Yesterday

There are some days when everything goes wrong.

It starts with one event, and then the chain of bad luck follows, like it was called by some sort of jinx sorority. But, there also are days when exactly the opposite happens.

First, it started with a dear friend of mine giving me a great news: he has a girlfriend. Actually, he did pronounce the word "engaged", but didn't exactly tie the knot since they've been going out for just a couple of weeks...and been knowing each other since childhood. I was so happy for him. After five or so years of being single, spent trying to forget the only girl who broke his heart, who's now happily married and with child, he merrily tells me that he has fallen in love again. 

I kept on telling him, it will eventually come to you one day if you only stopped searching...love is always unexpected.

Secondly, in the afternoon I had one of those experiences that throw you back in...well...sixteen years' time in the space of a second. A famous pop star popped in my workplace.

One of those people you worshipped when you were sixteen and, despite this made you the joke of your male friends and the desperation of your parents, you still remember the times spent singing the songs over and over and hopelessly waiting outside an hotel with your mates as really good fun. 

Not "the best times of your life", no...those would have come later.

I remember the frustration, though. That of spending so much time trying to see a person in a context that wasn't a gig without actually succeeding. You know, closer look, not just the miniature, big screen or TV version. Well, yesterday, without any advance notice, he was right in front of me.

At the beginning I thought OK, I can handle this (after having pinched hard my poor colleague's leg as soon as he stepped in). Couldn't really control heartbeats, sweating hands and - hopefully unnoticed - rash reactions, though. Damn, I thought I was a mature grown-up woman, but at that very moment I was back a teenager every inch.

"I am just having a look around." He said. 

And I replied with something very intelligent like: "Er...sure."

AskhimifheneedsanyhelpatallforGodssake! 

The result: my colleague maintains that I scared him off and he is never coming back. Just because I collapsed on the floor behind the counter when he left (pathetic, I know) and she claims that he saw me (no, he didn't). Despite losing the dignity, this banal event put a smile on my face: eventually, things come to those who can wait.

Precisely, there it arrived an email at the end of the day:

"Your exhibition proposal has been accepted." 

A curator friend of mine once quoted a passage from "By Nightfall", a novel by Michael Cunningham. 

It was a conversation between someone who wanted to become a curator and someone else, who compared the choice to that of wanting to become a movie star: obviously very few succeed.

True, but some do succeed the first character replied.

Well, that "yes" was coming from a Museum I worship and, if I have to draw parallelisms between curatorial and cinematographic careers, this would definitely be compared to being the leading actress in a Fellini movie.