Metropolitan Diary
Salvation Army
Dear Diary:
My 21st birthday was coming up so I went to the Salvation Army to look for a dress. It was the middle of summer, and I was on the hunt for something sparkly and short to wear clubbing with friends.
I navigated through the narrow aisles thick with secondhand clothes: velvet evening gowns, Planet Fitness T-shirts, leather pants with the tags still on. Customers chattered in Spanish and pressed themselves against the hangers to allow one another to pass.
A small woman wearing a sun hat and a medical mask noticed me frown at a stain on one dress. She said her mother was a seamstress, and then explained how to remove the stain.
She pointed to some other clothes she thought I should try on.
“You have great legs,” she said. “Show them off.”
“Don’t thank me,” she said, scurrying off toward the dress pants. “Thank your mother.”
— Lilly Sabella
Free Sandwich
Dear Diary:
It was 1985, and I was on my first trip to New York. I had driven up from Knoxville with a boy who didn’t like to drive. He was chasing a boy in the city, and I wanted to see the city.
After we arrived, he went his way, and I went mine. I stayed with some actor friends but spent most days alone with a tiny bit of money, trying to soak up everything.
Walking past a deli one day, I saw a sign scrawled on butcher paper: “Free sandwich if you can name Meryl Streep’s first movie.”
I walked inside and approached the man at the counter.
“I know the answer,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s ‘Julia,’” I said, speaking quickly. “Meryl Streep’s first movie was ‘Julia’ starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave.”
The man looked irritated.
“How’d you know that?” he said. “I can’t believe you knew that. Man. OK, what sandwich do you want?”
“Really?” I said.
“What sandwich — you won. Come on. Hurry it up.”
He pointed to a menu on the wall. I couldn’t believe it. I had won a sandwich, and it was free, and I was broke, and knew Meryl Streep’s first movie.
He made me a great sandwich — chicken salad on rye, maybe? I remember eating it in the spring sunshine, so happy to be out of Knoxville and on the streets of New York.
— Kerry Madden-Lunsford
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html
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Much appreciated 