I only have time for a quickie and then I’m off to Whitewater.
I’m renting a car for this little excursion (mine is making funny noises- and I don’t mean Bill Cosby funny- but more like “this milk tastes funny” funny) and at Enterprise Car Rental last night the young woman behind the counter asked me what kind of a car I wanted: I had my choice of a Nissan something or a something Cobalt. “All I really care about is that it has a CD player.” They both do, she assured me, so I went with the Nissan something. As she was typing that in, I felt compelled to say something so she wouldn’t think I was insisting on a CD player for shallow reasons. “I have a project I’ll be working on.” (My column for the Journal of SInging, although I didn’t bore her with the particulars.) As she continued typing, she asked me “Do you like Brittany Spears?” I literally bit my tongue, as I considered what reply would be most appropriate:
“Not even a little bit.”
“Like a migraine.”
“Maybe back when she was on the Mickey Mouse Club.”
But all of those answers seemed snotty, and I didn’t want her to switch me at the last minute to a car with an egg beater under the hood where the motor should be, so I just said “I’m more of a Franz Schubert kind of guy.” She looked over her shoulder at the young guy sitting at another desk, who offered, helpfully, “It’s sort of like Opera.” And this young woman finished up our transaction without further comment.
This was yet another case where I felt like people from two different galaxies had crossed paths for ninety seconds, before continuing on their intergalactic trajectories.