F as in fruitcake

People in New York can be eccentric, obviously. And it's no much hobos setting the bar as the crazy ladies on the Upper East Side with big fur coats and orange lipstick way outside the corners of their mouths. In fact, a lot of what would be considered eccentric elsewhere (Saskatchewan, say) doesn't even qualify here, what with all the actors and the gays and the Hasidic women with the mandatorily fake-looking wigs. But there's, I don't know, a containment to it. Like a courtesy or something.

What got me thinking about this was a conversation I had with a person from LA who, having lived both here and there, is a regular eccentricity connoisseur by now, and he said that the LA brand has this insufferable obnoxiousness to it, like every eccentric thinks he or she invented personality. And we chalked the city difference up to the fact that whereas people in LA drive e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e, people here have to take their Me roadshow on the subway. And there's only so much shit your fellow F train passengers are going to tolerate.