Here, an aspiring presidential candidate wearing a rubber boot promises a free pony every American. There, in a gray fur coat chic girl poses in the lobby of the Plaza where she spent her birthday weekend. An old man wearing a beret and smoking a huge bar chair explains what is to be adult. An anonymous brandishes two chichuahuas dressed in full gala, strawberry and top hat included. A Black dressed entirely in bright red, from his turban to his socks through her shorts, proclaims that he is the Sultan of Wisconsin. A refugee from the former Yugoslavia, which took twelve years to get a graduate degree while working as a janitor in Cambridge, proudly displays her dress and blue hat. Two Muslim girls wearing a headscarf volunteer after the passage of Hurricane Sandy. A transvestite dressed in pink unicorn glitter sways jauntily. A couple alone in the world entwines amid the bustle of Grand Central. An old man called Banana George was, at age 92, the oldest barefoot water skiers. A woman in a fur coat and hat, sitting on a folding chair patched with tape, painted on a lawn. A little girl on a scooter ahead holding the hand of a veteran in a wheelchair. A young Asian slides into a suitcase to go gently into the non-mixed pension his girlfriend. The most ordinary to the wackiest, they compose an extraordinarily moving mosaic that can be found in this book.
