The Next Echinacea

When it rains in Manhattan, you avoid it. If you’re going anywhere, take the subway and do whatever you can to avoid the rain. Unless you have to go a few blocks away, then you take a cab. Unless you are a true New Yorker, then you walk. I walked. I got soaked.

There is a point at which rain is transformed from an inconvenience to a full-on nuisance. The point, for me, is when my socks get wet. When your feet get wet and cold, keeping that cheery disposition you’ve fostered all day is almost impossible. When your feet get wet, your mortality looks you in the face and says, “You are the biggest wimp; grow a set!”

Yesterday I had to get my cheap, and I like to think frugal, ass over to a photo shoot six blocks away on 20th Street. It was not me getting photographed, thank god, but I was assisting in the art direction of the shoot to suit the clients ‘vision.’ With a shoddy umbrella in hand, I decided, “hey, it’s pouring outside, but I’m a New Yorker. It’s not going to phase me.”

It phased me.

I got to the photo shoot, complaining to myself like a five-year-old begging my mother not to take me to the dentist (You know, the flailing irrational style that embarrasses child and parent alike). I entered the studio, drenched from my knees down to my socks, and got out of my wet jacket and winter gear.

“I hope I don’t get pneumonia from all this rain,” I say as I pull off my scarf. The assistant to the photographer, who I had met before, leans over to me and says, “If you don’t want to get sick, you need to take lots of vitamin C, Zinc and eat McDonald’s.”

1. Vitamin C
2. Zinc
3. McDonald’s

“McDonald’s?”

“Well, I can’t back this up with any scientific evidence, but whenever I feel like I’m going to get sick, I eat a BigMac or any other fast food beef product. I think it has something to do with all the antibiotics and hormones they give the cows, but I never get sick.”

“Really? You’re pulling my leg here, right?”

“No, even my friends eat McDonald’s when they start to get sick, and it sorts them right out.”

I thought this was fascinating. After the shoot, I went to Burger King, ordered a Whopper, and had fries to really finish whatever it was off.

I now feel like shit, but at least I know what it was that did it to me.