Sorry, I know it's been a while since I've written, but it's been a busy week and weekend...
Last weekend was possibly the first time I've had a "2-in-2", although I'm not positive about that. After a lazy Saturday where I spent most of my time sitting on my futon reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road, I headed down to Sean's favorite burger joint to meet up with him and some of his coworkers for a bite to eat. I felt bad because they were had all spent the whole day moving one of his coworkers to her new apartment while I sat around waiting for Sean to call me and let me know when and where the moving festivities began. Guilty as charged! I had spent Friday night with them as well down at Second Nature for someone who knows someone who knows someone who is moving. Not a bad place - if you like crowded bars playing decent music but not having enough room to tear up the carpet at. Karma came back to bite me in the arse for that one, and I was stuck with an upset stomach for the rest of the weekend. I guess that's what I get for eating boring American food!
But, I wouldn't let that ruin a perfectly good weekend! That night I met up with Paul & Cathy, who had friends in town that had won lottery tickets to see Wicked. Being as diligent as ever, they found some student tickets available for the first row of the musical Good Vibrations, which featured songs of the Beach Boys. It was worth the $30 tickets, especially since we were looking up to the stage and some of the dancers were wearing skirts ;o) . Feeling like a blown-up balloon, I decided to head home afterwards rather than hit midtown with the crew. My body was pissed off about that American food...
Sunday was full of more time spent in Time Square, this time trying to win lottery tickets for Avenue Q, which is supposed to have lots of puppet nudity (GASP!). It's also supposed to be hilarious, by the way, and won the Best Musical award in 2004. After getting denied there, the mad scramble for tickets to something was on again. Wonderful Town was sold out of their student tickets, Julia of the Sea looked boring, so we hit Broadway Avenue and found ourselves in line for Mamma Mia, which features the songs of Abba. I had tried to get seats for this last year, but pulled a blonde manuever and bought tickets for a Wednesday when my friends were in town for a weekend. Yea, oops. That's okay though, because we got $20 tickets to the standing-room only for that afternoon's show! What a deal. Mamma Mia was a pretty entertaining gig, full on with Love Parade-like space outfits in some parts of the show. (Speaking of the Love Parade, may it rest in peace. The world's biggest celebration of techno music was disbanded last year by Berlin just because the city was being destroyed by the millions of tourists who came or something stupid like that ;o(. )
I headed home after that because I had a meeting with a colleague of Paul's who needed some mp3 music moved from her work laptop to her personal laptop. After being stood up two times before, you can imagine how thrilled I was to find out that she was going to stand me up one more time because she had "sooo much to drink last night and I'm hung-over". I was at my wit's end with that one and decided if she bailed once more, she was going to have to find some other geek to work on her computer...
But, in the end, the evening turned a corner and karma came to my side. Baltimore Jen called and wanted to see if I wanted to go see a movie that evening. Ummm...yes please. I'd been trying to get ahold of her for a while, but she's been swamped with work and after-work LSAT classes and thus hadn't returned any of my phone calls. She wanted to see either Hotel Rwanda (a movie about genocide - fun!) or Sideways (a movie about wine tasting in California, probably in the area near where I went to college). Tough choice there, right? So of course I picked Hotel Rwanda. :o|
Oops. Okay, depressing movie but I really wanted to see it and it appealed to my sense of learning more about the world and why/how America has turned its back on it. Don't even get me started on the Bush administration....Anyway, so we saw the depressing movie and what better way to make a difference in the world than to go eat dessert and drink coffee (or chamomile tea if you have an upset stomach) in an awesome little European cafe, complete with a live piano player and a position overlooking the street, in a swank Upper West Side neighborhood. Isn't it ironic, don't you think?
J. Riley
