One day last week, I went to Au Bon Pain with a couple of colleagues. It being a beautiful Spring day, I was wearing a bright orange shirt from the Gap, circa 2004.
While waiting for my sandwich, a woman behind me, also waiting, strolled to and fro while singing opera. And boy, was she was singing. Her voice, while subdued appropriately for a lunch hour sandwich pick-up, had this resonant, rich, professional-opera-singer tone. She was singing snippets of Verdi's greatest hits. In Au Bon Pain.
Suddenly and apropos of nothing, she said to me, "I love your shirt; it's so pretty. You look like sherbet."
While I appreciated the fact that she pronounced sherbet correctly, it frightened me to be compared to an icy, sweet desert treat by a total stranger, and one singing opera at that. If she had said, "your shirt looks like sherbet" vs. "you look like sherbet," that may have ameliorated my concerns. But her tone was frightening; she sounded hungry.
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