Let us be honest, decent taxis in the Middling City are a rarity.
Taxis in these parts pump out blue smoke, are missing hubcaps, are dented and rusted, feature smoking drivers who look like former (or current) felons. Usually.

sidebar: Once, after detraining at Exchange Street and hailing a quote-unquote cab-for-hire (the only one on horizon) was told by driver that he would have to wait for another fare - or two - before he could afford to leave. Needing a ride, and also riding along this curious and spontaneous narrative, waited for the others to express need. And they did. And we drove off.
another sidebar: For a short stretch YT lived with a roomie pal across from a now-defunct taxi company on a stretch of Grant Street that I referred to lovingly as Little Warsaw. The taxi drivers, a slatternly bunch, were usually, when not speeding off to parts far and wide, leering up at us when we sat on our dismal, sun-drenched rented front porch.

Recently YT was in a drive-thru ATM situ and there was a shambles of a taxi letting off a passenger about a yard from the ATM machine, just close enough to block my own transacting.
I was so entranced by the sight of the taxi, the lack of courtesy, the lack of understanding of car lengths and such, the grease on the back window, the lengthy transaction between driver and passenger that there was no laying on of the horn to rile those ahead out of their otherworldly condition.
After this moment YT thought of an MC-based Conceptual Arts and Crafts Project Series.
The premier involves taxis in the aforementioned condition (and their handlers) switching spots and automobiles with instructors from the MC's venerable driving institutes.
Youngsters, and those who never cared to drive until later in life, would hop into these decrepit cars with loose steering columns to learn driving ropes, to really handle a mechanical tiger. They'd be inching towards curbs, lurching around corners in cars that could handle the abuse.
And MC cabbies could suddenly drive fares around in safe vehicles.
Wondering if there could be grant money for this conceptual foray, replete with a digvid doc of the fun, of course.
Onwards.
This weekend past involved a panoply of moments both memory-worthy, and photo-friendly.
Pre-Garden Walk party in Liz's garden was divine amid the lilies and tinkling pond and old friends, visit to the Hallwalls members's show opening was its usual crowded incarnation with a most inspiring exchange with thee Pulitzer-winning Tom Toles who liked my drawing and suggested I carry on with the pencils, after-dancing at eponymous Miss Kitty's (as the joint where we wanted to karaoke had some head-banger dudes filing in with basses and such, and where I Hula-Hooped for the first time in decades without injury to myself or anyone on the large patio, and where the CDjockey could not find her copy of C-Sharp's Set it Off, sadly), a brunch with the girls at Roycroft and trek to Vidler's to gaze at curios and candy. After Vidler's we went into that used clothing place and I made the disco-related purchase (for the pending Sunday night disco on the site of the old Mulligan's where OJ and Danny Gare and countless others sniffed in heaps of disco high times) of a very odd pink shirt that involves leatherette-looking stitched nylon, pink rhinestones, and lots of pleating.
It's, as they say about relationships, complicated.

Complicated, Conceptual Love.