Eavesdropping at the Victory Coffee Shop

It's a balmy eighteen degrees outside, and I'm camped out in front of the coffee shop on the corner on my block. With one eye I'm editing a misery memoir of unspeakable depravity; with the other I'm watching out for Michelle Williams. I'm still feeling sad for her that greedy little Reese Witherspoon seems to have bagged Jake Gyllenhaal. Michelle and Jake must have already bonded way back on Ang Lee's set, but it seems that Jake and Ryan Phillipe have been running buddies for years, and Reese made smarter use of her in.

While I'm trying to make the child abuse more grammatically correct and idly matchmaking Hollywood stars, the pair in the table next to me have their minds on weightier matters.

"Of course there was this huge uproar when the Times did the obit and they didn't mention any of her relationships with women. I mean, I always felt like she was in the closet for, you know, for not the usual reasons."
"But for for the Times to exclude that part of her life..."
"I know. And it's so obvious from her theory that she's just so into sex."
"Did you see that teee-rrible review of her review of American in Paris?"

I'm still trying to figure out who the man in the unnervingly blue glasses is talking about, when there's some signal from the gods or their blackberries and they abandon the one other table to two stylish middle-aged women who've been hovering in the shadows.

The first topic of conversation is an epic man vs. machine debate which ranges from the scandal of children no longer being taught cursive script to the impossibility of a robot ever picking out decent fabric. I'm starting to feel a little intimidated, because one of these women works in Art and the other seems to have a personal assistant who she can call and order to write thank you notes for her. Then one of them gives a badly misremembered rehash of a Malcom Gladwell argument that I've read for myself and I'm happily sipping my Cranberry Fizz again, smug as you like.

Just when it seemed like my battery would die before the intellectualising at the next table stopped, they abandoned the debate and started talking about a mutual friend in that way that women do when they're working out how bitchy they can get before the other one protests. Since the sun was out, and the world was mellow, they managed a pretty thorough character assassination.

Much as they love her to bits, and despite the fact that she is 'of course, so creative' it's clear that she's a rabid waste of space.

If only Michelle Williams would come out and join me, we could have torn dimpled lil' Reese into Pieces just as merrily.