The Pop Up
An adventure in Soho with Coach Rahti
‘Hey Grandma! You got big tits!’
Now ordinarily, when a man draws my attention to him on the street, it’s gotten more gracious than that over the years. A medical professional in scrubs on break walking past saying ‘You’re so pretty!’ with great ernestness prompts a warm feeling in my chest. An exclamation of ‘Love your hair!’ is a lovely acknowledgement and never disruptive.
But this was old school catcalling with an agist spin. Referencing my anatomy in a very familiar way, and calling me ‘grandma’. It stopped me up short, as it was meant to do.
I stepped up to the young man with a quizically annoyed look but before I could confront him he launched into a rant:
“In this neighborhood, the only way white people look at me is if I shout at them, make ‘em laugh…’
I wasn’t laughing but he didn’t seem to notice.
“ Unless I’m inside one of these fancy shops behind a counter or at the door in a uniform, they don’t wanna see me….I’m an artist, y’know?’
On the building just behind him were two pages of eyeball sketches torn out of a pad and taped to the wall. They were quite good.
“...And I’m a model…”
He whipped out his phone to show me his Instagram….wherein he, clearly an onyx Adonis of a muse to the photographer, was the subject of some very artful commercial photos. He took his baseball cap off to show me the short, flat-cropped bleach-blond hair above his ears.
“I play it down. I don’t want to be too sexualized”. He was referring to his hair kept under the cap I guess. I’ll never know. But his bluntness made me throw my head back and laugh out loud.
It was also a nervous response, yet at the same time I felt loving towards him.
He ranted on for a while and at one point said ‘apologies if that (referring to the big tits remark) was a little crass’.
“It was” I said gently. He reupped his banter. I realized a graceful off ramp would be to follow him on Instagram. He took my phone and made it happen, and as I walked away, I could hear him continuing to shout-talk at me as I gave a backward wave.
Downtown Soho has officially turned into a mall.
It felt very young, and largely non-New Yorkish. As Scott Galloway puts it, it seemed like the streets were chock-a-block full of kids whose parents are putting them through New York City.
I was there to attend a pop up event on my day off. A very acclaimed astrologer, Chani, with a world class app, was in town selling her merch, signing books and generally radiating a lovely vibe. Ordinarily I disdain a line, but I decided to followthrough and partake of the experience, having never waited on this type of line..the kind that draws a lot of curiosity and attention.
The cue stretched around the block, off of Spring Street and onto Elizabeth Street. It broke and continued past the open gates of the Elizabeth Street Community garden, so inviting with its shade, granite monuments and benches. At first I thought it was an ancient cemetery. A lovely young man kept the entrance from being blocked by CHANI fans.
I’d hoped this would be a networking opportunity, full of other professional people as fascinated as I am by ‘pseudo-sciences’ that are mostly grounded in ancient wisdom.
It was not that. Sure, the people there were of a feather regarding a shared interest in astrology, but most seemed to be there for the swag, which ran out after the first hundred people.
Standing for two and a half hours in the sun with occasional patches of shade from some street trees will not go down as one of my favorite artist dates. I’d forgotten to bring a water bottle and an energy bar for one thing. It hadn’t occurred to me that my exposure to the elements would be akin to partaking in a street protest. At one point I turned and asked a young woman behind me where she had arrived from for the event. She looked startled by the break in her own thoughts and shot back ‘Home’. People behind her chuckled. I pressed a bit, clarifying the question so that I learned more specifically that she was originally from California. I caught a vibe that signaled a lack of desire for continued engagement.
You can be lonlier on a line of people than in the solitude of your own home.
I gamified the experience a bit by deciding not to look at my phone until I got inside and almost succeeded. I folded upon hearing a conversations about the possibility of getting a chart done, so I dug up my statistics to enable that.
Otherwise, observing people observe us, inquiring as to what we were waiting for and looking at the anomalies in the bark of the trees we passed so slowly and incrementally kept me occupied. It was an interesting group…mostly women, mostly young and very ethnically diverse. The two Gen Zers ahead of me were reading actual physical books, which sparked a sense of hope and admiration in me. We own a bookstore in New Jersey afterall, so it’s fiscally reassuring to see younger people ingesting content oldschool.
The pop up was in a small space, but the vibe was very friendly. I push-pinned a vision for the future on the wall alongside many others, spun a roulette version of an eight ball but with far many more answers to land upon, and purchased two very fairly priced Chani publications, including an astrological planner and a text on astrology.
Chani is a beautiful young woman with a zillion-watt smile. She was connecting fully if quickly with each of us as we stepped up for a signature and a photograph. I told her how impressed I was by all she’d done, which I am. There are few entrepreneurs in the ‘Inspiration Economy’ that I know of with the digital grass-roots reach of this business woman. Her merch is made by, and benefits survivors of gender-based abuse, and was marked down a bit off the shelf for the event (It was nice to feel a little rewarded for the wait.) Her team enjoys an 80K base income with enviable benefits.
Overall, I find her very impressive.
Afterwards, I did some window shopping at the big corporate chains on Broadway and had my run-in with the catcalling street artist. Then, I took the train back to my quiet Brooklyn neighborhood and pretty much crashed.
Later in the evening I checked my phone to find a new Instagram follower: my man of the street art and freelance modeling world.
I just hope he improves his game with the shout outs to women on the street. There is actually a way to complement a stranger without it being a verbal assault. I will say when done respectfully and correctly it can feel quite reassuring to many of us old broads, given our increased sense of invisibility at large.