Happy 70th Birthday To Yanna Avis Who Was So Damn Rude To Me

Six years ago, I wrote a blog post about Yanna Avis, a rich Manhattan socialite who fancies herself an exotic, international, smoky, chanteuse. She treated me like dirt and I don’t like her. When she was eventually arrested for shoplifting and I saw her tight face splashed all over the newspapers, it made me happy. Well, I heard through the grapevine that she did another show earlier this week and as she was walking onto the stage, she tripped over a microphone cord and fell, pulling a music stand down to the ground along with her dignity. Since she turns 70 years old in a few days, I decided it was time to repost this magical story of my encounter with Yanna Avis. Happy 70th birthday, Ms. Avis!  xo, BW

(This story was originally posted on November 11, 2013 when she was 64 years old. Now she’s 70.)

Sometimes bad things happen to good people. We all know this and accept it as part of our lives. We like to believe in karma and hope that people will get what they deserve; all the kind people will find twenty-dollar bills on the street and all the assholes will get to their cars to find dead batteries. Many times when we have someone who sits in our station and treats us like a turd taco all we can do is send out to the universe that we would like for them to fall into a pile of dog crap. Well, the universe heard me because someone who was a notorious byotch from hell to me showed up in the papers this week for a wee little problem she has regarding shoplifting.

According to the New York Daily News, Yanna Avis, 64, was arrested for stealing a pair of gloves from Loehmann’s. Her age is not really important to the story, but I can tell by her pinched face and colored hair that she is entering her golden years against her will, so I want to make sure that her age is loud and proud. Yanna Avis is 64. Sixty. Four. Like, that means she was born in 1949 when Harry Truman was president and a stamp cost three fucking cents. Yanna Avis is French and the heir to the Avis Rent-a Car empire. I had issue with Avis Rent-a-Car a few years ago when they jacked me over on a car rental in Houston, Texas so I really hated her before I even knew who she was.

I have had the displeasure of working around Yanna Avis, 64, on more than one occasion. She did not sit in my section, but performed at one of my jobs and I had to assist her many times. She does not know the meaning of the words “please” or “thank you.” I came to dread when she would be in the room because dealing with her is like trying to squeeze a zit on your back. No matter how hard you try to get rid of it, it always pops up somewhere else. For her show, she wears this ridiculous top hat because she thinks that fancy rich cabaret singers look good in them. When I get to to work to begin setting up the room, she is there rehearsing, which seems too little too late. I mean, the show is beginning in an hour and no amount of rehearsal in the next sixty minutes is going to suddenly make her vocal cords have the ability to, you know, actually sing. She is in a tizzy about her hat because it has gone missing.

“Where eez my hat? I cannot find it, do you know where eet eez?”

“I’m sorry, I just got here. What are you looking for?” I ask.

“My hat. My top hat. Someone must have moved it. Eet is gone! I need eet right now!”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m the server and I just got to work. I’m not sure where your hat is.”

At this, she turns in a huff and goes off to find someone else to find her stupid fucking top hat. Of course no one knows where it is because we were all doing our own thing like making coffee and getting ice. We don’t deal with the performers. Ten minutes later, she comes to me again.

“Do you know where eez my hat?”

“Umm, no ma’am. You already asked me and I still don’t know.”

I can tell that she has no idea that she has already asked me. In her eyes, I am just another member of the help. She again, stomps away from me. As I begin to arrange the tables, I find the stupid fucking top hat that has fallen onto the floor and rolled under a table. I pick it up and go find Yanna, 64. When she sees me approaching, she grabs it out of my hands.

“Zer eet eez!”

No thank you or recognition. Five minutes later, she asks us to move several of the tables out of the room so that she can make a grand entrance to the stage without having to walk around the tables. Moving the tables means they all have to be unset and then carried downstairs. It’s fine, we do it plenty of times. I open the curtains that separate the lobby from the showroom so I can move the tables downstairs. As I begin dragging the tables out of the room, she yells at me from the stage where she is still “rehearsing.”

“Shut zoze curtains! I can be seen!”

“Well, I’m moving the tables out of the room as you requested,” I tell her.

“Shut zem now!”

“I can’t move the tables through the curtains. Do you want the tables moved out or not?” I ask her.

“Yes!”

“Well, the the curtains have to stay open until I can move them then.”

She throws her hands up in disgust and continues “singing.”

Every time she has performed at the club, she is rude, condescending, elitist and an overall beech. I don’t like her, so imagine my glee when I saw that she had been arrested for shoplifting! According to Yann Avis, 64, it was a misunderstanding, but according to a Loehmann’s employee, she saw the sixty-four year old songbird “remove one pair of gloves from a display and conceal the items in a bag.” My favorite picture of her in the paper is when she is leaving the courthouse concealed behind a scarf because it reminds me of the time she made us hold the curtain open so that she could hide behind it as she slipped down the stairs unnoticed by her adoring fans of friends and other socialites with faces pulled back tighter than drums.

Yanna Avis, 64, hides in shame.

Yanna Avis, 64, hides her tight face in shame.

Yanna Avis, 64, will be cleared of all charges once she completes one day of community service. I hope she has to go clean up the garbage in Central Park or serve food at a soup kitchen. I’m sure she had other ideas for for community service:

“Your honor, what eef I geev my maid some of my old clozing, oui? Non? Err, okay zen, ‘ow about eef I make my own bed tomorrow, oui? Non? Okay, zen, what eef I ‘ave my cook take zee day off and I make my own sandweech zat day? Oui?”

None of that is going to work, Yanna. You will have to take your sixty-four year old ass out of your Fifth Avenue condo and do some community service, Hopefully those gloves you stole aren’t the only ones you have because you might have to get your hands a little bit dirty. It truly feels good when bad things happen to bad people.

Au revoir.

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