The Good, Bad & Very Ugly

        A friend I’ve had for thirty-five years is in her mid-nineties now, and a big highlight of every week for us both is getting together for lunch at our favorite Jewish deli.

        My friend’s name is Phyllis, and she was the Director of Special Events at the Jewish Community Center when I was a dance teacher there. Our paths crossed one day when, because new flooring was being installed, I’d had to teach in an auditorium directly across from her office, rather than in my usual dance studio a corridor away.

        As Fate would have it, that same day, Phyllis had learned that she needed to find a children’s choreographer to work with Bob of Sesame Street who was coming to Rochester for a JCC fundraiser. Talk about serendip!

        So, Phyllis was the person who – sorry for this pun – kickstarted my career as a choreographer. For that alone, I would be devoted to her forever, but it just so happens that she’s also an exceptional friend. She’s brilliant and charming, pizzazzy and fun, savvy, loyal and a fascinating conversationalist. She remembers everything, including names and faces of students we haven’t seen in decades, and, at her independent living facility, she runs several clubs, organizes special events and teaches two Yiddish classes every week.

And, as if all that isn’t enough, at age ninety-four (and three-quarters), she still wears gorgeous clothes, statement jewelry and beautifully applied make-up every day of her life. Shallow Me loves being seen with her because she’s so exceptional in every way and, best of all, she has not lost one iota of her pizzazz since the day, thirty-six years ago, when she first introduced herself to me. The woman is a bona fide dynamo and, without question, my role model in every way. All this, we’ll file under GOOD.

     The only indication that she’s aged comes in the fact that she’s begun to need a walker. She hates it, but her three “kids” – ages sixty-five to seventy-two – have insisted, so she’s acquiesced.

        It’s quite the deluxe model – I mean, come on, what else would a woman like Phyllis use? But collapsing that industrial strength apparatus in order to fit it into the back seat of my mid-size sedan is no minor task! It doesn’t help that she stores Tupperware containers in the compartment beneath its seat so that she can take leftovers from dinner back to her apartment each night.

        They cause the middle section of the walker to fight me every week like a hooked tuna. But I love Phyllis, so I suffer through this wrestling match. Besides, I’m Jewish – a day without suffering would have no purpose or meaning.

        I always drop Phyllis off in front of the deli so that she doesn’t have as far to walk, and after lunch, I gladly bring the car back to the curb right in front of the place for her, too.

        Last Friday was a very Upstate New York weather day: snowing a lot and very icy, so, after lunch, I took care to make the distance between the curb and my car doors even narrower than usual for her.

        As I wrestled with the walker, Phyllis climbed into the passenger’s seat, and as she closed her door, it grazed the walker ever so slightly. But sadly, that was the exact moment when I was leaning over it with both my feet precariously squeezed into the extra-narrow, icy path of road next to the curb.

        The result was an anything-but-graceful-or-well-choreographed face plant onto the walker, which, in turn, collapsed onto the sidewalk.

        This, needless to say, is the BAD segment of our saga. Still, it cannot even marginally compare to what’s next: the UGLY…the oh-so VERY, VERY UGLY portion.

     I’m sixty-eight, but I’m dancer/choreographer – oh, and let’s be candid here - /CONCEITED spry. The idea that I’d be down for that metaphoric count – especially on a concrete slab of sidewalk in front of a Jewish deli? – is simply unthinkable.

        So, in a nano-second, I sprang back up, unscathed, (well, except that I could feel blood sticking to my tights at the knees, and the heel of my right palm was already purpling up) and reached back down to retrieve Phyllis’s fallen war horse of a walker, now glistening with chips of ice and snow.

        Quasi-Ugly…but still nowhere near what lay just out of view on the Ugly horizon.

        A woman in her later 40’s with a Raggedy-Ann-red dye job, peacock blue eye shadow and more piercings on her brows and lips than I could count at a glance, flailed her arms at me, like a conductor during a performance of The Flight of the Bumblebee, and shouted, from halfway across the vast parking lot, “WAIT!!!! I SAW YOU FALL!!! WAIT THERE, DEAR!!! I’LL COME HELP YOU WITH YOUR WALKER!!!!”

        She then proceeded to lumber toward me like a rampaging Clydesdale.

        “No, no,” I called out to her in my most youthful voice. “I’m fine!”

        “NOOOO! PLEASE!! DON’T MOVE!!!” She continued to shout as she steamrolled ever closer. “I CAN HELP YOU!!!”

        When she finally made it across the ice-dappled asphalt, Miss Helpful was magenta-faced and wheezing asthamatically. “Heeeeere,” she oozed. Her voice, between gasps, was obsequious, and high-pitched, the kind usually reserved for one’s new puppy. “Let me help you with your walker!!!” She clamped two tattooed hands onto its top.

        “No,” I said, not relinquishing my own hold on the device, yet still trying to sound polite and appreciative. I mean, she had, after all, traveled half the length of a football field for this good deed that she was bound and determined to execute. “I’m totally fine.”

        “I don’t mind,” she said like a cooing pigeon. “Here, I’ll just help you get your walker back into the car.” She tugged it toward herself.

        That was ‘it’ for me. The last straw.

        “Listen to me!” I said sternly, yanking the walker back toward my side of the crack in the icy sidewalk, “I don’t need your help…and this isn’t ‘my’ walker!”

        The woman actually yanked it back toward herself and said, “Don’t be embarrassed about falling. It happens to all of us! I fell many times last week, myself!”

        Well, perhaps I should give YOU this walker, then, I thought to myself, because unless I’m trying to close a big, heavy model while cramped into an icy wedge of space – while I’m wearing high heel boots, let me add – I never fall, okay? And I’ve got at least twenty-five years on YOU, Miss Helpful!

        I admit that the words that I actually said did sound like a snarl. “I….AM….FINE. I…DO…NOT…NEED…YOUR…HELP!”

        I freed Phyllis’s walker from the woman’s steely grip but, to my credit, did have the social acumen to say – well, okay, between gritted teeth, which certainly robbed it of the congeniality factor – “But thank you.” (Still, if I’m honest, I have to admit that I could pretty much hear the unspoken, parenthetical word, “(Asshole!)” that hung in the air between us.)

        Turning my back to her, I slammed the damn walker closed with Herculean ferocity and heaved it into the back seat as if I were a disgruntled Amazon delivery guy.

        Then I flounced to the driver’s side door, flung myself into place behind the steering wheel and immediately heard Phyllis exclaim, “Awww! Wasn’t it SO NICE of that woman to offer to help you with my walker?”

        Phyllis always sees the best in people, and I do admire that about her. So, for that reason, for a quick second, I did bandy the idea around of just saying, “Yesss! Wasn’t it, though?”

        But Phyllis also has a tremendous sense of humor – and of the absurd – so I shared with her the complete tableau of the ridiculous chain of events that began with her simple act of  lightly grazing her walker with my car door at the most inopportune of moments.

        Then we proceeded to laugh all the way to her independent living facility five miles down the road.

        And, just like that, everything went back to Good.