I probably just try too hard to group everything together
Celebrity sightings, like all things, come in threes, and one thing I’ve noticed about things that come in threes is that there are usually two that are mostly the same and then one that is slightly different. This weekend, for example, I saw Erin Wasson and Alexander Wang, but then I also saw Alexis Bledel.
Alexander Wang and Erin Wasson are similar for lots of reasons, but most importantly, in this case at least, because each was doing exactly what I expect of them. If I was in charge of making an American Museum of Natural History-style diorama about Erin Wasson, for example, I could do worse than to put her sitting on the patio of that restaurant Gemma on the Bowery, looking gaunt and a bit self-consumed, gesticulating animatedly, probably with a cigarette, and wearing clothes that could, in a costume closet somewhere, double as either present-day high fashion or rags for a pauper type in a takeoff of Oliver Twist. Likewise, Alexander Wang was walking down the street in Tribeca talking to a scrawny guy with an angular haircut, looking friendly and excitable and also slightly dazed, wearing clothing in various shades of black, white, and gray.
Alexis Bledel, on the other hand, was at Trader Joe’s, shopping with some square shouldered guy who I think was wearing a flannel shirt. I actually have no real impression of what Alexis Bledel does when she’s not acting. Maybe she went to college at some point? But I have spent some time watching Gilmore Girls (when or how or why I’m not sure) and have a clear sense of what would going on with Rory by now, at which point I’d guess she’d be in her mid twenties—she would be living in Cobble Hill with a square-shouldered dude who wore flannel shirts, working at some nondescript office where she had to wear professional clothes, and shopping on Sundays at Trader Joe’s.
Usually when I see a celebrity I have the sense that they’re doing a brief cameo in my world, but in this case it was much weirder. I actually felt like I was in Alexis Bledel’s world, or in the Gilmore Girls’ world, at least, if it had just kept going and going after the cameras stopped—that random extra in gym clothes in the produce section trying to decide between organic and non-organic grapefruits (I went with non-organic, because won’t the skin protect the inside from the pesticides? I hope so) while Rory and her boyfriend decided between herb turkey or the regular kind. And while I thought about all this (and also once again confirmed to myself how it really is strange how things come in threes) I was actually sort of staring straight at them, which was probably a little weird (maybe they thought I was a huge Gilmore Girls fan?). But luckily I snapped out of this quickly and was able to do like every good New Yorker and ignore celebrities like they are even more invisible than the rest of us.
