Home Affairs: Confessions on a dance floor
Revenge, character likability, a cockatoo, and a wedding dress.
Ideally, everything I write for this publication would be read out loud to you by a professional breakdancer as she contorts and twists her body. Occasionally, she would pause to catch her breath and, three seconds later, back to the rhythm of narration.
Sometimes, (especially when I write this Sunday section, Home Affairs) I visualize that woman. Her name is Kathy. She’s been dancing her whole life in South Carolina and has a puppy that looks more like a pigeon than a canine. “I can’t wrap my head around this case, the veterinarian says it’s a first for him. And he’s been seeing dogs and cats for sixty years. Sixty years! No pigeon-looking dogs! Until I brought Oppenheimer to his clinic for a check-up. Can you believe it?”
“I can’t,” is what I would say to Kathy. But the part I would truly have trouble believing is that no one has ever told her she has a pigeon, not a puppy. But hey, here I am, participating in the scheme of keeping her in the dark.
“Oppenheimer is a great name for a puppy.” That is all I can say.
“Have you seen the movie? It’s truly amazing!”
“No, I haven’t had the chance yet.” And I wouldn’t be lying.
This is the problem with this woman. She’s chatty and never wants to get any work done. She had reached out to me, praising this newsletter, and offering her breakdancing skills for a possible collab.
I checked her work and fell in love with her charisma immediately. I replied in less than two minutes: Yes, Kathy. Let’s do it! Do you want to read out loud Home Affairs while you dance? I’ll tape it and it’ll be like Confessions on a dance floor, but for real this time.
Oh, Kathy, Kathy… We’ve met four times to record the mundane observations I’ve been logging for this section. Not once, has she actually read a full sentence without stopping to mention some far-fetched detail about her life.
Chatty Kathy is waiting in my living room as I type these words. So, since it looks like you’ll never actually see her reading these lines to you between spins and twirls, you’ll have to do exactly what I did: Imagine her.
Here’s the wedding dress I never got to wear. This week, something delirious happened to me: Nostalgia for the wedding party we never had.