"Looking around at the women, I try to discern some defining characteristic. Surely girls who come to New York to spend a day on a bus looking at fleeting backgrounds from a defunct TV series in the company of other like-minded girls should have some deforming mark so we can recognize them on the street or at the bar or in the dark. But they aren’t tattooed, or particularly fat, or lopsided with walleyes. They aren’t carrying oxygen tanks or wearing padded safety helmets. They aren’t noticeably over- or underdressed. There isn’t a winking absence of underwear or overindulgence of cleavage. They are a relatively plain cross section of women from across the States and beyond. Most of them won’t see 25 again. They are all gamely fighting a losing battle against comfort carbs, gravity, and the capricious idiocy of fashion. One has brought along her boyfriend, like a large, sulky handbag, which was, I think, an act of overt hostility and humiliation. I assume he’d been caught humping a short-order waitress, and this was part of his punishment. The other girls regard him and me with barely disguised disgust. Mr. Big wouldn’t be caught dead on a Sex and the City bus tour. What sort of demi-man would? Well, the three English poofs at the back would. They started out screechy and hyperventilatingly Cage aux Folles, but they got quieter and shiftier as we went on; there wasn’t anything like enough camp irony. This was all way too real."
