Overheard Starbuck

"Have you noticed how everyone on tv has more money then you...and me?"
---"They look like they do. ...Except for the stars of Cops, crowds in news videos, audiences for game shows and fictional criminals."

"Do you know anyone who's been on tv?"
---"I once recognized a guy playing a non-speaking role of a loving father with a wife, kids, and a dog in an insurance company's commercial. I never found out how much he earned or if the commercial was for local as well as national broadcast.
... I met him before this good fortune, around the time he went gay in a big way. He was love sick--dizzy and overwhelmed--with problems with his family--I'm not sure--and all I remember about him now is 'how did I not see what a transformation he was going through'? --I mean talk about being naked and exposed."
"Like a snake shedding its skin?"
---"Like a twenty-something year-old man being born without a mother. Everywhere he went the world he knew had fallen aside. Had dissolved and disappeared. Was swept, snatched, kicked or blown away and proven a lie. While his new world, of which he knew next to nothing--except that it was new and supposed to be more true-- came into being not baby-comfort, mother's caring hands-sized but fully formed adult and male."
"Where does the 'lifestyle' come in?"
---"I only now noticed how existential 'coming out' can be."