The Lamp

Last year, I was on the hunt for a floor lamp that O and I could agree on. This may not seem like a tricky task for some couples, but we have a small apartment; every piece of furniture matters. Never mind that we both have very clear notions of what we do and do not like, and finding the overlap in our tastes in décor has its challenges.

We had spent several hours researching every lamp imaginable on lamps.com over the course of a number of weeks. This had led to an online purchase that brought into our home a lampshade so large it could have doubled for a ferris wheel. As soon as we slapped the return sticker on the box and sent it back from whence it came, I decided to stop wasting my time gauging dimensions remotely. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, I headed to the Bowery, where lamp stores are lined up by the handful.

The plan was to take pictures with my cell phone of any prospective candidates, and send them to O’s cell phone for his review while he was out running errands. He would yay or nay them until we had a winner.

I browsed through store after store. I looked at hundreds of lamps. By the time I could no longer bring myself to look at one more lamp, I had found a maximum of two, maybe three lamps that I could see myself living with. One was alarmingly cheap. The other cost a fortune.

O called to tell me he couldn’t make out any of the lamps from my poor quality pictures and to go ahead and get whatever I liked. This was not going to work for me, if only for the fact that I dreaded dealing with the returning of it.

I deemed Operation: Buy Lamp a failure and decided to go home, tired and crabby.

As I stood on the corner of Delancey waiting for the light to turn, I suddenly caught sight of a man in a red dress running towards me. As he got closer, he tore around the corner and took off down the street. I stared. I looked back from whence he’d come. Another two dozen men in red dresses were following behind him. To be clear, they were not wearing the same red dress. There were prom dresses, flamenco dresses, short ones, fluffy ones, sequinned ones. But there was definitely a Red Dress Race for Men taking place, and I was standing smack dab in the middle of the course.

Somewhere between runner #1 and the rest of them, I reached for my shitty phone and frantically tried to snap a picture of what I was witnessing.

I don’t think I have to tell you that my poor quality photos of a group of transvestite runners failed to adequately convey the moment. One snapshot after another, I got a handful of bad angles, fuzzy red blotches in motion, and the errant limb disappearing out of frame.

As quickly as they appeared, so did they vanish, and with them my bad mood.

There I was, still standing on the street corner, but everything had shifted. The unexpectedness of their arrival in my space, the strange light-heartedness of the atmosphere they had swept into my corner had completely brought me out of my mundane fixation. Why on earth was I feeling out of sorts about a floor lamp? There was fun to be had! Life to be lived!

I felt the urge to soak in the remains of the day with a sense of frivolity and whimsy. I poked my head into vintage thrift shops, I bought cheap bangles from a street vendor and made a point of passing the dog park in Thompson Square to get a jolt of the warm fuzzies watching the puppies wrestling with one another.

The next day, without consulting O, I ordered a lamp from Crate and Barrel – or was it Pottery Barn? – and it showed up two days later. It’s innocuous and functional, and I don’t want to spend another minute writing about it.