Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes by Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page A

bad clam when she was eating with Hillary. Either that or she choked on the prime rib and Hillary had to do the Heimlich. I forget which. Anyway, it’s time to go.”
    â€œAre you sure Stella doesn’t suffer from emphysema?” I asked, concerned.
    â€œHuh?” Rivera said.
    I explained how just recently I’d seen the author John Irving getting interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Irving had related an anecdote about being out to dinner with his mentor Kurt Vonnegut when Vonnegut had started choking. Irving, unwilling to let his mentor die while dining with him—talk about someone thinking everything that happened around them was about me, me, me (or them, them, them)—he immediately started performing the Heimlich. But Irving is a short man, Vonnegut a tall one, and Irving’s first efforts…well, let’s just say he did not apply the pressure to Vonnegut’s stomach. So then Irving, a man with a lot of wrestling in his past, somehow got Vonnegut down on the floor on all fours, whereupon he proceeded to continue to Heimlich him. At one point, Vonnegut managed to gasp, “John, I wasn’t choking on anything. I have emphysema.” As punch lines go, it was a doozy.
    Rivera gave me a strange look. “ Chica, I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, but we gotta go.”
    And with that, barely giving me a second to throw a goodbye wave over my shoulder to Billy Charisma, she tugged me away.

    Back out in the entryway, the rest of our group was waiting for us. But they certainly weren’t bored. They were standing on the edges of a huge crowd whose attention was focused on someone in the center.
    In the middle of the room, replacing the Balloon Lady from earlier, was The Yo-Yo Man.
    Oh my God! It was The Yo-Yo Man!
    At least that’s what the sandwich-board sign on the easel said: Chris Westacott, The Yo-Yo Man.
    â€œOh my God!” I shrieked at my gal pals. “It’s The Yo-Yo Man!”
    I’m sure they thought I was nuts, but I didn’t let that stop me as I elbowed my way through the crowd. Besides, I didn’t want to stick around long enough for Elizabeth Hepburn to tell me she’d once slept with someone named Duncan.
    I was going to finally see the man from the commercials up close and personal! I was going to finally see the man of my dreams in the flesh!
    But when I got to the front of the crowd, I saw it wasn’t The Yo-Yo Man at all. It was merely A Yo-Yo Man. And not even any kind of great Yo-Yo Man. It was Furthest Guy in the commercials, the guy who was always dropping his yo-yo in the background, while the real Yo-Yo Man, The Yo-Yo Man, showed his stuff.
    But, hey. Up close and personal, Furthest Guy wasn’t half-bad, at least not in the looks department. He was taller than I’d have expected—he always looked so tiny and insignificant in those commercials—and his hair was no longer so short, the curly chestnut strands poking out from the bottom of the Mets cap he wore backward. This near, I could finally see his eye color as he kept those warm brown eyes focused on the twin yo-yos he was twirling simultaneously. And his body…True, he had on those oversized long shorts, the ones that I hate with the waistbands that reveal the tops of guys’ underwear, on top of which was a T-shirt advertising the casino we were in; I figured the casino probably made him wear the T-shirt. As for the obnoxious long shorts, I figured it was probably part of the cool yo-yo guy persona. I mean, why else would anyone our age—and he did look to be about the same age as me—wear those stupid long shorts if they didn’t have to? As for the Mets hat, I was hoping that was for real. I may not have cared about sports, but my dad was a big Mets fan and it would please him greatly once I brought this Chris Westacott home.
    What was I thinking? I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Clearly the