Witz полностью

The help, they exist only in occasion, every day after night into morning’s cleanup and bagging detail, every sweeping function, life as event, as tidying up after those honored, never them. They’re tired, destroyed, just trying to save up enough to continue college, to pay off debts, loans and lovers; why not leave a tip: waiters, waitresses, tenders, and ushers who five nights a week observe only the happinesses of others, party strangers, are often even asked to participate, in saddening lieu of family or friends; they’re in all the period footage, with their hands heatscarred, with the same shiny knees and ragged cuffs and tarnished buckles, their upsets everfading, with the same listless, spent expressions for this woman in a purple minidress and pink mink stole her husband stole, how she seems to be invited everywhere, her husband not so much: an immodest neckline, her shoulders social out the ears, and, too, with an evident heft on heels so high her knees can’t breathe, a wisp of pearls she strangles with one stocky, shortfingered hand manicured in squoval, the other mauls a plate of miniaturized maize in a singularly nauseating glaze of sweet & sour…I shouldn’t, she mouths to a friend, I really shouldn’t, then crowding the tiered cake iced in her saliva: she’s on her diet again, for the love of a mensch across the hall not her husband but his brother who he holds a tumbler of water in his left, one of vodka in his right, or it’s the other way around, even he doesn’t know; they gesture lust to one another, the mating ritual of the properly insured, the sacred dance of the wellsalaried, choreographed just a step ahead of casting: all plates, knives, forks and spoons down to do the dance of the dividend, the propitiatory gesture of the seasonally bonused, yearended, quartered, the rump moves creditlined, lit and smoked with the mortgage burnt at candlelighting — them surging to the gathering of the now fed, drunk, cigarettebreaked orchestra after yet another set by the DJ whose idea was it to hire him, whose recommended references supplied…they’re playing our song, and, nu — have you heard the one about the Davidsons in B ? them liningup with their requests, fountainpenned on the napkins, linen and so costly, they’ll show up on the bill; the emcee finds a tambourine under a heap of fractured maracas; the hired dancer pulls a ham-string treyf; the plumed horses prance, knock knees, saddles slip to become leathern udders at which the magician’s bunnies suckle, they trip over each other to crash atop the impersonator and the caricaturist; the midget on stilts falls into the Vienna Table, rises to mime his survival. A glare passes over people shaking it to the silence ensuing: Hanna again, recognizable in reproduction, an embodiment of the eveningwear hangered off the rack in front of them at the front of this lesser hall — she’s busied tying a heliumed balloon within a balloon within a balloon to the back of her chair, while at the same time talking schools and teachers, standardized testing and homework tutors to her neighbor with the nose and portfolio, with the eyes observant, an orient of detail rumored, talented with such unkind acuity of gaze that could feel any face up and identify work, ID plastic surgery of what type and by which doctor at three counties’ remove.