NAIL BUFFS

(photo: Shading ourselves from the excessive fluorescent lighting inside Lauren's Nails that shines brighter than 1000 suns)

The other James in my life and I were able to silence our barking dogs and get the pedicures we've been trying to schedule since July. While I waited to meet Jim outside of Lauren's Nails on Newbury, a very, very tan man in an American flag tank top ran up to me with a seemingly urgent question: "Hey, do you want to buy my truck?" I told him I couldn't drive, which is 70 percent true. But the question will go down as the second most random comment every uttered next to: "I like potatoes. Potatoes make me happy" that was whispered conspiratorially at an ATM on the Vineyard in 1996. No stranger to odd encounters himself, Jim shared a recent one with a "very hot Brazilian man" who tried to pick him up on the Blue Line. Jim, a married man, turned him down but was subsequently busted trying to take a photo of him with his camera phone.

While picking our colors, we ran into "T" -- sans piece -- but looking fantastic nonetheless. We chatted briefly as she had her feet loofahed. Annie made a pit stop here too, humoring us by taking the above photo. While the pedis were sub par and the dizzies at Lauren's inexplicably charged Jim an extra $5 for a nail buff, we recovered, all too aware that these were good problems to have in light of the week. We moved on to Stephanie's and Jurys where we discussed some curious developments in the old neighborhood. Furio the 4'11" Italian man who used to drink a quart of Bud every afternoon and then pass out on his lawn chair behind his tomato plants, has begun wearing tight t-shirts and hanging on the corner for hours at a time. He's usually sweeping or hosing down the sidewalk, but sometimes he just strikes a pose against the telephone pole. We'll be investigating this on the Pointy Universe. That said, Jim headed off to London for two weeks and I back to burbia indefinitely.