NOT SMEAR, SCHMEAR

Sometimes, I forget how Jewish I can be. I've had many Jewish friends over the years and have picked up a few "isms". They're very descriptive words.

So Pam and I are walking the streets of New York and she says she's hungry.
I agree that I am too.
She asks what I might like to eat.
"Just a toasted bagel with a schmear cream cheese", I reply.
She stops walking. "Schmear ?!?!", she yodels across the Upper East Side. "Isn't that word reserved for PAP tests?"
"SCH-MEAR", she forces me to reply. "Not SMEAR".
The slight arch of her left eyebrow indicates that she's not quite ready to believe that it's a real word.

We continue our journey, making our way down to The Flatiron district looking for an Indian grocery I've read about, and a stop for lunch at Eataly. Halfway down the block from the subway station we have just exited, it happens. She stops dead, mouth agape in shock and awe. And there it is, in big bold letters, proving, without a doubt , that I know what I'm talking about.

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My first week on Broadway ended in more of a whimper than a roar. On Friday, I started to feel a little throat tickle. By Saturday I was hacking up a lung like an asthmatic, coal-mining sea lion. By Sunday morning, my head somehow weighed twenty pounds more than usual, causing something known in medical circles as "falls down a lot". After an hour of drinking coffee and water and vainly trying to convince myself that my body just needed a little extra time to wake up, I had to face the facts. The fact that I'd coughed so long and so hard that I'd shredded my vocal cords. The fact that my energy was so low I could barely make it to the bathroom, let alone up and down Pride Rock a dozen times. The fact that regardless of my good intentions and well-ingrained old-country work ethic, there was no way I could give eighteen hundred people their $150 worth....twice, being a Sunday. So, after a further thirty minutes of arguing with myself, I made the call to Stage Management and pulled myself from the shows. They, having witnessed my physical state on Saturday, were not surprised.

On my return to the show tonight, everyone was very welcoming and genuinely happy to see me back, and I was more than a little relieved to learn that I had inadvertently joined a secret club. Several people told me their story of have to take a show or two off during their first week on Broadway. Just another indication of the sneaky nature of stress.....you can never really be sure what it's doing to you, especially when your body is producing adrenaline in volumes that would kill a normal 9 to 5 desk worker.

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The subway stop that I use to go to work spits me out into the world on 42nd Street, right in the heart of Times Square. The particular stairs that I most often use are where the big, fuzzy mascots frequently hang out. Mickey and Minnie are usually there. Sometimes Spongebob Squarepants, occasionally Hello Kitty, and always, for some reason, Elmo. I overheard this on my way to work tonight:
"Gurl, them things is weird. One time I'm down here some dirtyass Elmo aksed me fo' a dollah !"