Leslie Louise Harpold

It wasn’t that Leslie didn’t care what your opinion was — because she did. See, the faster she could learn what you thought about something, the quicker she could enlighten you on every conceivable way in which you were wrong wrong wrong. Because, among the many things that Leslie found intolerable in this world, spending a whole lot of time suffering your crap was high on the shit list. So chop chop, and another cigarette gets lit and another Diet Coke gets popped.

Leslie’s time in San Francisco did nothing to buff the edges she’d been sharpening for years in New York City, and I think her west coast friends uniformly enjoyed the long deadpan stare followed by the extended oratory followed by the phone number of someone you should definitely call followed by more hotdish and then when you got home, there was this amazing email full of flirting and coquettishness and affection and usually ending with the assurance that you were now best friends forever. They always had tons of typos and a paucity of capitalization (and frankly I suspect she never actually read most of them before hitting “Send”) but emails from Leslie were always the best.