Overheard
Kate Carmichael -- Monday, June 20, 2005 -- 10:45:14 PMFrom the unbelievable to the mundane, if you overheard it, it goes here. Please add where you overheard it, and general descriptions of the speakers if you can.
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In the women's restroom (I was in the stall and couldn't see the speakers):
1: Hey, I like that.
2: Thanks. You know how everyone has some colors they look good in? Well purple, light blue, and peach are mine. I love this color of purple.
1: Uh huh.
2: I bought it, and I thought 'Hey, I bet that'd look good on me.'
1: Mmm.
2: And I saw somewhere wearing this color last week, so I think it's in style.
1: Oh.
2: So I got this, and there's a matching skirt to go with it. Matching pants too, but I decided the pants were too much. I mean...what am I going to wear purple pants with?
1: (inaudible...walking away)
I posted this before in Exploding Heads but think it goes here:
In a doctor's waiting room:
Receptionist talking to a patient: I really liked the Lord of the Rings movies but my son wants to read the books. I tried to read them but, Old English is hard!
I was in Sam's Club once, in the dairy aisle. The guy and his father or father-in-law (I presume) were loading up their cart with gallons of milk. Lots of them - like about eight.
Younger Guy: Do you know why we go through this much milk every week?
Older Guy: Well, I'd guess because of the cats.
Younger Guy: Yes, because of the cats.
I wandered away intensely interested about what kind of cats. Lions? Panthers? The mind reels...
On Being Middle to Upper Middle Class in Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement.
Setting: restaurant down by the beach, a table next to us
Participants: a fiftysomething Southern white guy and his new Yankee friend. A few beers had been consumed.
I can't remember it word by word, but it was the story of the Southern guy's childhood. It was the 50s and 60s. His parents worked in medical fields in a mid-sized Alabama city. Dad was a dentist, and mom was a nurse. Almost all of the white mothers in town worked, including all of his friends' mothers.
And of course, because they worked, they needed a mammy to take care of the children. All the middle class families had mammies. But his mammy was special. She felt like she was part of the family, and was proud to be their mammy. Most of the other mammies didn't feel that way about their families.
There was the description of how when George Wallace finally got his ass kicked by the feds, the white middle class families in town suddenly figured out a way to build a whole system of private schools nearly overnight. Because even though he didn't think his parents were racists, they didn't want him going to school with the black kids.
It was weird. I ended up feeling like an anthropologist discovering a part/subculture of my own country, and listening to him was kind of like picking an odd sort of scab.
Wow catling. Having grown up in Indianapolis, home of violent protests when desegregation busing began, that type of conversation sounds vaguely familiar to me. Older, but familiar still.
Dina, I think my head would've exploded there on the spot. OMG.
I'm going to be plagued wondering about those cats. Maybe they're those people you see on Pet Rescue, with 42,000 cats in a 600 sq ft house. You're not really supposed to give cats milk, are you? Doesn't it cause diarrhea?
I think those guys staged that conversation. It doesn't sound like a normal thing for two guys to say, especially as they're buying the milk -- wouldn't they already KNOW why they were buying milk? Duh. I think it was a small play to freak out nosy parkers.
Or just a couple guys with oddball senses of humor or a long-running joke about the tiger living in the carport.
Scene: backstage at the Nova Scotia Tattoo. A group of Mounties hanging out and waiting for their rehearsal call. Two of the older men in the group - possibly the commanding officers - had gotten their hands on a pair of Segways, and were tooling around on them in the hallway.
CO, on the Segway: "This is like a chariot from Ben Hur - give me a Hail, Ceasar!"
Assembled Mounties, trying not to crack up: "Hail, Ceasar!"
Passerby: "All he needs is some chained up slaves to lead in triumph, and he's set."
Right before the Iraq invasion, I saw two young guys in the ice cream aisle at Safeway:
"Dude, let's get vanilla."
"Ok, but not that one. That's French vanilla."
"Yeah, we don't need to be giving them any money."
Walking by a bus stop in Boston:
"So there she was with 13 illegitimate children..."
It took a lot of restraint not to turn back and find out the rest of the story.
That was the truly interesting part: she lived in a shoe.
My husband is a huge evesdropper and he's got me into the habit, too. Sometimes we go out to dinner and just listen to the people next to us. (Judge away! We have to get our laughs somewhere!)
When we were in Barcelona, we were at a restaurant which had tables extremely close together. An attractive young couple were sitting next to us. Over the course of the next hour, the follow facts emerged:
She was Danish. He was French. Neither spoke each other's languages, so they spoke English with each other. (Lucky for us!)
They had met online.
This was the second weekend they had spent F2F.
He was married, but "essentially it was over."
He had two children. But he "didn't get along very well with them."
He had taken a recent AIDS test (negative). She hadn't done one.
Their hotel was around the corner.
I think I've told this story before, but some friends of mine and I were in a diner in New York City, circa 1999. We were sitting near the door, and there was a bowl of mints out on the host stand.
My friend Max was telling me that a study had found that many of the most heinous germs in a restaurant were in the mint bowl. Because, you know, people go to the restroom when they're finished eating, fail to wash their hands, and grab some mints when they're leaving.
Just then, a couple people were on their way out, grabbed some mints, and a man turned to his companion and said, "Hey, these are great mints!"
Everyone at my table burst out laughing.
Mr. D and I were having dinner while on our honeymoon and thoroughly enjoying eavesdropping on the group of women at the next table. They got to talking about movies. One said, "You know what's really scary? That movie "The Birds."
There was a pause, and then another one said, "You know, that could happen."
Still, when we see groups of seagulls or crows, one of us will say, "It could happen."