Intel Jessica here. So this morning I had to meet someone on the Upper East Side for breakfast. For cosmic reasons which will become clear soon enough, not only did the subway manage to transport me from my Brooklyn lean-to to Fifth Avenue fairly quickly for once, the person I was meeting was late, so since I had a little time to kill I thought I’d spend it trying on ridiculous Gucci snoods at Bergdorf Goodman and making funny faces at myself in the mirror. Almost immediately I realized that doing this by yourself as opposed to with your friends makes you look like kind of a crazy lady, and after a testy “Can I help you” from a sales person, I moved down to the shoe floor, where who to my wondering eyes should appear but the inimitable hedge-fund super-wife Lisa Maria Falcone.
She was much prettier, smaller, and less injected-looking in person and was wearing a filmy, all-white sweat outfit, the purity of which was interrupted only by the massive brace on her right leg. “I shattered my foot,” she shrugged to a salesman who greeted her as though he knew her (though apparently not well enough to know that she had recently been in a Vespa accident, i.e., he didn’t know her like I know her). I stood there agog, not so much at the fact that I was having a sighting of Lisa Maria Falcone, THE LISA MARIA FALCONE, or that said sighting was occurring in Bergdorf’s the day after it was revealed that her husband’s hedge fund lost a whopping 10 percent in June (to be fair, she was in the 60 percent off section) but at the fact that she was shoe shopping with a broken foot. The woman is truly unstoppable, and I’m sorry to say that the sight of such strength and bravery in the face of adversity left me completely mute and unable to say any of the things I had prepared should this moment arise, such as, “What kind of gross things have you found lying around in the Guccione mansion? and “When can my friend Bess and I come over and have Cosmos in your closet?” Or even, “I love your work.” I just stood there stupidly, holding a completely ridiculous orange espadrille that I wouldn’t ever consider if it weren’t on sale. Then the salesman said, “Can I help you?” and I was like, “Er, no,” and scuttered out back onto the streets, to join the rest of the mortals.
