post-derby throwdown

About a month back, my roommates and I decided it was time to throw a housewarming party. Or, rather, it was well past time for a housewarming party, considering we moved into the apartment back in November. Which, essentially, was the problem – we couldn’t really call it a housewarming party without sounding like morons, especially considering that several large rooms in our apartment are still largely unfurnished. Compounding that problem was the issue of high expectations – the last time the three of us regularly held parties, they were good enough to eventually become the basis of a movie on Comedy Central.

After some thought, we settled upon the idea of a Derby party. One of us, Colin, being from Kentucky, we figured had some legitimate claim on the event. So, in typical style, we talked about the idea for several weeks without actually doing anything. Then, about a week back, with the panic of true procrastination, we sat down and banged out an Evite:

Dearest Friends and Lovers:

Next Saturday, May 3rd, 10 p.m. Mark the date on your calendar with a large, red pen.

We, the proprietors of the Gotham Sugar Shack, invite you’ns (and yer sister) to join us in celebrating the Kentucky Derby. Yes, this is a theme party (sans the spooky masks, organ music, and sacrificial orgies).

Here’s how it works: our lovely Sugar Shack will be divided into an “infield” and a “grandstand” (a la Churchill Downs). In non-Kentucky speak, that means you should dress either as “southern gentry” or “white trash.” (i.e. Scarlett O’Hara vs. Daisy Duke). We’re serious about this; we’ll have a big motherfucker at the door checkin’ for overalls or white seersucker.

By the miracle of Tivo, we’ll have a midnight broadcast of the ACTUAL KENTUCKY DERBY. That means real horses running in a circle for 60 seconds. Then the race is over (but the party will continue going round and round). Let us know below which horse you think will win – placing bettors will receive genuine horse products. That’s what they do in Kentucky, and that’s what we’ll be doing in Hell’s Kitchen.

We’ll provide cheap beer & wine coolers (infield), Mint Juleps & champagne (grandstand), and fried chicken. But please bring a bit of your own beer, bourbon, or chicken to help the Ol’ Kentucky Cause.

And remember: Everybody Pig It!!!

Yours and we are,
Joshua, James, & Colin

Amazingly, over sixty of our friends have RSVP’ed. And, more than likely, thirty or forty more will be showing up unannounced.

But we’ll be ready for them. As promised, we’ve stocked up on champagne, marinated mint for the juleps, bought out every flavor of Boones, and filled giant Styrofoam coolers with Schaefer, Schlitz, Schlitz Ice, Schmidt’s, Old Milwaukee and Pabst Blue Ribbon. We’ve decorated the Infield with a holographic Jesus, an American flag made of Christmas lights, empty buckets of fried chicken, and NASCAR paraphernalia, while the grandstand has pictures of Secretariat and My Old Kentucky Home.

And, best of all, we’re suited up and ready to go. Colin and James are holding up the white trash end of the spectrum (with James doing the modern variant, and Colin a retro Hatfield/McCoy), while I’ve picked up a seersucker suit/bowtie/suede shoe ensemble.

In short, we’re set. If you’re going to throw a party, we say, throw a fucking party.

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May 3, 2003

Grumpy, Doc, Bashful, Sleepy, Happy, Dopey and

Special thanks to my roommate Jamie, for pointing out the likely connection between me sneezing all weekend long and the recently appeared blossoms on the trees lining our block. As I only discovered my seasonal allergies a few years back, they still take me by surprise each year; though perhaps they shouldn’t, as they seem to kick in like clockwork, at least judging from my blogging about essentially the same thing almost exactly the same time last year.

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April 20, 2003

nyc

To paraphrase: Home at last, home at last, God almighty, I’m home at last.

Back in Manhattan, with no trips anywhere on the immediate horizon. I cannot express how happy that makes me.

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April 15, 2003

holy street-corner confrontation!

Just rescued some lady at the end of my block from a big drunk who was harassing her. Not too happy to be “escorted” away, he left me with a few good welts as souvenirs of the encounter. Still, I’m tempted to stop this movie producing / tech non-profit crap and just become Batman full time.

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April 13, 2003

wi-fry II

Despite the large signs plastered all over the windows of the McDonalds on 51st and Broadway, none of the four cashiers I spoke with had a clue about the internet access pilot. Seems the idea may not be quite ready for a national roll-out.

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March 16, 2003

bar none

One of the few downsides to leaving the East Side was an increase in distance between myself and the Campbell Apartment, one of New York’s finest bars for early-evening drinks dates, martini meetings, and general impressing of others.

Thanks to the investigative efforts of my esteemed Cyan colleague Colin, however, I have, fortunately, discovered an able replacement quite close to home: Single-Room Occupancy, located just two blocks up (on 53rd, slightly East of 9th). Entrance is through a brownstone basement door, largely unmarked save a single green sconce. Ring the buzzer for admittance into the small space, sparsely decorated and lit solely by recessed glowing tiles in the roof and floor. No liquor, just an excellent assortment of imported beers and fine wines, served in tasteful fluted glassware. Sort of neo-minimalist speak-easy chic.

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on entropy

Apparently, even if I am only gone for a matter of days, my roommates wreak organizational havoc, remarkably efficiently, in my absence. Dishes pile in the sink, garbage cans fill to overflowing, important incoming mail becomes buried under several-month old issues of The Onion, The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Certainly, even the second law of thermodynamics predicts such change – over time, the universe inevitably progresses towards chaos. And yet, sitting this close to the seemingly inexhaustible energy supply of the sun, our little planet is mathematically destined to head in the opposite direction, towards an increasingly ordered state (see Morowitz, 1968). Perhaps, then, it is my recent time in sunny LA that inspired me to clean our apartment this evening in my roommates’ absence. For a few brief moments, at least, there is a semblance of civilization, everything is in its right place.

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March 9, 2003

at the orchestra

Last night, I headed off to hear the New York Philharmonic play. It was my first chance to do so this season, as, though I’d held tickets for a number of earlier concerts, I’d always been out of town and had to pass them off to friends. The girl I was meeting was (per usual) rather late, which gave me a chance to stand in front of the fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center, perhaps my favorite place in New York (at least at night during the winter). The opera, the orchestra and the ballet all had performances that evening, and so the three glass-faced buildings that surround the fountain were lit up and teaming with couples and families and students and whomever else, dressed up and wearing mittens and overcoats and jostling for entrance.

Standing there, I was hit by a wave of homesickness – not homesickness for somewhere else, but homesickness for that very place, at the thought that I would almost doubtless eventually end up living somewhere that wasn’t as beautiful and crystalline and quintessentially New York as the fountain in Lincoln Center at that very moment.

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March 1, 2003

like a tourist

This afternoon, on the way back from the bank to my office, I was stopped by a gentleman in Times Square handing out tickets to the taping of Letterman. With nothing better to do (aside from, say, actual work), and having never before attended such a thing, I decided to skip out the rest of the afternoon to attend.

In summary: the guests were good (Steve Martin, Amy Sedaris, The Foo Fighters), the sketches and Dave’s jokes were rather bland, and the incontrovertible highlight of the show was the poor makeup woman whose sole responsibility seemed to be sneaking on and off stage to quickly powder Paul Shaffer’s bald head between shots.

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February 24, 2003