I've just come back from a long weekend in the Big Apple, so this is the first in a series of posts about things that happened while I was away.
Usually I like to go shopping when I'm in New York. This time was no exception, but all I seemed to buy were cold pills and tissues. Thursday afternoon, while still at work, my nose started running. And it didn't stop until today, back in Florida. And just to add to my misery, New York was cold-ish and rainy.
But I didn't let that dampen my weekend. I took in all of the theater I could, which I will talk about in another post.
On Saturday night, after we saw Deuce, Gene and I headed down to the West Village. He had told me earlier that he doesn't often go out to bars when he's in town and that he had never been to any of the gin joints in the Village. Well, being a native of the New York metropolitan area, I felt it my duty to show him a couple of the classics.
We started at my favorite, Marie's Crisis, a subterranean proverbial hole in the wall with a single bar and a beat up old piano. And dozens of gay men, straight women and their straight boyfriends, singing show tunes as loudly as possible. The place -- and some of the patrons -- have been there forever.
Since I was sick, I knew I should take care of myself. So I ordered orange juice. I suppose the vodka that came with it wasn't the best thing in the world, but hey, what can you do? When you order orange juice in a bar, it comes with vodka. It's some city ordinance or something.
We left Marie's and went to another venerable Sheridan Square outpost -- the Monster. It's nothing special, but they thought it appropriate to charge a $7 cover. The noive! Again, I ordered some orange juice, but they must have been running low, as it mostly tasted like vodka. Suddenly, my cold was feeling a lot better.
Gene didn't like the Monster all that much, so we decided to try out a place down the street call Pieces. I had never been, but knew that it had been around for awhile. We walked in and found ourselves in a room with a fair number of twinks. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have liked a place like that, but it was karaoke night and the boys and two lesbians were having fun. So we sat at the bar and took it all in. The lesbians were actually good on the microphone. But you could tell these were twinks. No show tunes for days, except two numbers from Little Shop of Horrors.
Gene ordered the drinks this time and asked Raul, the cute bartender, for orange juice for me. They must have received the OJ shipment meant for the Monster, because my drink actually tasted like juice. But Raul, good, law-abiding bartender that he is, had to put some vodka in it. The juice was making me feel better, so I had another.
'Round about 1-ish, we left and managed to find Sixth Ave and a cab going north. We got to the hotel, frustrated that the diner-ish place across the street was closed. Closed? Wait, we have the munchies!
We got up to our hotel room and I peeled off my clothes and fell (literally) into bed. We were blathering on about one thing or another, and the last thing I remember is telling Gene about my stalker-boy at work from a couple of months ago. Turns out he knows the guy!
The next day, strangely enough, I started to feel a little better. Must have been the orange juice.
