Cell phonage...Saturday I went by the Garden on West 89th Street and our craft ladies were out in front of the Garden gate selling quilts, knitted and crocheted items. They had been rained out at our September Arts and Crafts Festival, and we had given them this past week end as a rain date. I asked, "How are things going? " Eleanor, the craft lady who crochets's unusual hats sniffed, "OK , lots of people coming along, but most of them are on cell phones. They don't see us, they don't see anything, they just go along in their own little bubble. It wasn't like this last year" She's right, the market penetration of cell phone has finally made them ubiquitous, and a necessary object. Down in court a few weeks ago, a Judge on the bench demanded that I call my client right then and there to check on a date for a conference with the parties. In the hallways of justice, on Centre Street, the din of haggling has been heightened with the buzz of cell phones ringing ( lawyers eschew fancy ringtones) and shouting over poor connections. Along Fifth avenue, well dressed people alone on the street walk along, talking loudly and gesticulating to imaginary companions. Look closer, and you see an unobtrusive earbud screwed into their ear. Barry, my signficant other, tells me his teaching assistant at school has never had a conversation with him when he walks her to the subway, because she is always on the phone. The craft ladies commiserated, "its just like living in the suburbs, where everyone is in cars and don't notice anything." There has been major shift in New York street life this year. Before you could always go out and there would be throngs of people relating in a semi social manner. People noticed the guy begging at the corner, the voter registration people with clipboards and the "published poet" sitting at his little table selling original poems. Now, part of informal street life has been chilled. People pass along, in the throng, but not part of it, sealed in a bubble, talking to the ether.