Today, I had lunch with my friend Mark and went to visit my friend Lauri for the first time since her daughter, Ruby, was born a few weeks ago. Ruby is an adorable child with an intelligent gaze, who nevertheless burst into tears when presented with the gift Rob and I had picked out for her: a fashion-forward cow doll dressed in a pillbox hat and faux fur coat. (Let us hope that her agitation stemmed from her inexperienced eye for discerning fake fur from the real thing, and that her displeasure was merely an aversion to the implication of animal cruelty.)

Later, walking home, I became distracted from my route by the song from the new Revlon advertising campaign. I was not hearing it at that exact moment; I was attempting to determine how I might obtain a copy because it is quite lovely.* And I was distracted from that by an elderly woman walking a foxy-looking little dog, who kept saying to it, “No, you behave yourself,” as if the foxy-looking little dog had just suggested that the elderly woman behave herself. And I was distracted from that because I suddenly found myself surrounded by a procession of priests and laypeople bearing crosses and a large, realistic statue of a bloody corpse.

This crowd, two or three hundred strong and chanting, appeared out of nowhere and surged around me. They were accompanied on the street by several police cars, lights flashing, and for a moment I felt as if I had materialized in a lynch mob before I realized that they were re-enacting the Stations of the Cross on Amsterdam Avenue.

To escape this horrifying mania, I ducked into the Door Store, the furniture shop at which Rob and I bought two chairs last week for our new house. The lovely woman who helped us before was there again, and before I knew it, she succeeded in selling me a feng shui fountain to accompany the order. (Apparently, anyone can offer to sell me anything, and I will jump at the chance, but it was a very handsome fountain—and quite a bargain!—so I did not feel too bad.)

Back on the street, several blocks away, I whipped out my cell phone to return a call to my friend Viki, when from around a corner came . . . the procession! Clearly, they had ducked behind some parked cars while I bought my fountain and were following me home for god-knows-what nefarious purposes. This time, they were singing “Amazing Grace,” so I am afraid my phone message to Viki was comprised entirely of that hymn. While running for my life, I was struck again by the statue of the bloody corpse they held aloft over them. What is it about Christians and their reverence for violent masochism? I thought the point of this particular corpse was that it came back to life: in which case, should they not be walking around with some sort of realistic animatronic robot?

Probably not, because if it had any sense, it would tell them to go home and stop holding up traffic and overwhelming the pedestrians. “And by the way,” it would say, “why don’t you mind your own business and stop bothering gay people who want to get married?”

They should probably keep it away from water, though, in case it gets any perambulatory ideas. I hear that is hell on the circuits.


* If you know, please drop me a line, but do not drop me a line** only to suggest that I look on the Revlon web site for a clue, because I did already, and there was nary a clue to be found.

** What is a line, anyway?