Yesterday evening I saw I Live in Fear at the Film Forum (not a great movie, but an amazing performance by a young Toshiro Mifune as an aged factory owner who wants to drag his unwilling family off to Brazil to escape the H-bomb). Afterwards I stopped off at Kati Roll for a chicken-and-egg-roll dinner (delicious, but I kept wondering which came first), walked across Washington Square Park where I listened to a salsa band play to a good-sized, appreciative crowd, and continued on to Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway, where I stopped in before hitting the subway home. I went down to the basement and found it set up for a reading, with rows of empty metal chairs; the reading seemed to be over, but people were still milling around. I looked towards the back of the room to see if the featured author was still there. A man wearing nothing but black racing shorts was standing talking to people; encasing his head was what looked like a large fishbowl attached to a white plastic neck ring. He may well have been the featured author; I didn’t sully the purity of the moment by staying to ask questions. I hit the subway home.
Did you ever find out who was this person with the fishbowl encasing the head?
I decided later it must have been Jonathan Ames, but I forget why.