That answer is easy. No. I interpreted our encounter as a flirtation, but an obligitory, professional flourish of feminine wiles against gawky male confuzzlement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were the same age, and still are, but she seemed to have a world of experience ahead of me. But did she? Does she? She went the starlet route, almost certainly forgetting we ever met. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She remains a minor fixture in the Society pages, postsing to social media about Prada bags and posting old pictures of herself with recently dead celebs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
No, I never knew her, but our signals blipped, and crossed. Through chance and forensic grubbing I unwittingly summoned her name and exact street address down to the apartment number. This was maybe 10 years ago. Rummaging public records is just something I do. It’s like sorting through trash cans looking for identities to steal, only my intentions are innocuous at best, harmelss at worst. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I just like to dig. I put together the life stories of strangers and neighbors and friends alike. As I once explained to a bemused cemetery worker at Old Calvary, I do this with the dead. The fun of traipsing cemeteries all those years was not just for the beauty of the spaces but also learning something about the people whose names I documented. I remember finding the guy who’d patented a bunch of oil refining techniques. Another guy patented a jewelry-making contraption. And the saga of the mighty Johnston Mausoleum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This woman I revisited last night had minor roles in movies and she modeled and wrote some articles. She was on magazine covers and movie posters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through the magic of public records (which I think share far too much) I learned last night that she lives in a bedbug infested shithole in midtown, with no heat in the winter and rats in the summer. She’s a real New Yorker I see postings to social media where it’s all Prada bags and name-dropping other minor celebrities who don’t sseem to respond to her shoutouts. She posts heavily doctored photos of herself, some from decades ago when she had a certain Jackie Kennedy look about her. All whil swatting bedbugs and mice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nothing wrong with that. We all have our times of highs and lows in the motel of life. To me it providesever more proof that social media is a blanket of lies. And those of us who go for the truth are waived off, dismissed as attention-whores, drama-jocks. Lying works. Among my many character flaws I sometimes ask myself why being a compulsive liar could not have been one of them<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That answer is easy. No. I interpreted our encounter as a flirtation, but an obligitory, professional flourish of feminine wiles against gawky male confuzzlement. We were the same age, and still are, but she seemed to have a world of experience ahead of me. But did she? Does she? She went the starlet route, almost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-c2D","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}