. I said,  "Sure." So Ed went to live there for a while, spending his leisure time intently watching the artist paint and sculpt. Obviously, Ed took notes, because one night we walked into the studio, to find that Ed has made his own, site-specific sculptural art piece: he had surrounded the cat food tin on the floor, with nine perfectly symmetrical piles of "homogenous found materials."

There was: one pile of cat fur fluff, one pile of wood shavings, one pile of dry cat food, and so on....nine perfectly round, perfectly identical (in size and shape) art piles , surrounding the cat food can in a perfect circle. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, the single goddamndest thing I've ever seen. Eddie trotted up to meet us as we entered, and led us to his masterwork, looking back every two seconds to make sure we were following him. When we approached it,  he stood there with an attitude that said, quite clearly, "VOILA!"

If I'd been thinking straight, i would have photographed it and then found him a dealer and a gallery. By now, you might be reading, instead of this, a piece about Ed's current retrospective at MOMA.

*************************

Fast forward two years. By now, the artist friend (now my husband) and I, were living in Carroll Gardens. We had a lovely floor-through apartment ,with a landing that had an entrance to the apartment on either side: so that it was possible to go out through the kitchen door, on one side, mosey across the landing,  and go straight through to the bedroom door on the other side. One day, Ed , in a spirit of adventure and inquiry, scratched at our kitchen door, so that he could go exploring. Finding himself on the hall landing, he went across it...and scratched on the bedroom door, opposite. We let him in, little suspecting what was to follow.

Eddie stopped short, upon entering the bedroom from a whole new perspective, and then his whole orange self, stiffened in astonishment. 

"Hey!" his attitude said, very clearly ."You know what?? I have ANOTHER apartment, exactly like THIS one! Then he looked at us. "And you guys look just like those OTHER people I know! My OTHER servants! This is AMAZING!!" 

He walked around the entire apartment, his tail a quivering question mark of dazzled discovery. He couldn't believe it. Here he was, only three years old, and yet ALREADY he owned TWO apartments in a pretty nice section of Brooklyn. AND , two more servants. This was GREAT!

Ed walked up to the kitchen door (which I'd closed) and scratched to be let out, then, did the same drill: walked across the landing to the bedroom door and scratched to be let in, and- once again!- was completely overcome with delight to find that he had...yes..THREE apartments! With ? Two MORE servants! Making a total of six! In a nice section of Brooklyn! God DAMN! And then he made the same inspection as before, with the same quivering, question mark tail....

He was impressed. Self-impressed. Only three years old, and yet, he had accomplished SO MUCH. "What a genius i am," one could hear him thinking. It was almost audible. What was more than audible, was his purring, He sounded like a bilge pump. on steroids.

Since it was a Sunday afternoon with not much else going on, I decided to see how many times he'd repeat his Voyage of Amazing Real Estate Discovery. The answer was? Eighteen times. Each time, he seemed progressively more chuffed. Each time, he repeated his tour of triumphant inspection. Each time, you could see him mentally trying to keep track of how many servants he had NOW. 18 apartments. 36 servants. And a market value of, oh...22 million? 24? That's 40 MILLION cans of Little Friskies! [Cat currency is a wee bit different than human's. Their values are much more specific.]

 At the end of it all, Eddie turned around three times in a circle, curled up, and went to sleep...for sixteen hours. 

Hey, real estate mogulhood is TIRING!

He was a happy landlord. And, to be fair...he only raised the rent once...the day he decided that he needed a can and a HALF of Friskies, a day. But we scrimped and saved, and made do...and somehow? We managed.

****************************************

The day we moved into  the aforementioned apartment on President Street, I was piling up boxes, Adam was haggling with the movers,  and Ed was exploring the fireplace. Suddenly, I heard a "CLANG!" ...and a black cat I'd never seen before, went scooting into the room I was in, and hid under the couch. I couldn't understand where this strange black cat had come from. -And where was Ed? But when I picked up the noir stranger and my hands turned pitch colored, I got suspicious, and put the intruder under the bathroom tap: as the water ran, he gradually revealed himself to be a ginger cat named Ed, who had figured out how to release the thing on the fireplace that held all the soot back, and then got drenched in an avalanche of hundred year old cinders. 

A new identity: Master of Disguises. Cat of Mystery. Politically incorrect user of blackface. Blackcatface. Eddie fearlessly broke taboos. Of course the last taboo is a taboo because it's just a stupid thing to do, but Ed cared not. -I'm surprised he didn't wind up headlining in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, frankly.

******************************************************

For ten years, Eddie Sebastian, Private Eye,  had a performance art ritual that was as ironclad as it was baffling: he did what we called "The Work." 

It started one night not long after we were married. At three a.m., a series of inexplicable, loud and bizarrely specific noises began issuing from the kitchen. I turned to my spouse. "Hey, wake up! I hear something that sounds like someone is tipping over a series of small marble busts of Napoleon,  in the kitchen, honey!"

 Adam awoke, and listened for a moment. "My God, that IS what it sounds like. What the hell?"

I got up, and, walking into the kitchen, switched on the light, to find Ed sitting there with a "Who, ME?" expression. His golden eyes were wide with completely spurious innocence. 

"Nothing to see HERE," he intimated. "And certainly no small marble busts. Especially not of Napoleon."
Eyeing him suspiciously, I stood, irresolute, but his innocence convinced me, and I went back to bed.
The next night, 3 a.m., we were awakened by what sounded like someone teaching hamsters to poledance.
"Psst! Wake up!" I nudged my fella.
He sat up, and rubbed his eyes, and listened for a moment. then a strange expression crossed his face. "Is there some sort of hamster strip club around here?" he asked.
'It's Ed!" I hissed. "What is he Doing!"
We listened intently for a moment. Then my hus's face relaxed.
"He is doing...The Work."
"Oh. I think you're right." I had to agree.
"And...the Work Must Continue," he said, and started snoring.
This went on for years. I thought it was just a folie a deux, that all married people had delusions about their pets, until a brother in law staed overnight i the study. In the moening, Pete got up and I found himsearching throught he trash.
"What are you DOING, dude? I made you a nice breakfast, it's on the table, you don't actually forage for scraps, you know."
He muttered "yeah, yeah.." distractedly. the he straightened up and faced me squarely.
Listen," he said, "I could swear I heard someone building a small, dog-powered diriible last night." He looked defiant." I know that sounds crazy.But it was an inexplicable yet very specific noise."
"Oh, THAT," I said, releived. "That was just...The Work."
At that moment, Ed strolled by, tail in the air.
"And, "I continued, "the Work..Must Continue."
"Oh, okay, "said pete. "Then I want coffee."

Many years later, after Ed parols the hallway here twice a day, and greets visitors by officiously showing them the many amenities of the uilding, such as the stairs, the floor, the stairs again and the place where I once dropped a platter of fried chicken (a day that will live forever as a golden memory for Ed), and after he challeneges the two pitbulls who belong to the nice lesbian postal workers on the sixth floor to a duel (thank god Susan, their main walker, has very good leash control), he comes back in, and after checking to see if there are any ladies aside from me, he sits in his favorite place. the inside of a the base of a wicker stool. It's round and perfect for an old guy to curl up in, and hecan also keep an eye on what's going on, in case pit bulls or Pretty ladies stop by and Action needs to be taken.
These days, he's not as spry as he used to be. I noticed recently that he doesn't hear me when I say "Ed man, I'm home, pal!" and he can't hear the celestial sound of a can openin. Sometimes he falls over, but I always act like I don't see, and he gets up again and starts nonchalantly cleaning the one area on his bod he cleans, a ptch the size of a quarter near his right leg. Pointless, but apparently VERY important.
He has to take medicine, and his eye is a little cloudy, and I think he might be nearing his last days, but he's proved me wrong before. But just in case, some nights I sleep in the floor, because he can't make it up the ladder to the loft bed, and he cries when he feels he is not getting his fair share of attention. he retired from the Work soe four ears ago. Except one night, when my friend Jennifer stayed over, a longtime Pretty Lady friend and admirerer or Ed's.
As I was making coffe in the morning, she said, "Is it possible that someone was teaching mice carpentry here last night? I swear I thought I heard really tiny sawing."
I asked, carefully, "What tie was this, Jenjen?"
She tought for a moment. "Oh...maybe 3 a.m?"

I smiled. The Master had come out of retirement. Like Sinatra, Like Streisnad, like he great masters before him, he always had one last tirck up his sleeve for his admirers.

because..the Work Must Continue.

And so I wrap myself in a blanket on the carpet, solemnly hand Ed his red heartshaped pillow, and we both settle down for a cat nap, dreaming of catnip, fried chicken, and...The Work.

love from me and eddie
p

Coffee, Farm Animals, and Yahtzee: 8 AM

"The rain it raineth every day

Upon the just and unjust fella;

But more upon the just, because

The unjust hath the just's umbrella."

-Anon.

 8: AM     Friday

Walking in the park this morning, I noticed what seemed to be an unusually large and rather oddly shaped, dog. being walked by a resigned-looking woman in her 50's. Didn't pay too much attention...was drinking deli coffee and staring uncomprehendingly at the "Times"..but when the dog said something unusual, I looked up quickly. Because what the dog said? Was: "GRUNT."

I said, "What?"

"GRUNT", said the dog,  because he was a pig. A 150 lb pig (I used to work as a "guess your pig's weight" girl at carnivals). Black and white.  A huge black and white HOG.

I stood up, and making a great show of looking completely unconcerned, strolled by, surreptitiously staring at said pig. Apparently the hem of my nonchalance was showing, because the woman glared at me.

I thought, but did not say, "YOU'RE the one walking a ginormous farm animal here, pal. And you don't want attention???"

As I walked on, I saw a young woman with a little white dog on a leash. She was saying to the dog, "Oh, look, Binky! There's your friend! Your friend the piggie-wiggie!"

The dog said, "No. NOT friend. No. BIG pig. Big SCARY pig. Bite me. Not friend EVER."

The woman said, "Let's go say hi!!"

The little dog said, desperately, "Look, I think ..I think I might be a ..cat. Yes. I'm a cat.  Can we go home and discuss this? -Like, now? Immediately? Possibly by yesterday? I have to leave. Truly. Bye now.". He slipped his collar, and fled.

I walked off. His owner had caught him. He was going to have to say Hi To The Pig. -And with any luck, she wouldn't have to change Binky's name to "Breakfast".

I still don't know what happened.

**********************************************************

9 AM

Having fun dating. I know, that sounds like an insane thing to say, but it's true.. It's fun to re-learn all this stuff. It's fun to talk to great looking, accomplished guys, although some of them are obviously a little more used to dating the Girls Who SELL Paintings, rather than the Girls Who Are IN Paintings.-Which is fine. if I can bring a little Bad Ass Bohemia in a minidress, into the lives of finance guys, I'm more than pleased to help out. 

My girlfriends tell me I should "play more games' with my dates. So I brought Yahtzee to the Boom Boom Room. -Should I have tried "Pictionary"?


******************************

So? Look for me in the park, at 8 AM.  I'll have deli coffee, a copy of The Times, an enormous farm animal on an inadequate leash, and a game of "Yahtzee". (-Or "Pictionary.")

And if there are are several tall, blonde women, who answer that description?

-I'll be the one who's smiling.

xxooo

beauty and weirdness

cosmetic surgery

It's Spring, and that means brighter light, less clothing, and much, much more flirting.
And it also means that even the most secure woman thinks, fleetingly, about paying lots of money to look better for all three of those conditions.

[Random note: I think Macy's would make a LOT more sales if the put Xanax dispensers in every bathing suit changing room. Or Vicodin. I'm not picky.]

Many years ago, the combination of having an unexpected day off and a taste for random adventures, led me to call a plastic surgeoun who advertised in the Post. [Advertising in the Post should have been the first red flag: Danger, Will Robinson!! as "Lost In Space" robot would say.] He was giving free consultations, and his office was a block from the museum I was going to. And I'm a weirdo. So I went.

The girl behind the desk had classic ethnic features: BIG eyes, BIG mouth, BIG cheekbones, and a little dot where her nose used to be. She smiled cheerily at me as I approached the desk with trepidation. She said "He's WONDERFUL! He did my nose! I'm so happy!"

She leaned confidingly in. "I know, you're surprised. Most people can't tell. But then he did myy mom and my cousin Sheila, and now we all look alike!"
I gulped weakly. "Didn't you look alike before? Being, um, related and all?"
A shadow crossed her face. "He'll see you now," she said crisply, and I walked in.

Dr X's office was like any other oldfashioned doctor's office: paper covered table, stainless steel trashcan opearted by a lever (this is important, hold on), and, on the desk, an oldfashioned doctor's bag. I couldn't IMAGINE why he needed that. He beamed at me, and said "Oh, you've come just in time!!

"I have? It's Tuesday." I was confused.

"No, no! Those naso-labial folds are getting out of hand!" He helpfully handed me a mirror. It had magnification. LOTS of magnification. Catherine Deneuve at 16 would not have survived looking in that mirror.
"I like to call them marionette lines!"

"You do?" I needed water.

"Yes, because--and this'll interest you, I saw where you are a cabaret performer--I'm actuall a ventriloquist! "

"You are?" Really needed water. And a valium.

"Here's my dummy!" He whipped out a picture of himself on stage, with a dummy dressed as a doctor. Little stethoscope, white outfit, the works. Disturbingly, the dummy looked like he was suffereing from a form of macrocephalia. I guess that was supposed to be humourous.

"I can throw my voice!", he announced, and walked over to the trashcan. Using the pedal, he made the lid go up and down, and made hois voice come out of it, saying "Hello, Peri! You got here just in time!"

"well, it IS Tuesday", I muttered, hynotized by the surrealism.

"So! he sat back down. "You need a brow lift, a partial face left, and a couple of other things we can talk about now. Mind if I se your breasts?"

I fled. I would like to say I handled it coolly, and stuck around for the free wine and cheese, but i didn't: I fled like Bambi at a gun show. All I could think about was tha, someday soon,while he was opearating on a patient, he was going to snap, and make Mr. Kidney have a fun and amsuing dialogue with Mrs. Spleen. There would be blood on the walls as they carted him away, screaming "Give me a trash can! I can make it talk!"

So now I age in real time, and smile when I see the "New You For Spring!" plastic surgery ads in the Voice, and getused to the fact that NYC is a city filled with an ever-arriving stream of the young and the gorgeous. I have marionnette lines. But I got no strings to hold me down, and i can quote Dickens, and on a good day I can turn enough heads to satisfy whatever need that is, and that's okay.

But please. No talking trash cans.

Ever.


PS: Did I mention, that at the time of this whole megilla, I was TWENTY-SEVEN?
27. And he said I needed abrowlift.

Note: the writer reserves the right to change her mind about this issue at a moment's notice.

Where's that Xanax?

A Brief, Chicken-y Encounter With The Abyss

I make the best chicken soup ever in the history of the Universe, and I'm modest about it, too. The problem is, I can't let anyone know what's in it. But you're you, so I can tell you: the secret ingredient is...Chicken feet.

No, really. I go down to Chinatown, and find a store that sells chicken feet. They're easy to locate, as there is usually a crowd of chickens in wheelchairs, picketing the place. I buy a passel (along with the two chickens it takes to make the soup properly), go home, and fire up the oven.

The first time i did this, i was still married. I was cooking away, and had tossed the footsies in the pot, and did something else for a while...then turned back . And then screamed. The feet had come together in pairs [no cracks, please], and were doing an amazing simulacrum of the "Praying Hands" trope, so beloved by cheesy sculptors everywhere. Truly, it was one of the most appalling sights ever. So i did what any normal, 29 year old woman would do...I raced into the hall and crouched there in sheer, abject terror.

My husband came home. "Ha ha, little lady," he said, or would have said if he talked like that, which he didn't or else i wouldn't have married him. "What seems to be the problem here?"

I gestured in a frantic way reminiscent of the early Zasu Pitts, towards the closed kitchen door. "Feet," I said. "Praying. -Scared."

He gave me an odd look, and marched in a manly manner, into the kitchen, where i heard a loud girly scream, and he came rocketing out to join me in terrified crouch position.

"NOW what?", he asked. We clutched each other, and whimpered, and waited for The End To Come.

Finally, we closed our eyes, inched back into the kitchen, and managed to turn the stove off. Eventually all was fixed, the feet were retrieved and buried in a special graveyard, and dinner went on. I made matzo balls with seltzer water-the secret o' fluffiness- and life went on, but I had to go get Audited by a crack team of Chicken Scientologists, before i could look at a spoon again without screaming.

And now, off to teach class...

love

xoxo peri

New York Stories: 4 AM.

     When you fall in love with a city, it tells you its secrets.

   New York is, for better or worse, the city I am in love with.

    Oh, I've had flirtations: Paris and I have a long standing affaire, but, not surprisingly, it doesn't want to commit; Rome and i have had some beautiful moments, but, being both beautiful AND Italian, it's seeing other people; and Sydney and I like to say "we're just good friends", but that time in the park when a three-foot-tall ibis with a scimitar where it's beak should have been, offered to eviscerate me if i didn't hand over my sandwich...well, that moment binds us forever. -Me, Sydney, AND the ibis. [Note to bird lovers everywhere: maybe it wasn't an ibis. I didn't stop running long enough to ask.]

   But New York has my heart.

   Maybe it's because my family got here from Limerick, Ireland, in 1832, and one way or another, never got around to leaving. Maybe it's because my family's history is inextricably intertwined with the history of New York: not in a big way, but in small ways that matter. I can walk around and see the house where three generations of my mother's family lived : the upright, now-Episcopalian, newly hyphenated (some of them, anyway) Knox-Robinsons. I stand in front of the townhouse on West 10th Street, and think about how the hero of the 19th Cavalry Brigade of NYC, also known as The Fighting Irish, came home from with a Congressional Medal of Honor from Gettysburg, and later, ran for Mayor of the City in 1876, on an Anti-Tammany Hall/Anti Boss Tweed platform. Since the Boss and his Tammany machine ran every molecule of the city back then with a grip that was ferocious, greedy and ruthless, I think Captain Knox got minus twenty-two votes. 
 Then, I can go to Fifth Avenue and 41st Street and see the grand Stanford White-designed "Knox Building", symbol of my lovely Mom's family's former glory. My profligate grandfather, on that side, sold that gorgeous gold mine of a marble property, for a song in the 60's: right around the time he burned a Mary Cassatt portrait of his mother, because he had "never cared for it.". [That sound you hear right now is me yelling, "Even if you hate art,someday you'll have a granddaughter who both loves art and could really use a trust fund!!", to handsome, improvident, dead Grandad.]
Or,  I can walk to 75th and Second Ave, and see the tiny hardware shop, that my (wonderful, New York born, Jewish) Dad's immigrant father, David, founded 75 years ago[ it's still there!], when he and my grandmother came here to escape the shtetls of the Ukraine. My grandmother had been a typist for a jail, in the "old country". Her desk overlooked the courtyard, where, every day, men were marched out and dispatched by firing squad. My grandmother was not exactly nostalgic for that, and loved her adopted home, where, instead of a steady diet of death and potatoes,  she could nibble marzipan, and dress up like a Chinese Maiden in order to better play MahJohnng with the other fair, fiftyish "maidens" of the Yorkville Jewish community. (So many other family places...but, that's enough for now.)

 Maybe I love New York so much, because so many of my favorite writers, artists and musicians have breathed their molecular selves lastingly into the air we breathe here now. Either born here: the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Norman Mailer, among so many more; or self-imported treasures, such as WH Auden, Truman Capote, Josephine Baker, Carson McCullers...on and on and on.

If I walk the Brooklyn Promenade, I can hear Walt Whitman and Melville talking about the harbor; if I walk in Central Park, it's a Ludwig Bemelmans drawing. Uptown, I can hear Langston Hughes saying, "Life, for me/ain't been no crystal stair..."; downtown, I can hear Edna St. Vincent Millay murmuring:

"My candle burns at both ends/It will not last the night/ But oh my foes and ah my friends/It gives a lovely light," 
which is the unofficial creed of the young who flock here to have Life...before it has them.

  My personal city has celebration and loss, mourning and hope, and most of all, surprises. As a friend who now lives in Hong Kong, said wistfully, last time she was here, "The best parts of this city happen in minutes and years...and nothing in between." -Like most who are most astute about this town, she was born elsewhere. Some of the most passionate lovers of this granite gathering, have been from other, softer, better-natured places. Joseph Mitchell, who with passionate dispassion chronicled New York's eccentrics and day-to-day workers in books like "Up In The Old Hotel", was from balmy, half remembered Missouri landscapes. These live in his language, in his Southern, dawdling observer's awe of the city's zooming minutiae. The contrast makes both views more vivid, as smooth blue velvet brings out a diamond's most brittle glittering sharps.

   My personal city is sometimes literally personal. I can trace my years of being married to a great artist who worked, back then, as a mural painter, by walking into certain churches, theaters and the houses of the Great, and seeing my own face and body on the walls-and sometimes ceilings. I've been Goddesses, Maenads, angels, and some romping Renaissance nudes, or sometimes just a worried face in a crowd, whose inherited mongrelsy reflects, in her features, the hybrid vigor of this immigrants' town. I walk by a Chase bank on Fulton Street, whose dull facade looks vapidly out, expressing nothing...but whose granite mulishness, hides the place where PT Barnum's Museum once drew gasps of wonder from a constantly changing-but always aghast-audience of happily duped gapers. "See the Fiji Mermaid!" [Really a stuffed manatee.] "See George Washington's nurse!" [An African-American woman of incredible antiquity and dignity, sitting in a chair hardly less stiff-backed than she was.] "This way to the Egress!"-a joke on his audience, as "egress" is a silver dollar word for "exit", so the punters happily showed themselves out.

Two houses down from Barnum's jackdaw splendors, you could stop in the famous Cigar Store, and buy a smoke from a pretty girl, who'd throw in a smile as lagniappe. One such wood cured nymph was named Mary Rogers, and one day she vanished, to turn up in the caves off Hoboken as a forlorn bundle of rag-and-bone. One of her regular customers-an odd and dandified newspaper man with forlorn, agate eyes-was named Edgar Allen Poe. Poe was so intrigued by a life going up in smoke, that he wrote what was arguably the first detective novel, about the crime.  Out of respect for Mary Rogers (nee Lyons, and a Mather-descended half Yankee, like your humble correspondent), he changed the setting rather randomly to Paris, and her name to "Marie Roget". [Not the best disguised nom-de-homicide.] "The Mystery of Marie Roget" is a still a wonderful, "dread-full"read.

 Next to that was the first Knox Hat Store. Charles Knox had escaped the potato famine in Limerick (yup-we've come full circle-he was my great-times 5--granduncle), to apprentice himself to a hatter at 15, and open his store at 22. At that time, no man would leave his house without wearing a hat. It would have been as indecent as going outside without pants on...really. Hats were most often made from the pelts of the beavers John Jacob Astor got his start by trapping and selling. The beaver pelts were then treated with the toxic heavy metal mercury, which, if one is unlucky or unknowing enough to come in contact with, will poison your mind and then the rest of you...hence the expression "mad as a hatter." But Mr. Knox seems to have kept his wits enough to make a fortune, for soon "Knox Hats" had a bustling factory in Brooklyn, and his stores rivaled our modern chain stores, for ubiquity. Charles Knox made the hats for President Lincoln to wear to both of his Inaugurations. The second time around, the silk lining of the great man's top hat, was hand painted by Civil War widows. History does not relate, alas, what the paintings were of, or whether the widows' tears caused the pictures to run, tellingly, movingly, indelibly.

Fittingly enough, the great Civil War photographer Matthew Brady's photography studio, was upstairs. 

Next door, in a modest apartment, lived a customs clerk named Herman Melville, who liked to write in the evenings. "Moby Dick" was most likely written, about where the Chase's third ATM now stands...perhaps twenty feet up vertically. And the peripatetic and worldchewingly exuberant Walt Whitman, had a place around the corner. Poe's office was one block down. One wonders what the Cigar Store conversation, the talks over choosing a hat next door, were like. One does, at four in the morning, writing on a laptop, thirty blocks north of these lost stories. But not so lost after all.

Will end with a moment that distills my own wanderings, of daytime glittering/nighttime somber, sidewalks. It was 10:30 on a beautiful Mayevening. I was leaving the place I worked, late, and decided to walk home to the Village, to breathe and dream and gaze around in peace.

A song called out from a shadow, a low tango murmur on a boombox breeze. In an alcove in front of a building, where flowers nodded their small bright heads, were a man and a woman, evening-clad: he in a dark swallowtail tuxedo, she in a gown that shimmered like a waterfall of twilight satin. They danced the tango, to the music coming from the portable player set, like a conductor, in front of their secret stage. He led and she followed...bending, swaying, prowling like panthers, as I walked by and into my own dark unknown streets. The music followed me. It felt like a soft, lingering hand on my cheek, saying goodbye gently, reluctantly...and forever.

xoxoxoxox

peri lyons. c2012  all rights reserved  New York City 4:15 in the morning