Recently Yours Truly was hobnobbing with a Middling City homicide detective.
A thug.
An intimidating man who made it his sudden m.o. to fetch YT a small slice of pizza. Hot peppers or not he inquired. Hot peppers, I warbled, imperiously. My cohort, who shall be unnamed here, caught the thug lying to his little lady near the back corner of the bar by the peestops, pretending to be at a press conference or a holding tank or somewhere else quite loud, important and workful.
The homicide thug pointed out the latest arrival, a shoe shine man, one of those sorts who looks like a dusting of cocoa powder happened and, come to think of local lore, this idiomatic twist could resemble the dustings of yore that straggled onto homes in the vicinity of Bethlehem Steel Corp., all those benzene molecules and such nestling into lungs.
So there is the shoe shine man, all obsequiousness, on the floor doing his thing.
All of his front and near-front teeth are, it seems, a distant memory, and the thug starts to shout at the shoe shine man.
When'dja get out of jail. Still smoking crack.
And more along those lines.
It was oddly uncomfortable, the thug intimidating the slavish shiner and when me and palsy-walsy left I stated that that scenario in that venue, which shall also be left unnamed, was like visiting a movie set.
We were in the roles of writerly watchers, anecdote makers.
Time to see Dorothy, who deftly shapes the auburn hairs I make.

Idiomatic, thematic Love.