bleck… it has been a few days since my last dispatch.  I have been unwell. I’m on a cleanse. No sugar, no gluten, no meat, no dairy, no caffeine, no vino. I feel just awful. It’s the worst.

Marvin, my “queen-from-Queens” trainer, is making me do it. There is this notoriously ghetto gym on the corner where I live, and I finally broke down and joined. I was 10 pages away from my latest draft of this TV pilot I’m working on, and I needed to lift heavy things to keep from going insane.

Marvin doesn’t charge me. He says he’s the St. Jude of trainers–the patron saint of lost causes. Marvin is a hot saint. I can only aspire to his boobies. Anyway, I feel like doody. Now I know why people in Whole Foods always look so terrible.

These guys here look so anemic and depressed, right? I mean, who wants to be these guys? Not me, no sir, no ma’am, no way. Yay chemicals!

So I whine to him, “But Marvin, my body thrives on toxins and various prescription meds… I’m serial (as Teodora, our nanny, would say) Coffee and a Prozac… Breakfast of champions, my friend!”

He is not convinced.

He surveys me up and down and says, “Let me be your 12-step program girly, and don’t make me pull your hair.” I gape, choking on my hemp, beet, kale, wheat grass, organic cardboard smoothie. And he says, “I want you to stand in front of a mirror every day and repeat after me: vanity, vanity, vanity… my ego is my friend. My ego is my friend…”

I’m not so sure this is the best mantra, but whatever works.

I ask a girlfriend about the whole thing. She is this crazy high powered corporate attorney who doesn’t suffer fools for more than 3 seconds, and she says, “Oh yeah, the drag queens here are all trainers by day. I’m so stressed out every time I leave the fucking gym, I have to smoke a cigarette and have a martini to recover. Fortunately, the intense stink of my yoga mat overpowers the sin.”

And there it is. Sin, for lack of a better term, is a prerequisite for living in NYC. You need a little to balance things out. It’s also a bit like what St. Augustine said when he was hanging out in Rome committing acts of total debauch, “Oh God, let me good… but not yet.”

So, I smoked a cigarette after my smoothie and repeated the chant.

Oh Marvin, queen of Queens, let me be good… but not yet.

xoxo – gg