Metro Musings: The Metropolitan Ballet

I'm off getting my hair re braided today and have my first Guest Blogger! Adama, my sister and mother to my niece Yasmine! This piece is being submitted to the local Fox affiliate blog site too!

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I recently had a revelation about what I had in common with the other parents I take the commuter train to work with everyday.

They dance what I call the Metro Ballet. They shove and push people out the way. When the doors open it's every man and woman for him/herself. They're not ashamed to knock down old people and shove their way onto jam packed trains. Handbags and briefcases be damned, as long as their physical body made it onto the train with the closing doors, they were good.

I used to watch them pull and yank at the doors until the automatic sensor thing that realizes some fool is caught in the door opens and then quickly shuts before some other opportunist could try to squeeze his body inside.

At some point, I began to notice that I'd see the same group of strangers on the platform each morning. We'd end up in the same car of the 6 to 7 car train. I even gave some of them names:

There is "Gucci Boy". He's a "spritely" thin dude always sporting something with the Gucci brand name: Gucci belts, shoes, baseball cap and I can't forget his Gucci "man" purse. He is more than a metrosexual. I would want to be as neat as he is, but I'm just not that interested in working that hard for it.

There's also the woman with the bushy salt and pepper afro that I affectionately call "Frederick Douglas".

There's "roller lady" who can't seem to get up early enough to take all of her rollers out of her hair so she rolls out the house with a half a head of rollers and then proceeds to take them out during the ride downtown. Crazy!

Finally, there's "Pat" Labelle. I call "her" that for a couple of reasons. First, none of us on the train is even sure s/he is a man or woman. She's got that drag queen look about her...and hence, the second reason for her name. Her painted on face starts out half "fixed up" at the beginning of the train trip into downtown. By the time we hit "Metro Center", her mask is totally done.

When I first started taking the train about 4 months ago, I separated myself from these Metro Ballet Dancers. I used to think about how robotic they all were running to catch their train... standing around the platform... barely blinking through the routine. They were on auto-pilot and didn't think twice about screaming at a little kid to get out of the way as they dashed down escalators. What was the hurry?

Then this spring, my daughter got accepted to a daycare program which required me to pick her up by a certain time or face a series of penalty fines that increased with each minute after 6pm. The very next day, would you believe it, I joined the metropolitan ballet company! I took my place in the routine, shoving, pushing and prodding because I then discovered that like me, they too had some kid that needed to be picked up and like me, were damned if they'd pay an extra $20-50 dollars because someone decided to get in the way of a closing door!

Now as I fight my way through metro subway traffic, it's much more fun because finally, I fit in.