on a corner (recalled)

She had a queen’s posture and silver hair and was much too elegant to be lost. She stopped us on a corner in the part of the city where the grid goes haywire, asked us if we knew where a certain restaurant was.

“I don’t know, but my phone might know,” said my friend (this was before such things were commonplace).

“Really,” she marveled, taking her time with the word. “Would you ask it for me?”

He did, and after a while we found the restaurant for her, half a block from where we stood. She introduced herself as though we ought to know her name and admonished us to come to her current show. She was, it turned out, quite famous once. We never did go.