Nude Men

beards.
    After her show, I tell her I don’t understand. She says, “Maybe it’s you, Jeremy. Maybe you bring me good luck.”
     
    A t her next show, three nights later, there are five clapping tables.
     
    T he waiters have to bring in more tables, and they eliminate the open dancing area. Her show goes from ten minutes to twenty to half an hour, but not more. She doesn’t want to overdo it. She wants to leave them unsatisfied, dying for more. And then we realize that she is an overnight sensation.
    But don’t think it’s her same old dumb tricks that are attracting so much attention. No. It’s her new tricks, which are even more moronic. Laura has great instinct and intuition about people. After her first successful evening, she was able to sense which tricks people were clapping at particularly loudly, and she went in that direction. Her most admired tricks are the ones that are barely perceptible as tricks, the most subtle ones, like when she takes off her brown jacket and reveals that the inside is red.
    Her tricks get progressively more idiotic, and the clapping and the number of clappers increase. Laura unwraps a candy and smells it, and people clap. Such tricks cannot even be called magic anymore, yet people call them that with delight, and calling them that contains a message about modern life and society, which goes something like this: In our times, routine, habit, drudgery, and repetition are so ingrained, so inescapable, that it seems as though nothing short of magic can break the pattern of eating the candy. Breaking that pattern, by doing the unexpected, even ever so slightly, like smelling the candy, is so unusual and extraordinary that it is certainly worth being called magic and certainly worth clapping for.
    When Laura takes a Kleenex out of her pocket and wipes her forehead with it, everyone roars with clapter because the primary function of a Kleenex is to receive a nose’s wind. By wiping her forehead (a less common, secondary function), Laura is fighting drudgery and expectation.
    The most refined people are those who can detect the subtlest tricks, and they clap. If someone claps wrongly, at one of Laura’s “trick tricks,” like when she looks at the time on her watch, well, she’ll shake her head ever so slightly, and the person is horribly humiliated, given crushingly subtle looks of disdain and contemptuous clucks of the tongue by the other members of the audience. If, on the other hand, someone claps alone in the right place, Laura’s lips twitch into a slight smile, and everyone join8 in on the clapping and bestows on the first lucky clapper looks of endless respect and admiration.
    A typical evening consists of the following repertoire of basic tricks:
    Laura winds her watch. One courageous clapper dares a few claps. She smiles slightly. They all roar, with clapter, and reward the fortunate first clapper with smiles and “Ah!”s of awe. The primary function of a watch is to indicate the time, which is worth no respect because it only contributes to the monotony of modern life. To be wound is a watch’s secondary, less common, function and is worth great respect.
    Laura takes a comb and brush out of her box of objects and starts combing the hair out of the brush. One clapper claps, she twitches her lips, the entire room claps.
    She takes off her pearl necklace and puts it on the table on the stage. Someone claps, she turns her head one inch to the side, which everyone knows is a negative response, and people cluck, snort, and snicker to the now ruined first clapper. People have become bold. Sometimes they even allow their disdain to be expressed verbally. You’ll hear “God,” “Really!” and “He’s out of it.”
    One of the reasons her show is so beloved is that there’s a lot at stake for the audience. People can build or destroy their reputation with a single clap. It’s the quick way to success. Or failure.
    After her show, people talk to one another enthusiastically, saying things like: “She’s a genius; her choice of tricks is superb, exquisite. The vocabulary is rich, and the language, my goodness, the language is sublime. When she revealed the red inside of her jacket, I thought I would die!” The ultimately chic thing to say is: “How did she do that?” and to ask her directly, “Is there any chance you might ever reveal how you did that jacket trick?” And she wisely answers, “I’m sorry, I never reveal my magic tricks. I’d be out on the