I'm Also Just A Girl...

... Standing in front of a boy, asking him to love me." Julia Roberts

I'm also just the SJG, standing in front of a sign, asking where to find Hugh Grant.

"He's right over there," said no one. Oh, well. In the meantime, we sauntered, Britishly, up and down Portobello Road, encountering some very twitchy antique sellers, including the red-haired crazy woman at a jewelry table who seemed most unhappy to see us. "Don't touch that... Please don't bump the table. If it goes, I go with it... That's very precious, you know. Very few left... Straighten that necklace out, would you? It's not going to straighten itself." Guess what we bought from her? Bupkis. We preferred to throw money at the nice, welcoming Solomons, an old Jewish couple who ran an adorable stall full of lovely things, and invited us to touch everything.

Saturday night, I got talked into seeing Dave Chappelle. I'm still not sure how it happened. Oh, wait, it's coming back to me. "Mother Dear, Father Dear, Dave Chappelle is at the Hammersmith Apollo Saturday night," the youngest mentioned, ever-so-casually. "Might we see him? The tickets are only $$$$$$$$$$. Please, oh, please, Mummy and Daddy." Well, how could we say no? It's a word that's rarely in our vocabulary. We only had to pay the concierge at the hotel an additional $$$$$$$$ to procure these elusive tickets. And then away we went in a taxi. Once inside the arena, it became quite clear that hubby and I were the Oldest People in the audience by several decades. "Oh, look, Granny's here," I thought I heard someone say.

How to sum up the Chappelle brand of comedy? Hmm. Let's start with raunchy and take it to its farthest extreme. Hubby and the youngest were in heaven, laughing their arses off, slapping their knees, practically rolling in the aisles. I, on the other hand, chuckled now and then. On the SJG comedy scale, Chappelle's penile-centric humor earns a low-hanging B-. I would've preferred Alan King. But then, I'm not Dave's target audience. (Although I liked him very much as Tom Hanks' sidekick in "You've Got Mail.") After an evening of prolonged weenie jokes, it seemed only fitting that we should take the tube back, and at every stop, hear this on the loud speaker, over and over again: "Picadilly Line. Cockfosters." All night, it played on a continuous loop in my dreams. "Piccadilly Line. Cockfosters. Piccadilly Line. Cockfosters." Seriously. Does such a place really exist?

Apparently.