(6:43 P.M. BROOKLYN, NY) Lily Rubenstein, 24, attended Saturday’s art show, What’s Inside: A Look Inwards, Rectal and Spiritual with mixed feelings. Intrigued expression perched on her countenance, Rubenstein nodded solemnly at the performance piece, featuring men in the nude crying on toilets. She hoped her confusion was interpreted as interest. Several Tinder matches were also in the audience, and feigning intrigue was a less arduous task than talking to the manifestations of her digital escapades. Mirroring the other audience members, Rubenstein kept on nodding at the performance, resembling an overzealous Chasidic man praying.
Alex Roberts, another attendee, remarked, “The girl with the bangs? Yeah, she seemed into it I guess?”. Rubenstein truly encased the performance of a lifetime.
What the other audience members didn’t know was that Lily Rubenstein was not thinking about the vestiges of intrinsic personhood because of the art show at all, but rather thinking about corporate icon Chester Cheetah.
Rubenstein was raised in a middle-class household in Queens, the daughter of a nutritionist and personal trainer, who encouraged a strict diet of healthy meals. However, Rubenstein (as most teenagers are beholden to do) retaliated against this nutritional regime in the only way she knew how — by eating swarths of Cheetos by the Family-Sized bags. Although this practice was initiated in her tweendom, it had proliferated in not only her digestive practices, but her mental. Rubenstein could not stop thinking about the golden orange fur adorning the Cheetos icon, Chester Cheetah. She often doodled in her notebooks “Lily Cheetah”, imagining a future with the spotted creature. Rubenstein even tried mirroring his black spots at age 14, but was sent to the hospital as her parents feared she was host to a new disease.
Thoughts of the sunglasses-adorned god run rampantly in Rubenstein’s psyche. If all roads run back to Rome, all thoughts go back to Chester. Consequently, at Saturday’s performance, Rubenstein masked her confusion of the event by thinking about her one, true, emotional motif — Chester.