Pre-Teen Follies
            

            Dear Christine--

            All right, all right ... so maybe I exaggerated a little when I said you
were a Republican operative plotting Al Gore's demise when you ran into him
outside that Washington movie theater way back when. So I took a little
literary license. Trust me, sister. The story works great when you're not
around to correct it with trifles like the facts.

            I do remember the laughable panic that Washington plunges into every time
the city gets so much as a dusting of snow. But here in New York City, as you
know, the mindset is a little different. Here it takes the equivalent of a
percussion bomb to get anyone's attention. Here, we don't chitchat much about
the weather or foreign policy or world peace. Every day is a Seinfeld
episode and, even when it's not, the tabloid headline writers try to turn it
into one. We're the hard-to-please connoisseurs of a unique local art form: The
Truly Weird Story.

            Take today. Rather than waking up and remarking about the four inches of
snow we received here overnight, the big story here is about the two office
workers who were stuck in an skyscraper elevator that went on a 40-story free
fall--only to screech to a stop near the fourth floor when the emergency brake
kicked in.

            Apparently, some rescue workers took an adjacent elevator to the place where
the man and woman were stuck, took out the side panels that separated the two
elevator cars, then asked them to make a tightrope walk across a narrow beam
that spanned the shaft between the two elevators, as if these two poor
knee-knocking souls were suddenly the second coming of Karl Wallenda.

            They did it. But can you say 'intensive therapy'?

            Another headline here today said Mia Farrow's son, Seamus, wants to enroll
at Columbia next year. Even though he's 12. Apparently, he's already taking
courses at a small college at Massachusetts. I read that and thought I can't
even remember what I was doing at 12? Can you? I faintly recall jamming a full
pack of bubblegum into my mouth before every softball game I played. And
falling asleep to baseball games that I listened to on a transistor radio I
smuggled to bed. And getting so dusty from playing outside all day that I could
wet my finger and write my name on my dirt-covered legs. Back then, my parents
had just bought us a homicidal pony named Yankee, and while I was trying to
ride him one day, he bucked me right over a three-rail fence. I landed in some
tall grass with a thud.

            Perhaps not surprisingly, years later I had to go to the doctor because of a
back problem. I had a slightly cracked disk, and the doctor asked me how it
might've happened. And I thought about being launched off the horse and all the
other stuff that happened that same year--the time I fell out of a tree in my
neighbor's yard, the time I fell 20 feet from a hay loft and landed unhurt on a
barn floor covered with straw; the time I wrecked a minibike or fell into a
ravine after trying to swing one-handed on a tree vine, like I'd just seen
Johnny Weismuller do in a Tarzan movie. I also fell smack on my head in gym
class when a classmate forgot to hold my legs onto the uneven bars as I
practicing a gymnastics maneuver called a "Flying Eagle." I couldn't turn my
head for a week.

            So just as I'm about to tell my doctor, Leopold, all this, she's staring at
the X-ray and absently says, "You know, 90 percent of these back problems are
hereditary."

            So that's what I was doing at age 12. I didn't even know the word
"matriculation."

            Gotta run now because the TV news has just started a story about the police
apprehending "Soccer Guy"--this sidewalk bandit who distracted tourists by
breaking into a soccer-ball-handling routine, then circling and bumping them
until he'd pickpocketed their wallets. As local lore goes, it doesn't match the
all-time classic ("Headless Body Found in Topless Bar"). Nor does Soccer Guy
seem like an appellation that's likely to go down in the annals of crime
alongside Sammy the Bull--or even Paulie Walnuts, that hit man on the
Sopranos.

            But, as in Washington, on snowy days like this, you take what you can
get.

            Stay warm,
Johnette