You Can Tell the Troublemakers by Their Yoga Mats

...seriously, earlier this evening I was refused entrance to a prominent Philadelphia hotel, apparently because my yoga mat made me look like an undesirable radical trouble maker...

...there I was, having biked downtown earlier for yoga class, mat strapped neatly beneath my knapsack, heading to meet friends at a bar with what they told me was a surprisingly affordable Happy Hour ensconced inside a venerable hotel bordering Philadelphia’s lovely Rittenhouse Square...(where I was apparently stalked by a psychopath as a young child in the late 60’s, but that’s another story)...

...got there to find the place surrounded by cops, with a crowd of Occupy Philly people protesting the presence, apparently at some auditorium within, of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney...carrying signs reading Greed Is Good: Romney/Gekko 2012 (which, for what it’s worth, with no offense intended to any readers' well thought-out social and political sensibilities, I thought was clever) and repeatedly yelling REVOLUTION!!! (which, for what it’s worth, with no offense intended to any reader’s well thought-out social and political sensibilities, I thought was stupid)...

...so, I head for the front door, only to find a member of the hotel’s security personnel moving over to bar my way....he asked if I was a hotel guest, I explained that I was going to meet some friends in the bar, and he let me know it was restricted, and maybe I could come back in an hour...

...so, figuring that meant nobody was allowed in, apart from registered guests, and the location for our meet-up would have to be changed, if it hadn’t been already, I called one of my friends, Marge, who, as it turned out, was just around the corner, only to see another friend, approaching through the park...

...Marge said that she’d talked to yet another friend who was already in the bar...said maybe it was your yoga mat...a possibility she found amusing...so decided to go try her luck at the door...where the same guy who’d physically prevented me from entering, mere minutes earlier, ushered both her and our other friend in, without asking if they were guests, only to turn angrily to remind me that I'd already been denied entrance....I said I’m with them...and, apparently not wanting to offend my respectable non-yoga-mat-carrying companions, he let me in...

...notably, a bit later, after I’d told this story to people at the bar, a nicely dressed older woman walked up and said that she, actually, was one of the protesters, and had no problem getting in....then, she didn’t have a yoga mat...

Difficult Times Six

So...I’ve been called upon to share six (6) random things about myself...or something like that...but, listen, first I’m gonna tell something not-so random about me...that anyone who knows me at all knows well...which is that I’m notoriously difficult...very much so...so, for instance, since getting into this blogging thing, I’ve found myself a part of this blogger community...and, thus, I’ve made some lovely blogger friends...but also found that this community has its own strange language, customs, rituals, and unique sexual positions...okay, maybe not that last part...at least, nobody’s told me about them...anyway, among those blogger friends are Seeing-Eye Chick who “tagged” me for the six things thing...even though she knows I never follow the rules of these things...as well as Lea, who’s given me two blogging awards I’ve forgotten even to acknowledge, much less follow the rules of...and, dare I forget, my good friend Svasti, who’s once again gonna call me on recycling stuff I’ve said elsewhere...but I’ve done worse things...really...

1. 1966—the year I was born, as well as the year Bob Dylan came out with the Blonde on Blonde album, which features both the best pick-up line ever—she said ‘your debutante knows what you need, but I know what you want’—as well as the best after-it’s-all-fallen-to-pieces line—when we meet again, introduced as friends, please don’t let on that you knew me when, I was hungry, and it was your world....

2. 6 is the first digit in the address of the house where I grew up, and where my mother still lives. However, if you look my mom up in the phone book, you’ll see only the street name, without the number. The reason for that is that, shortly before we moved out from the city, when I was three, my dad, a psychiatrist, ran into someone he’d had committed, a fellow psychiatrist, actually, on the street. The guy said “I know where your children play.” My dad asked “where’s that?” The guy said “Rittenhouse Square,” which, as it turned out, was exactly right.

3. 6 is also the first digit of my phone number when I was a kid, and, thanks to cell phones, it’s the only number other than my own (which also contains a 6) that I still have memorized—I can, however, still remember what, according to the Guinness Book of World’s Records when I was a kid, was the world’s hardest tongue twister: the sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.

4. 666 is, of course, the Number of the Beast according to the Book of Revelations in the New Testament. I tend to associate it, however, with the heavy metal bands that massively overused it in my youth, who I always hated, though now I realize that this was mostly because that was the music most popular with the bullies in my high school. I still don’t like heavy metal much, but will admit that the Paranoid album by Black Sabbath isn’t bad.

5. That 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing was never much of a challenge for me...he lived around the corner from the house where I lived until I was three...the one from which, apparently, that crazy shrink followed us to the park....

6. I could tell ya about the 6 Branches of Yoga...but you’d be better off asking somebody who can do twists and inversions without hurting him(or her)self...like Brooks or Linda or the aforementioned Svasti....