Challenge: Find costume in less than three hours for a “90’s Scandals” costume party.
Solution: One old pair of ice skates from under the bed, one curly blond wig and ballerina costume from Ricky’s Costume Shop around the corner, one junior-size Louisville Slugger baseball bat borrowed from the kids who live next door.
Voila, Tonya Harding.
[Pictures, if possible, to follow.]
Tuesday evening, I grabbed drinks with a West Coast entrepreneur friend passing through the city. A few years younger than I, he already runs a company that’s fast closing in on the million dollar sales mark.
But if it was a reminder that I’ve long since been displaced from the ‘boy wonder’ end of the startup spectrum, I was at least consoled to find age – or, rather, an additional few years of an effective liver-training regimen – has its advantages.
My friend emailed this morning:
Good meeting up with you on Tuesday night. You were definitely right about the Russian vodka; it sneaks up on you.
So here is what I gathered from other sources about the remainder of the evening after we left from margaritas. First I began by drunk dialing a ton of people, one girl 8 times throughout the course of the hour. I wandered through Times Square, telling people on the phone that I had no idea where my hotel was. I stopped in a bar and bought a Corona, so I could use the bathroom, but never touched the drink. While I was walking, some gay guys started trying to pick me up, or so I told people on the phone. Who knows if by then I was just hallucinating. Apparently security kicked me out of some place where I was walking and then I stopped at Sbarros and grabbed two slices of pizza. Nobody really knows how I ended
up back at my hotel, could have walked, could have been a taxi. And then I proceeded to puke my guts out.The funny part: when I woke up in the morning, I really had no idea what had happened, and until I started thinking about what I had done the night before, about 2 hours into the day, I had even forgotten that I had puked. Never a good sign.
I, on the other hand, made it home that night in time to bang out some late-night emails before hitting the hay. Looks like I haven’t hit forced retirement quite yet after all.
For years, my younger brother has been calling me a ‘drunken monkey’.
Turns out, he was right:
As previously noted, this Saturday, I turned 26. Or, as I like to think of it, ‘double bar mitzvah’.
A few thoughts on the misadventures involved:
– The birthday weekend actually started Thursday night, with drinks and more drinks at Russian Samovar. Though I haven’t been to that bar for over a month, the bartenders, proprietors, and even piano players all still knew me by name. I take this to be a dangerous sign for the state of my liver.
– The crowd that Thursday was wonderfully eclectic, with two sets of aunts and uncles, friends, colleagues, interns, and ex-girlfriends. It’s always a bit terrifying to see spheres of your life collide, and a wonderful relief when the people you like, like each other.
– Apparently, one of the aunts in attendance got drunk enough to reapply lipstick in the mirror behind her several times, before the other aunt told her that it wasn’t actually a mirror, but a clear glass divider between their table and the next. Hooray for family!
– Another reason to love my family: my mother pre-ordered me a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which arrived early Saturday morning.
– Despite my other engagements during the weekend, I polished off all 652 Potter pages by 7:00pm on Sunday.
– Saturday afternoon, I joined my grandmother at the Laura Pels Theater, for the Roundabout’s new production, Jon Robin Baitz’s The Paris Letter. The play itself was good, though not great; the acting was extraordinary. Also, as two or three friends have previously noted, Ron Rifkin does look a bit like my father.
– I splurged for a birthday dinner of hugely overpriced sushi, a good reminder after a few months of lower-end sushi joints that, at least with sushi, you get what you pay for.
– My great-grandmother, Nana, would buy herself birthday gifts each year, so that she’d be sure to receive at least one or two things she really wanted. I think this is an excellent plan.
– To that end, I bought myself a Nokia 7280, for use as a ‘weekends and evenings’ cell phone. My trusty Treo, which I love to death, is a bit large for casual pocketing, causing me to often leave it behind when heading out for the night. Now, I can switch my SIM card to the Nokia, which has the added benefit of looking alarmingly like a tube of lipstick might in the world of Tron.
– Saturday evening, I took the phone back to Samovar, for a second birthday party. One reason I love the place: we drank eleven carafes of home-brewed flavored vodka; they charged us for four.
– Another gift-to-self birthday present: gymnastics rings. Give me six months of practice, and I should have an Iron Cross.
– Speaking of which, as recently added to the left sidebar, I’m helping to head up a new group-training gym, CrossFit NYC. I showed up to co-lead the Sunday morning class, less hung over than still drunk.
– Also speaking of which, at Russian Samovar on Saturday night, as we were getting ready to leave the bar and brave the stifling humidity outside, I peeled off my button-down shirt, to just the fitted gray undershirt beneath. A girl at the next table, with whom I’d been intermittently flirting, blurted out, “wow, so I guess you go to the gym,” blushing as soon as that popped out of her mouth. It was the best compliment I’ve received in weeks.
– Interesting fact: you know who totally remembers your birthday and sends an awkward email each year? Girls you’ve slept with.
And, finally, a quick birthday history story:
I was born at 2:27pm, July 16th, 1979, at Stanford Hospital. In the State of California, during the first three hours of a baby’s life, the attending doctor or nurse is required to give the baby Silver Nitrate eye drops, to prevent infection. The drops, however, blur the baby’s vision for several hours.
As soon as I had popped out, I started looking around. Taking in everything. The nurse told my parents that she couldn’t bear to put those eye drops in, that she’d wait until the latest moment allowed by law, as she’d never before seen a baby so engrossed by the world, so enthralled by just sucking everything in.
Even in those first hours of life, I couldn’t get enough. I still can’t.
I spent most of last week with Rob Barnum, a new hire who’ll be managing the West Coast office of Cyan Pictures + Long Tail Releasing, who was in town to get up to speed on both companies. While still in college, Rob served as an exec at EscapeHomes, helping to take the company through several large venture capital rounds and a recent merger. He then started a production company to escape from the world of tech and into the world of film. Plus, he screenwrites, and blogs, and drinks heavily.
So, in short, I hired him because, in true narcissistic style, I like people like myself.
It wasn’t until Friday night, however, that I realized how dangerous having both of us in the same room would be. Because Friday night, we headed down to the West Village, hit the first crowded bar off the subway steps, and decided it was imperative that we spend the evening picking up random women.
Now, picking up women in bars is a chump’s game. It puts you into competition with every single other guy in the bar. Worse, it puts you on par with every single other guy in the bar, makes you the sketchy sort of guy who spends Friday night hitting on random women.
Sure, the girls are ostensibly there because they want the attention, having layered on makeup and cocktail dresses. But, deep down, every girl would much rather date a guy she’d met at the park or through a friend or in the yogurt aisle of the supermarket. The Fat Black Pussycat just lacks tell-your-grandkids-about-how-you-met charm.
So, if you’re looking to meet women at a bar, the main thing is to not be like all of the other sketchy guys surrounding you. You’ve got to be different, in a good way. You’ve got to think outside the booty box.
Rum and Coke’s in hand, Rob and I sat down at the first bar to discuss that conundrum, and to scope out the options. To our immediate right was a group of three girls, sitting together, dutifully brushing off a chain of successive hopefuls coming over with their smoothest entrances. They seemed as good a choice as anyone else.
Before I had the chance to reason my way out of it, I excused myself from Rob and headed over. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said, receiving icy stares. “But I was wondering which you think are cooler: blimps or hot-air balloons.”
“What?”, one of them asked.
“Blimps or hot air balloons – which is cooler. You.” I pointed to the one in the middle.
“Blimps, I guess,” she said, slightly confused. I got another blimp vote, then one for hot-air balloons.
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s all I needed.” I walked back to Rob, sat down, and checked my watch.
Thirty-four seconds later, the most intrepid of the three walked over.
“Now we’re curious,” she said. “Why did you want to know that?”
“It’s not that important,” I replied, and went back to talking with Rob.
“You can’t just ask us that,” she continued. “You have to tell me why you wanted to know.”
“Well,” I started, then looked to Rob, who nodded approval. “We’re going to be racing from New York to Chicago. Either in blimps or hot air balloons, and we wanted to see if one was cooler than the other.”
“Racing to Chicago?” the girl asked, dubious.
“Well,” Rob jumped in. “My grandfather passed away recently, and gave me an old hot-air balloon in his will. I was thinking about repairing it, and then I thought, if Josh buys one too, we could race.”
“Right,” I continued. “But I figured Rob could probably get some trade-in value on the balloon if we wanted to switch to blimps and race those instead.”
Rob and I nodded nonchalantly, like that pretty much summed it all up.
“You have to come with me to tell that to my friends,” the girl said. We were in.
Over the course of the evening, at several bars and with several groups of women, we worked our way through variations on the theme. Perhaps Rob was going to be in a hot-air balloon and I’d be in a blimp, and did they think that would put one of us at a disadvantage? Or, we had already bought the blimps, but we were in town to see if Blimpie would be a corporate sponsor of our race.
While we’d come in totally deadpan, we tried to slowly edge the story over the top, to let the girls in on it. The good ones got it, and played along, happy to be inside a shared joke. The slower ones never seemed to catch on, but remained credulous and interested.
Either way, after a while, we’d excuse ourselves, bow off invitations to join them at subsequent bars, decline phone numbers. We weren’t really there to pick up women. We just wanted the thrill of the chase.
Which, I would guess, is almost as exciting as racing hot-air balloons.
Suave:
Less suave:
Growing up in suburban Northern California, with Jewish New Yorker parents, Southern culture was, to put it mildly, not a large part of my early life. So far as I was concerned, America was the West Coast, the East Coast, and a whole bunch of ‘fly-over states’ in between.
But, over the past five years, largely due to living several of those with a Georgian and a Kentuckian, I’ve slowly begun to believe there might actually be something good going on in all those places jumbled up in the beach-less middle.
My iTunes library has filled with bluegrass and alt-country. My DVD collection has grown to encompass swaths of ‘regional storytelling’ – from *Matewan* through *All the Real Girls*.
And I’ve eaten barbecue. Lots of barbecue. With a host of guides ready to toss aside ‘Yankee bullshit’, I’ve toured the range of New York options, tasting scores of hush puppies, comparing the merits of vinegar- and tomato-based sauces, and marveling at the wide array of ways to chop up and char-broil the contents of an average barnyard. (Pig snoot sandwiches? Seriously?)
So it was with great anticipation that, yesterday at high noon, I headed down to Madison Square Park to meet James, Colin and Bill at the 3rd Annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party. The event brought together pitmasters from places like Little Rock and Decatur, Murphysboro and St. Louis, Elgin and Driftwood, each carting with them a little slice of home.
Or, as it turned out, a big slice of home. Which was good, because New Yorkers came in droves to the event, yielding hour-long lines at each separate stand. The restauranteurs were ready, having towed along fleets of trailer-hitched industrial-sized grills, and having piled high stacks of animal carcasses, part and whole, bound for fiery fates.
I arrived at the park just after noon, and found James already in line for the Salt Lick’s stand. Ten minutes and ten feet of line later, it became clear my initial wide-sampling intentions likely wouldn’t work out. Buying plates from just two different vendors, it seemed, would be an all-afternoon affair.
Moments later, however, Colin arrived with our salvation: a Bubba Fast Pass he’d scored from a VIP the day before. The pass took us ‘backstage’, past the crawling lines and into the cordoned-off sections behind each stand, where the barbecuing itself was actually underway. From that vantage point, we could amble up to any of the serving stations and score selections of grilled goodness in mere seconds.
By the time we left the park, some two hours later, I could barely walk. Sated and sauce-spattered, I was nearly sweating from the sheer effort of ongoing digestion. James pointed out that he was trying not to step too hard when he walked, for fear of triggering an emergency bathroom run.
But, goddamn, that was some barbecue.
As we headed towards the subway, Colin announced he was considering holding his upcoming birthday party at Blue Smoke, a relatively recent addition to the NYC barbecue scene, which brings a rather New York perspective (“you can improve anything, or, at least, make anything more expensive”) to it all by serving up what might be called haute barbecue cuisine.
Normally, I’d have been more than happy to pencil that into my calendar. But with the taste of authenticity still literally stuck between my teeth, it seemed like, well, kind of a waste.
Turns out, my Southern friends are right: when it come to barbecue, them yankees don’t know shit.
**Thursday**
Though exact details are hazy, the night definitely involved karaoke, four bars, and drinking champagne direct from pilfered bottles in the conference room of the Union Square W Hotel, with Colin and Sarah.
From their emails the following morning:
Colin:
> I am still drunk. And at work.
>
> My memory of Lemon Bar is a little fuzzy, but I remember we closed the
> place. I passed out on the subway home and woke up in Long Island City.
>
> I just want to be the first to say that last night was, unparallelled.
Sarah:
> Oh my god, best night ever.
>
> We are invincible.
And Colin’s response to Sarah:
> I am feeling very vincible.
>
> I think I may yet throw up.
**Friday**
Came up to New Haven late afternoon for dinner at the Chai Society. Wandered around Yale’s campus for a bit, marvelling at how beautiful it is, and trying to convince myself that I actually lived here for four years. Post-dinner, walked back to the train station, and discovered I’d missed the last train out for the night by about fifteen minutes, leaving me more than five hours off from the next train at 4:40am.
Spent those hours huddled on a bench of the quiet, cavernous New Haven train station, as I and three other poor saps who similarly missed the last train home sureptitiously eyed each other, mentally calculating the odds that one of the other three might rob us all blind if we drifted off to sleep.
Nonetheless, did manage to get some neck-crink-inducing naptime on the train ride itself, feeling safe under the conductor’s watchful eye. Pulled into Grand Central at 6:30am, and pulled my bed covers over my head at 7:00am.
Sadly, after too many days of work-driven early rising, by 10:00am, I was up again and nominally ready to face the world.
Now, at 5:00pm, I’m ready to rock out Florida style: early-bird special for dinner, asleep by 7:00pm.
Meant to post about this yesterday, but a non-stop string of Cyan and Long Tail meetings kept me, sadly, doing actual work rather than writing up inane summaries of my rampant social alcoholism.
Despite a slow start (involving a terrifying initial half-hour of sitting at a table by myself, imagining that nobody would show up at all), the inaugural S-A Block Party collected a crowd of seventeen different attendees over the course of the evening, five of whom I’d never before met live, making it, in my opinion, an unqualified success.
As it was also the first chance for a crowd of my friends to meet Abigail (who showed up with a couple of her own friends in tow, presumably as reinforcements), the event brought together ‘holy crap there are real people on the other end of that email address’ internet weirdness with ‘so this girl really exists after all’ dating weirdness, yielding an event that was, in equal parts, exceedingly awkward and absolutely excellent.
In short, my kind of party.
The S-A Block Party is at 9:00 this very evening, B.B. Doyle’s Pub & Restaurant, 51st just off 8th.
Hope to see you there.