sophie heawood

RUNYON CANYON

Four young women out for a gentle hike; one is a white nanny with a pushchair containing a brown baby. The other women coo over the child and ask, “So, is this her second baby?”
“Yeah,” says the nanny.
“So, what, did she like RETURN the other one?”
“Yeah.”

A young white guy, maybe about 25, has been monologuing at his female friend for so long that I start subtly transcribing him into my Blackberry (with my super fast typing thumbs.) Seriously, this whole passage is verbatim:

“So I read in Oprah magazine about this kid who grew up in this super super strict family, like born again Christians? And like, he was gay? And obviously his family were not gonna be okay with this AT ALL, and he finally came out to his dad who was, like, traumatised and told him never to tell his mom, but his dad dropped dead a year later so he finally told his mom he was gay and she put him through all this electro shock therapy and all of this awful stuff to try and cure him and she pushed him and pushed him and so finally he snapped and he, like, KILLED his mom, and so the whole of the rest of the family was like really against him, you know, cos he’d killed his mom I guess, and nobody would support him and finally his grandmother on his dad’s side came out in support of him and she defended him at the trial and so her husband divorced her at the age of 75 and now the kid is still in jail and his grandma has moved to be near him so she can visit him but she’s totally alone and the whole rest of the family won’t have anything to do with them and it just goes to show that, you know, you don’t think something like that is going to come between you, because you think your family will always be there for you, but you know you’d be SURPRISED, sometimes at the end of the day it’s weird but people really don’t pull together over this stuff.”

GREENBLATT’S DELI, SUNSET BOULEVARD:

Waitress: Anger doesn’t get Russian dressing
Customer: What does get Russian dressing?
Waitress: Joy

Customer: Luxembourg? That country that was so random that Hitler forgot to invade it?
Waitress: That’s pretty much what they put on all their t-shirts. Have you seen In Bruges?
Customer: Sounds foreign
Waitress: I don’t think it is foreign, I think it’s English
Customer: Where is Bruges?
Waitress: Somewhere in Europe
Customer: Luxembourg.

Customer: Cindy was pretty wild when she lived in New York. She was dating some guy who had a dungeon. But these days people stay in touch.