Dead Sea Monkeys

So I recently reprised my role as "booth bitch" for the Dead Sea Pavilion working for a week at the Columbus Circle street fair. I have worked a lot of street fairs and I have seen a lot of crazies. I have gone loopy and come back again, only to find I am still loopy, but often not as loopy as those that visit the booth. I can't even recall all of them, and that makes me sad since they definitely thrust me into a pseudo reality wondering if I was in some strange dream as they spout out unintelligible gibberish with behavior only seen on SNL, Mad TV, and In Living Color. People say strange things, and do even weirder things, such as accepting a free Q-tip we were offering just to be silly and walking away staring at it with a gleam in their eye as though they had just won the lottery. My favorite thing ever uttered in the booth happened this past week when a pretty normal looking woman came in and was interested in the face cream with the Dead Sea Minerals in it, but what she said was... "Umm...hi! Do you have any of those face creams with the dead sea...monkeys....or whatever?" Instantly I smiled, as I always seem to when monkeys are involved. Then the brilliance exploded when I realized there is such a thing as Sea Monkeys...and she was not only requesting Dead Sea Monkeys, but in a face cream! I immediately got visuals of microscopic sea monkey cadavers rubbed all over her face. I started cracking up, and she looked at me like I was insane. She thought I was insane for laughing at her having asked for face cream with dead sea monkeys in it. A last she walked away wondering what was wrong with me. What's most wrong is that I didn't tell her that the dead sea monkeys cost extra.

Gratuitously Rotten Smelly Homeless Man

This morning I hopped into the brisk air on the subway platform and was met with a train pretty quick, only to rip open my fresh hot egg sandwich and enter a car on the train that just happened to be filled with the stench of Gratuitously Rotten Smelly Homeless Man. There was no one in this car. The looks on my face as well as the few others who had filtered on with me told me I wasn't the only one to smell it. At the far end of the car lay the rotten thing...with all his belongings. Was he dead? How long had his carcass been allowed to ride on this train? Why hadn't anyone cleaned him out of there at the last stop (being that it is the end of the line, where they clean the cars!)? I saw him stir, so the smell couldn't be explained by death. We all looked at eachother in horror, our noses scrunched up as we tried to inhale as little as possible. A few people passed through to the next car. I looked in, but realized that-at this hour of the morning, were I to move, I would lose my seat...which is a coveted position during the morning rush hour...even moreso when you are about to stand outside for the next 10 hours working a promotion. So I stayed there...still eating my egg sandwich...because, well...I had to eat. As others filtered in, no one sat from half way through the car towards him. Many switched cars the first chance they got. I remained. Every once in while, as my nose started to get used to the smell...I feared the idea that I could ever get used to something so awful...would I smell like that all day? Just as I would worry about getting used to it, another wiff would waft all the way down to my end. What the hell could cause that? Was he covered in open sores and lying in his own soiled pants? How long would he be permitted to stay there? I have no doubt his smell would linger LONG after he had been shood out...and some innocent new rider would sit right where his poopy/bloody/corpse-like body had layed all day. I don't know if I was being insensitive to the plight of this unfortunate soul...whose aroma stayed with me and taunted me throughout the day. Was it really nearby, or was it just that strong that my mind couldn't help but have flashbacks? I don't know...there are a lot of homeless people here that sleep on subways...and they don't all smell like that.