This Song Is About Me, Isn't It?

This really is a very small world. You'll never guess who I ran into on the streets of New York today, as I was making my way through Chelsea to my eye doctor's appointment. None other than young Youssef Kerkour, whom many of you will remember from the Philadelphia entries as the guy who played "The Visitor" in Picasso at the Lapin Agile. How wonderful and weird was that?

Youssef had just picked up his new headshots and was going to meet his friend Luis for lunch. You may also remember Luis from the online journal - I don't think I had posted any pictures of him, but he visited Actor Housing Central while we were in Philadlephia. Here's one from the cast party at Aaron Posner's house that I don't think I posted before... maybe I did.

So that was nice.

The eye appointment went well. I had my first eye exam in something on the order of six or seven years. That's what leaving corporate america and giving up your kick-ass health insurance will get you, my friends. Well, I've had insurance though Actors' Equity now for a while, so I decided to take advantage of the benefits and get myself the pair of glasses to which I'm entitled every two years.

I got the referral through the Davis Vision website, and have to say I was pretty pleased with the result. My new doctor, Dr. Rifat S. Jaffer is the cute little woman who is (frighteningly) pretty young-seeming. She's hip and easy to talk to - an easy rapport with me. I lost my old reading glasses ages ago, so she had nothing to compare to, but I'm suspecting that my prescription hasn't changed significantly in all these years. I don't need glasses for anything but reading, though I tend to think that the need for reading glasses my be stronger than it used to be. I was surprised at how hard I had to work to read some of the stuff on the eye charts.

Alas, while the Davis Vision plan covers pretty much everything involved in the whole eye-exam, including that wacky dialation of the pupils that they do, it requires that you choose your frames from the Davis Vision "collection." Not terribly trendy, friends. Not that I'm a slave to fashion, but I'm a slave to fashion. More than once I've been heard to utter the old "champagne tastes on a beer income" epithet. Unfortunately, were I to choose some of the frames in which I was really interested, ol' Davis Vision would only have provided $30 toward their purchase. And the frames I was looking at were in the $240 - $260 range. Not in the budget, I'm afraid. So I got the faux-designer frames, and I'm HAPPY about it. Did you believe me?

Really, I can't complain too much. The cheapo frames I did get are actually kinda cool, and have a lot of the features the others do. And jeez, I'm only going to be using them for sitting in front of the computer and reading books. Not like I have to impress anyone in those situations.

I'm so vain, I probably think this song is about me.