Tequila Sunrise

According to maps in the taxi cabs in town, I live in Spanish Harlem. For this and other reasons, I consider my street a bit sketchy, and this is further evidenced by the fact that there are always (slight exaggeration) fights outside my window. I first experienced the ringside seats inside my house a few weeks back at like 4:30am. Then, a few weeks later, there was another fight (the main event again featuring a man and woman), but it was as action packed because they were just yelling and screaming at each other. Comon, if you're gonna do that and wake up the neighborhood, you might as well throw some fists to make it interesting for those of us still awake. Then a peaceful Friday evening became interesting when some suit-wearing guy started yelling and screaming to the cop that just wrote him a parking ticket. This was quite exciting because the guy was irrate at the cop and threw out the standard "I pay your salary...blah blah blah...I was here for 20 seconds...blah blah blah". It was causing quite a commotion and Officer TicketWriter called for reinforcements, but that didn't stop Mr. Jeep Wrangler from telling her about the source of her salary as well. Unfortunately, no fists were thrown, and therefore no handcuffs were displayed to me and my neighbors. That would have been worth paying for...

After the main event, I met up with Alan and Andrea for dinner at a Mexican restaurant of questionable authenticity and quality, but solid margaritas. There was a whole slew of options on the back of the menu that I was going to choose from, though I was careful because I knew I'd have to be up at tequila sunrise the next morning for the day's events, which I will document below. After careful consideration, I chose the drink that apparently had four shots of Tequila in it. I found it interesting that the waitress said "do you want anything else with that?" Ummm....no, I just like margaritas on there own, thanks. Being blonde, it didn't occur to me that I just ordered four shots of tequila before we even got food. Luckly I was able to pawn off two of them to Andrea and Alan and had a margarita to soften the blow, so it was tolerable.

But my friends were worn out from the long week, so I bid them farewell and called Sean, who was downtown celebrating a birthday for a friend of his that I used to work with as well. So I joined them at Manhatta down in Alphabet City. The bouncers wouldn't let me in because I wasn't on a "list", which was totally lame, since my friends were right there smoking cancer sticks. The bouncer said "we don't like it when people lie to us", which was interesting because I was not sure what I could have lied about during my one minute discussion with them. Whatever pretenscious bouncer. After a few pleas and batted-eyelashes from Sean's cute girlfriend, the bouncers agreed that I did actually know them and let me in....

I got home somewhat late that night, but I had to wake up bright and early for New York Cares Day 2005, which involves cleaning up parks around the city by a few thousand of NewYork's generous citizens. Hopefully I'll get some pictures to show you the area we cleaned up, which was Ft. Washington Park in Washington Heights. The park was strewn with litter (several hundred bags worth in a very small area), needles, drug paraphanelia, and other fun items. I even found someone's bank account register that had entries dating from 1969 to 1973. I'm not sure how that got there. Needless to say, this park was trashed. It took the 70 volunteers about 3 or 4 hours of hard, manual labor to get this place back into decent shape. I was amazed, and the neighbors of the area were very thankful for the help.

After finishing up, a small group of us decided to walk towards downtown before our after-cleanup party. We got a mini tour of the area from some people that knew about it and checked out Columbia University as well. But the best part was chatting with the other volunteers and getting to know them better. Most of us went to the party, which had a live band, some food, and some beverages for everyone. It was a really good, positive atmosphere and our little group plans on getting together again sometime soon.

Last night, I went out with some people to my favorite place, the Lower East Side. After navigating Clinton St looking for something we could all eat and some place where we didn't have to wait two hours to get seated, we settled on Alias, which is a place I've wanted to try for a while. And, oh boy, were we not disappointed! I woke up this morning (well, more like this afternoon) and was still full, even though the proportions were not Olive Garden-like. Very creative food, including the vegetarian Lasagna with a bunch of things that I hadn't heard of, the mint ice-cream sandwhiches, and the root-beer float dessert drink (Vanilla Stoli, Maple Syrup, Cream, etc.).

After dinner, I headed over to Guernica to meet up with Alan and Andrea. I am beginning to realize that you don't need to pay a $30 cover charge and buy a $500 bottle of liquor to find cool dance clubs and bars in New York. It's just a matter of finding these places! East Village is jam packed with these places, but they are still dark doors that are hard to find. Very easy to walk past them without noticing it. And I'm not that observant, anyway....

J. Riley