Lydia’s Blog

Holy shit.

So I fucked off of work (again) today to catch the Germany/Argentina game in the World Cup Quarter Finals.

Okay yes. I enjoy soccer. The game itself is great…watching cool European strategy coming up again and again against South American finesse. I like the howling and cheering of inebriated fans. I like the howling and cheering of the players themselves, upon posession called after a foul. But let’s just be totally honest for a second.

Footballers, soccer players, whatever you want to call them…they’re fucking hot. There’s a trend in this year’s WM toward long hair. On the Argentinians, this manifested itself in several instances of shoulder-length locks, making parts of the team look like greased-up Assyrian gods.

And I’m sure I don’t even have to bring up the subject of their rippling man-shanks. Whoo, mother.

Testosterine deliciousness abounds in the World Cup. I would recommend that all my female and homosexual male readers turn off the Golden Girls rerun immediately, and locate the nearest source of ESPN 2.

The German back bench is comprised of what look like extras from a Leni Riefensthal film. That’s one tight, Aryan buffet. The starting team however leaves a bit to be desired (in terms of unfathomable hotness), notable standouts being Michael Balack, and the visual shower-head that is Jens Lehmann.

I’ve included some photos of Jens Lehmann, so that the non-footballed world can finally see what female Arsenal fans dream about at night. I was disturbed by one source’s comparison of Lehmann with David Hasselhoff…

Those that know the Kittensnake might be familiar with her gourmetante appreciation of man-man action. Well get this, I didn’t know this because I’d never seen it…but after normal play, if there is to be overtime, the players who’ll continue run to the side of the field and sprawl out on their backs. In the few minutes before the game resumes, a small army of winsome young trainers attends each prostrate player, slapping his massive calves to and fro, kneading his glistning shanks and buttocks, massaging his back, spraying him down, stretching his limbs for him. It happens again before the second quarter hour of overtime…

The cameras capture all of this in close-up. Forget the Cazzo, boys. This…

…is the shit.

Oh yeah. And the Germans are pretty excited to have won.

As I wandered through the ‘berg earlier this evening, after being more or less stood up by the cool Turkish lady who works at my favorite local bakery (who’d agreed to take me out for real Turkish night out, so to speak), I got to thinking about loss.

Sudden loss in the form of death and/or disaster is something we all acknowledge and fear. In all other subcategories, the point of recognition is always more important, and thereby much more difficult, than the actual moment of loss. For example my beloved, ailing grandmother relatively recently gave me an original photo of herself as an acrobat mugging with a midget in a travelling circus, which was how she made a living when she first came to the U.S. Only months after I tucked the photo into a Vanity Fair and threw it into a trash bin at the Fulton St. Mall, did I recognize the loss.

This precious object, which I’d discarded months earlier, came only upon tardy recognition to represent an enormous, aching loss. The kind of loss that tears at your past, present and future. The kind of loss you never really forget.

I just find it amazing that the act of loss can be so totally insignificant. Loss can be painless, even blissful. Recognition, the act of becoming aware, can be so devastating.

One can easily be compelled, quite suddenly, to mourn a place, thing, person or part of the self that was lost long ago. Soundlessly. Anonymously.

But somehow never blamelessly. Perhaps that’s why it’s so painful. The guilt is the sear that cuts through the throb.

And these are the things that fools consider at 4:00 a.m.

Today I had my first real artgasm in months…MONTHS I tell you.

Last Friday afternoon, Tommy and I were sitting out getting stumbly at the park. Suddenly his Doppelgaenger (the director Peter Palasnik) decided to stop by with his seeemingly mute lady friend. The boys chatted for a bit, until the subject of a certain cafe’s certain film competition came up.

I’d heard about it before. Cheeky PoMo cafe decides to host a short film competition/festival on the subject of its staple merchandise. Last year it was sugar. At some point it must have been coffee…and this year.

It’s cream.

I nearly squeezed off a load into my worn cotton grannies right then and there. Cream? My reaction to the borderline-retarded nature of the competition was quickly overtaken by my passionate and enduring worship of nearly all dairy products. Cream included. Could it be that the gods were speaking to me through this cafe’s trite post-adolescent stab at irony?

Yes. Oh Jesus yes.

Seconds later I was on the phone to Rebecca, my long-suffering designer and all-around collaborator. We had been planning to play around with a video-version of a recent opera proposal we’ve presented to a theater in Eastern Europe. “Fuck that shit,” I declared neutrally, “we’re doing cream.”

After a long silence, I heard a labored sigh on the line. “Just storyboard it and be at my place on Monday at four.”

As Monday broke this morning, I lunged out of my apartment and into my local supermarket, where I bought two cans of whipped cream, five cartons of 10% fat condensed milk and a huge jar of vanilla yogurt.

Later I’d find out that at that very moment, Rebecca was securing ape masks and balaclavas. This is why I love her.

See, I’m not an ideas director…I’m a pictures director. I’m an outside-in as opposed to inside-out director. Rebecca gets this. The visual logic I devise for a play, opera, installation or movie ends up molding the project’s content. End manifesto.

This established, I wanted to film a story-less series of bizarre episodes featuring two chunky topless ladies. And buckets of thick white cream.

And so that was today. Rebecca and I bouncing around her apartment in just our underwear (our pants had been destroyed in the first test take), sprinting for the sink after every cut, in order to wipe the cream out of our hair, eye sockets, underbreasts, belly-buttons, etc. Beautiful pictures. Dirty pictures. Holy pictures.

Everything began to stink of foul milk drying into wood. My eyebrows remain curded into a rather unfamiliar shape.

At one point, Rebecca’s roommate came home to find us spraying, smearing, shooting and drooling cream all over each other, and all over her newly done floors. She stood speechless at the smelly, jiggling sight.

Her four-month-old son, Hugo, seemed considerably more entertained.

Rapture, you might call it.

So, I decided on a guy to give my beloved apartment up to today (wow, nice English). His name is Randy, which is for some reason comforting. He’s my age and from New Jersey. He plays bass in a band and sells hot dogs by day. I figured he’ll really appreciate the neighborhood.

It’s surreal. I realize that I’ve been sort of walking around in a coma for at least the last three weeks or so. Basically since my guests left after the surgery. Or maybe before. I expected my life to just spring back to normal, but it didn’t. And of course it wouldn’t have…I’d quit the Komische Oper, I’m deaf, and summer had descended, and I could no longer rely on Berlin as my home. Sweet, annoying, fabulous, insane, bullshit Berlin. As of three weeks from now, it’ll just be another place to visit. Like Oberlin or Pittsburgh. Like West Hartford. Like New York.

I loved Berlin so much because it gave me so much material. I always had something to bitch about. As Dad used to say, Lyds is only happy when she’s complaining.

And how.

It’s ironic that I gave up the apartment on such a Berliny day in my neighborhood. Today was the Fete de la Musique at Zionskirchplatz, the church with the REALLY loud bells within spitting distance of my front door. I’d heard the music from my aparment, swelling through the courtyard. Really shitty reggae. I had to go out and take a look. After wading through stalls of hemp scarves and organic shoes, I found the soundstage. It was as I’d expected.

Seven white guys. And a sampler CD of old Bob Marley effects. I signed myself up for a free Thai Lotus massage to get over the Trauma (a pudgy Asian man sitting on the backs of my thighs, pounding the fuck out of my shoulderblades. I recommend).

Martin and Nicole came over a bit later to look at my place. Too small and too pink, they thought (nasty, stained pink carpets). We went out to dinner to celebrate.

On the way back, just minutes ago, I heard shitty live rock begin reverberating through the streets (making it impossible for me to watch the Argentina/Netherlands game on a street screen). Sure enough, on the corner in the opposite direction of Zionskirchplatz, a new arts collective was opening up, complete with live band and piles of Germans “dancing” (standing still and bending their knees alternately to the beat). The air was dense with dope, and the white person to dreadlock ratio was higher than I’d seen in a long while. Out in the open.

I stood and watched for two of three minutes, feeling a dizzying, nostalgic regret wash over me. After those few minutes, I felt something harder replacing that original sentiment. That bittersweet bonhommie shrinky-dinked into an odd, cynical menace I find myself turning toward more and more often these days.

I turned around, walked the twelve seconds to my building and walked up to my apartment. The apartment that as of today, isn’t really mine anymore.

I am not a foodie. I wasn’t brought up foodie. After school was always about either Elio’s pizza (it’s cool to be square), or Eggo waffles (leggo), depending on whether I was in the mood for salty or sweet. Dinner was often cold cereal. Crates of Pop Tarts and Hot Pockets and Fruit Roll-ups and Oreos and Corn Nuts and Doritos were stacked in delicious little mountains in our basement, a magnificent testament to the awesome powers of wholesale shopping. Fruit and veg were approximated by individually portioned cans of cling peaches, and big boxes of potato buds. I ate my first alfalfa sprout at age 24.

Now this of course led to the standard hackneyed catalogue of weight and body image problems, about which I won’t bore you.

The real shame about my anti-foodie upbringing, is that I wasn’t raised to appreciate when anything was technically, quantifiably “good”. There isn’t a lot of qualitative difference between starchy shit and salty starchy shit, if you get me. There was never a sense of joy or discretion about food. It wasn’t about letting the colors of a delicate souffle unfurl on the tongue. No. for me it was more about throwing another batch of frozen mozzarella sticks in the microwave and hoping my mom wouldn’t catch me before I could smuggle them back to my room.

I’ve run into the remains of this problem on several occasions as an adult because, strangely, opera people tend to be foodies. They tend to love to cook, and love great, tiny, exclusive restaurants, and when it comes to wine, forget it. Leave your two euro supermarket merlot at home.

While in Austria, I was invited out into wine country to sample rustic indigenous cuisine and some of the world’s greatest white wine. It was my friend Martin, his girlfriend Nicole and I, and while they sat there rolling their eyes in food- and drink-induced ecstasy, I tried my best to fit in via imitation. So, I drank through two bottles of 54 euro-a-bottle white something (as if it were Boone’s) and grunted and moaned and pointed, nodding and rolled my eyes around in what I believed to be the spirit of the event.

Then I was informed I’d been eating sausage rind (wax) for the past ten minutes. Fuck. They’d found me out. If you charged me thirty euro for a bowl of Dinty Moore, I’d call it Haute Cuisine because I JUST DON’T FUCKING KNOW.

My dear friend Beth and her dear husband James have taken me out on many an occaision, to sample the work of great chefs in both London and Berlin. I love these occasions, they make me feel like such a star, surrounded by people of such taste and class. Still, when it comes right down to it, I notice that the portions are far smaller (and there are many more of them), and arranged with far more aesthetic flair than you’d find at, say, a Denny’s–but deeper than that, you might as well slap me up some moons over my hammy.

What a fucking embarassment. Me, who’s future brother-in-law is one of New York’s hottest chefs. Me, who can dismiss a Haendel recording because of unidiomatically executed ornaments. Me, who can draw you up a compare and contrast chart between Marc Jacobs and Prada this season…how can I not have this most important of neo-dandy-esque traits? Where’s Joris-Karl Huysmans when you need him (maybe if I stick foie gras up my asshole I’ll enjoy it more…?)

Despite my apparent handicap, I do seem to be making progress in one area:

Cheese.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve pretty much gone totally gay for artisanal cheeses, the kinds that are only sold at street markets from specialty carts.

I have two preferred groups: old and hard, and soft and stinky.

With the former category, I’ve learned that time of make plays an enormous part in taste…for instance, if the milk was harvested and used in early spring, it’ll never have the nasty bite of a late summer milk cheese, due to the high moisture content in newer grass. You end up with some great cheeses, like this Dutch number I tried a while ago, aged 24 months, bright orange and so brittle you had to boil the knife to cut it.

The soft and stinky is my passion. I was happily maintaining my love affair with Saint Agur when just last weekend, I discovered Fourme d’Ambert.

With my first bite, I knew I’d never be able to eat a Kraft cheese product again. No. My life had changed forever.

After buying a decent-sized chunk of the cheese, I decided to go back to the cart for a second slab, for prophylactic reasons. After getting the cheese home, I tried spreading it on one of my ghetto-supermarket crackers. No no no.

I had to go back to the market to buy some nubby, fresh, whole-grain lesbian bread, in order for my precious cheese to be supported by an element of similar quality. While I was back at the market, I also bought organic vine tomatoes.

If I were only so lucky as to hope that a little slab of Fourme d’Ambert could be my gateway drug into the world of being able to tell a twinkie from a millefeuille.

Fucking unlikely, though.

Today I woke up at about noon and proceeded to do the absolute minimum any organism can do whilst still being considered a sentient being. I’d made plans for the evening with Tommy…but I fear the real bottom line in that area is that, when they even recognize me, Tommy’s friends and I appear to be cut from radically different social cloth. So the plans fell through. Diplomatically.

It was about eight thirty, and I realized I’d been stewing in my own fetid inactivity for longer than I’d slept the night before (though in my defense, said inactivity is actually part of a promise I made to my mother to “take it easy”). Fuck this, I thought. I’m going out solo style.

Okay, Dad. I hope you’re sitting down. I went out to see the live broadcast of the U.S. v. Italy in the World Cup.

As I left the aparment, the streets were ringing with the sound of our national anthem. It was highly surreal. You see, every tiny hole-in-the-wall bar, restaurant, cafe, convenience store, enoteca or shop in Berlin gets to write off the purchase of a huge flat screen TV or HD projection system as a business expense this year. They all shove these devices out on the street in the evenings (for the hardcore, also during the day) in order to lure customers with the promise of live soccer. It works. I made the mistake of trying to catch up with an old friend a few nights ago, during the Germany/Poland game.

Dumb idea. You see, to me the most aesthetically pleasing part of the World Cup is the surround-sound screaming you get at night at the moment. As one walks down the street, all can be calm until…it suddenly sounds as if the messiah was just born in every apartment and public space in the vicinity. Jubilant. Totally unselfconscious.

For my viewing, I chose Sankt Oberholz…an enormous cafe with one flatscreen and two projection systems…that somehow manages to maintain its PoMo flair.

Here’s what I learned: The U.S. team is clumsy and charmless, and Italians are pussies. To be sure, both are second class teams. Neither has the uncanny balletic skill of, say…Brazil, whose players can change direction with the ball in seeming defiance of physics, or the ironclad strategic airtightness of, say, the Germans.

The game was a draw, at 1:1. Still, to be fair–the Italians did score two goals…just one happened to be for the Americans. The Americans ran their tits off, managing in general to keep the (rather impotent) action on Italy’s goal side. Still, when the play wandered toward the American goalie (a very effective Mr. Keller), the situation became perceptibly more dangerous.

The greatest strength of the Italians, which I of course appreciated, was their acting ability. If an Italian player was so much as grazed by an American, he would immediately collapse to the ground, clutching at some predetermined part of his body, and writhe, wailing in agony. This tactic proved so effective that two American players were ejected from the game for tiny breaches in etiquette. Americans were, of course grazed and shoved and tripped just as often as the Italians…but you know us, we just stand right up and keep playing. One Italian player was rejected for rough play at one point. But the American (McBride) he virtually attacked was at that time bleeding profusely from his eye socket. (He was stoically treated for the laceration before rolling cameras, and then returned to the game.)

Sadly, at present it also makes for more effective copy to insinuate that the American team seems to get off on mindlessly beating the shit out of other national teams on the field. It was obvious as well that the evening’s spectators were waiting with great excitement for the Americans to get their asses beaten into the ground by a continental European team. When it became apparent that, at best, America would get beaten by one goal or so, the other spectators at Sankt Oberholz began to wander, one-by-one out of the WM viewing salon, gravitating back to their laptops and loose-shag cigarettes.

But I can’t get enough. Whether it’s rooting for the surprisingly skilled Croatian team against Brazil’s Death Star, or watching Argentina slip Serbia-Montenegro the unlubricated pinky to the tune of 6-0, I have to admit, the World Cup is a fucking remarkable event. Unlike the Super-Bowl, which is more of a “Coors n’Wings at home with my buds” kind of thing, The World Cup is a decidedly communal event. Every day brings a new national theme to Berlin. Last Thursday was Swedish day, for instance. Today was Italian day. People with banners, tricots, wigs, scarves…singing songs in the streets, on public transit, in the bars, you name it. It seems as though watching the games at home would be considered nearly antisocial.

The whole point is for construction workers, bankers, video artists, school teachers, cell-phone salesmen, doctors, students, dog-walkers, aerobics teachers, tech support guys and novelists to sit around together, drinking, cheering, and forgetting, even for a short while, about the colorlessness of everyday life.

Oh yes, and don’t forget to include stage directors in that pile.

Here’s a sweet phrase to add to your day-to-day vernacular. I maintain that I invented the term, although I’ve been informed by others that I might be mistaken.

Whatever, they’re dicks. This baby is so mine. I was dropping it back at grad school back in the oh won…

The term is this: Muffin Top. This describes the condition by which the waistband and/or hip area of a skirt or pair of trousers (also to some degree bikini bottoms, underwear, shorts, etc.) is (to vastly varying degrees) too snug on a person (generally female). The result of this miscalculation is one of the following:

Mild Muffin Top: the skin and underlying fat of the belly, torso, hips and possibly upper buttcheeks are pinched at an unflattering location, creating a fleshy spillover.

Acute Muffin Top: the skin and underlying fat of the upper thighs, hips, lower buttocks and, in severe cases, pubis are squeezed in such a way as to be forced upwards, thus joining the skin and underlying fat of the belly, torso, hips and possibly upper buttcheeks, as mentioned above (please see Mild Muffin Top). This combined payload creates a spillover of rather more epic scope.

Muffin Top is not exclusively a question of weight, or even fat distribution. It is far more a symptom of underfunctioning circumferential perception, in most cases combined with an unforgiveably shitty sense of fashion. (ex. stovepipe hiphuggers)

Possible uses of the phrase:

Noun (reflexive use): Fuck, you guys…I can’t buy these stovepipe hiphuggers, check out the Muffin Top I’m sporting here…

Noun (nonreflexive use): What would possibly convince a girl that thin to wear something miniscule enough to raise a Muffin Top like that? Is that from Baby Gap?

Adjective: See that girl over there? No, I meant the other one–the Muffin Toppy girl wearing the Ramones shirt from H & M.

Verb: If you buy those stovepipe hiphuggers like, two sizes bigger, they won’t Muffin Top you quite that much…

Verb (gerund form): Please don’t let her go out that way, she’s Muffin Topping all over the place.

Verb (simple past): Wow guys, those stovepipe hiphuggers really Muffin Topped the shit out of me back there. Thanks for being such good friends and not letting me buy them.

MUFFIN TOP COMPETITION!!!

Send your best picture of a Muffin Top (yours or someone else’s) to lydiasteier@gmail.com. I’ll post the candidates and put it to a vote. The individual who sent the winning photo will receive a genuine Berlin-Prenzlauerberg PoMo artifact sent to them. (Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery).

Entries must be received by July 1.

I’ve just read that Gyorgi Ligeti has died.

In my short career as a director and musician, I’ve been lucky enough to come into some pretty extensive contact with the works of modern masters, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Philip Glass, Bruno Maderna, Salvatore Sciarrino, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Maxwell Davies, etc.

Contemporary music is a difficult thing. Composers are tugged between the desire to insinuate themselves into the larger story of concert music, and to diverge from the beaten path (or that path observed to have been beaten). You have composers like Previn and Adamo, who are creating a type of lyrical nostalgia, or Zender and Fujikura, who are hellbent on reining divergent media into the live performance of music.

Here’s my dirty secret: When I get home after working on Neuwerth, Ades or Donatoni–on Davies, Rao or Henze—I always flip on some Bach before heading to bed. It’s my sorbet for dessert. It restores the right angles in my brain. It reminds me of the broad, devastating wonder that can be made possible by the act of making music.

Not so with Ligeti. No Bach necessary. He wasn’t the appetizer, entree or sorbet…he was the whole fucking six-course meal with brandy and a cigar at the tail end. Shit, he was even the hooker at work under the dinner table. While directing Le Grand Macabre in Graz, it wasn’t abnormal to see me glazing out to Ligeti on my iPod during extended meal breaks…despite enduring it in rehearsal for seven hours a day. His music can be punishing or frail, bellicose or desperate, hysterical or catatonic. It has that rare, divine breath in it that will surely guarantee it’s life on recordings and in concert halls for centuries to come.

To me, Ligeti was a cherished reminder of both the legacy and future of this idiotic business in which I increasingly find myself to be taking part. He was the granddaddy, the joker, the prophet, the anarchist…and perhaps most importantly, the most apt possible guardian of the western musical firmament.

For those that might not be familiar with Ligeti’s work, the 2001: Space Odyssey soundtrack can provide you with a great point of entry.

I have a rare gift. Very rare, it would seem. That gift is the following: I am like catnip to raving, often intoxicated indigents. If there is a reeking, loudly swearing reprobate within 200 meters, he or she will find me, find a seat immediately next to me, and proceed to put on a great show.

This happens at least once a week. Last week there was the grunter on the U-Bahn…who parked himself basically on my lap and proceeded to empty a large carton of boxed wine into (and onto) himself. Two days ago, it was the odd, trousers-averse Pacific-islands native who refused to stop touching my hair and telling me about our beautiful children as I flipped through a magazine at a cafe.

Earlier today, as I sunbathed a bit in the park, drinking coffee and unobtrusively reading The Economist, I was unsurprised to see a disgruntled and disorderly homeless man plop down next to me. He muttered, bleched and drank for a bit before snoozing for a bit. After waking up, he saw the cover of my magazine and decided to give a particularly mean-spirited monologue about how Americans destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq and if he wasn’t personally more vigilant (thus able to round up and lead his countrymen), we’d end up flattening Germany as well. When this line of thinking led him into a particularly nasty exposition about how I had probably bought my vagina from Louis Vuitton, people in the vicinity began to quietly gather their belongings and move away.

I just sat it out until the guy got bored and moved on. Took about two hours.

Why me? I sometimes wonder, in such situations. I have a couple of theories.

One, my mother constantly used to bring people around that were, well, not exactly considered the height of savory by normal society. The weren’t white-supremacists or pedophiles exactly–they were people she’d meet at the local public access TV stations, or comic book conventions. While most people (including my Dad, if left uncoerced) would politely steer way and I mean way the fuck clear of these people, by mother found them uniformly charming. For these men, In her book, living with their moms at age 37, having never had any contact with a three-dimensional woman, and having doll collections would be qualified as considerable strengths. Other plusses included personal hygiene incongruities, the constant presence of clothing featuring DC characters, and hairstyles as “hommages” (to Elvis, Wolverine, Andy Kaufmann, etc.)

She gave these men what so few people in their lives were giving them: a non-judgemental reaction. Although there are obvious differences, between these two cases, I also find myself unwillng to scowl and pull my newspaper over myself in cover as these people come near. I won’t stand up and march indignantly to the other side of the train, plopping back down with a caustic sigh. These people are pretty awful and annoying, sure, but they also probably didn’t mean to turn out the way they have. If I’m the one person that smiles and treats them kindly in a day, who does that hurt?

On my first trip to New York City at about age nine (with the St. James Church Choir), I walked past the then-ubiquitous wall of bums at Grand Central Station (right in the main hall…as you walk toward the tracks out to CT and suburban NY). I was reaching into my pocket to grab a quarter for a crying legless guy when the choir director’s wife grabbed my wrist and marched me away from both the bums and the other kids.

“Don’t go near the dirty people.” She hissed at me.

My Dad was different. He’d never provoke or approach an encounter with an indigent, but if one were to occur, he always seemed to know how to end it as quickly as possible while also seeming inhumanly friendly.

My second theory is the following: These people can smell their own.

What makes sane, normal people into babbling crazies that fall through the uneven slats of our society’s idea of decorum? It’s probably a combination of things. Maybe it’s a inborn tenuousness in terms of mental health, exacerbated by substance abuse, trauma or both, and topped by a healthy squirt of desperation and a gleaming cherry of lonliness to boot.

Recently, I’ve taken to talking to myself. Of course, I’ve always mumbled to myself in private, but I’ve been catching more public incidences as well.

A few days back, I was settled on a bench at one of the more apalling pomo coffee shops on my street, which happened to be quite crowded at the time. I got up to grab a water. When I came back to my spot, a choice pomo couple was preparing to settle there, somehow deciding to ignore my bag, nearly-full-coffee, and spread-open magazine. I gently pushed past them…going to reclaim my perch.

“Hey dickholes, I’m already sitting there…” I thought. Or I think I thought. Or I think I thought I thought.

Completely involuntarily, my inner monologue had managed to go public. The pomo couple turned and glared at me, incredulous. I recognized their look. I think I smiled.

In any case, I got my seat back.

As Joolz says, yes, this shit does always happen to me. This time, however, I had a witness.

A couple of days ago, I was ambling down Schoenhauser Allee after having a coffee with Rebecca, the designer friend whose constant employment in Barcelona justifies the occasional flown-in presence of yours truly.

As we were walking, I saw a woman lying on the street some ways ahead. “Check it out,” I said to Rebecca “a dead lady.”

She was skeptical, and so in typical classless American fashion, I bet her a bottle of decent wine (over EU 2 a bottle, that is) that the woman on the ground actually was dead.

To be honest, I was far from sure. My one clue was the two rubber-gloved policemen leaning casually on a tree next to the woman…ostensibly waiting for a van of some sort to carry the body away. I mean, they could have just been really lazy medics. They hadn’t made any effort to cover the woman in any way, however, and there wasn’t a crowd of people gathering (which is so awfully, appropriately German). All and all, it looked like any other early afternoon on a main street running through Berlin’s hipster district. Just with a prostrate, apparently deceased woman and two disinterested, sunglassed cops catching some rays.

As we approached the woman, it became clear that I had won the bet. The woman’s torso was flat against the ground, but her hips were torqued in a most unnatural way, legs following suit. Did she dive from a balcony above? Probably not. It would have had to have been a fourth- or fifth-floor balcony, and quite a strident jump (in order to land so far from the building). I couldn’t see any lacerations or bruises on the body. Sometimes old, sick drunks die on benches and stoops overnight, and are found in the morning. Despite her age, ragged dress and proximity to a bench, this was at nearly three in the afternoon, making this theory unlikely.

Whatever it was that did it, this woman was certainly dead. She wasn’t breathing, and her skin had already taken on that odd, waxy, grey-yellow tint.

As we passed by, me staring and Rebecca trying to drag me away, I overheard one cop saying something about the threat posed by the Czech teamin the upcoming World Cup to the other cop….while packing down a cigarette.

Walking away, I didn’t turn back. Now, I’m not a religious woman, but I found myself saying a little prayer for the dead lady, basically asking God to help those she left behind, those who loved her. Holy shit, I thought. Hopefully she even had people that loved her. Wow. I’m lucky. You’re lucky. Everyone who ends their lives someplace other than a sidewalk being gawked by hipsters and the essayists that hate them is lucky.

Feeling suddenly humbled and charitable as a result of the experience, I turned to Rebecca. “You know what, forget the bottle of wine”, I said.

She stopped walking, turned to me and stared.