Appropriating conversations

Adele and I sat outside a Soho bar sipping mixers and watching Wednesday night go by. We tried to define our surroundings: “It’s fun…” I began. “It’s just, everybody kind of doesn’t really seem as if they come here all the time…”.

“Like they don’t belong here,” suggested Adele.

“Yeah that’s it,” I agreed.

Well of course not. You get a few Soho stalwarts hanging on corners, running gay video stores, ignoring tourists. But apart from that, the crowd could be that of any old provincial British beered-up town. Just with a slightly funkier backdrop.

“Have you seen the film Chopper?” a guy on the table next to us was asking his companions.

“Have you?” I asked Adele.

Then I told her about how I’d been in these parts recently with Amy, who’s an appropriation artist, and about how she’d applied her artistic technique to both her food ordering (ordering what the next table ordered) and her conversation. She listened to the next table’s dinner-table anecdotes and copied the theme, which was hypnotherapy. She’d recently been hypnotised so it worked quite well.

Adele hadn’t seen Chopper and nor had I. So that didn’t work so well for me. But she enjoyed hearing about Amy and her appropriation.