Tallying Up the Day So Far

Number of classic lines I got on my walk today: 2
("Hey, girl, you looking for a man to take care of you?" from a guy sitting on his group house stoop. Later, caught behind another walker, I pass him and from behind hear "You're making me look bad." "I'm good at this," I turn around and say reassuringly. "I walk every day."
"You're still making me look bad," he says, smiling but not speeding up any.)

Number of unexpected friends who showed up while I was eating lunch at the Belvidere: 2
(One of whom I hadn't seen in months and who was not only looking terrific, but actually said the words, "I'm happy." You have to understand, this is a guy who would rather dwell on the negative than the positive just to be contrary, no matter how well things are going. He had the Eggs Belvidere while I ate a Caesar with grilled salmon; it was downright pleasant, not always the case with our shared meals in the past. And then another friend showed up to get a companion for Saturday Stroll and remind me that his birthday is tomorrow, in case I'd forgotten.)

Number of sidewalk chalk artists I saw on my way to the Byrd Theater: 7
(One girl, whose chalk art was labeled VMFA, was actually copying a 19th century Impressionist masterpiece and doing a magnificent job of translating oil on canvas to chalk on sidewalk.)

Number of phalluses in the locally-made film The Taint: Hundreds
(I'd heard about the film at Project Resolution where the director described it as a film about "a tainted river that makes all the men become misogynists and bash in women's heads. It's a comedy." Was it ever! The nearly full audience laughed almost the whole way through at vomiting, internal organs being ripped out, defecation, ejaculation and so much more. You kind of had to be there. Mimicking the age-old litter promo that the Byrd plays, there were several times when a character said, "Sick!" with just the right inflection to be an inside joke for regular Byrd attendees.)

Number of brilliant one-liners directed at me: 1
(Settled into my painful seat at the Byrd, local comic and ukulele player extraordinaire Herschel walked by and I said hello for the third time in three days; he'd been at the show at Alley Katz Thursday, at Gallery 5 last night, and here we were at the same place again. "My god," he exclaimed. "We're soulmates!"

But we all know there's no such things as soulmates. Right?