The weekend visit from Jenny G from DC went pretty well. I cut out of work a bit early and about twenty minutes later she and her friend Betsy showed up at my front door. I was mildly impressed that she could navigate her way to my apartment by now. After a quick hello how are you and some water, we headed out to get dinner. We walked down to 7th ave. to the Purity diner. The menu at that place is too enormous, and I couldn't decided what to get. I finally ordered a grilled cheese and bacon, and felt a bit guilty about the fatty, greasy plate in front of me. As it turned out, that would be just about the healthiest thing I would consume all weekend.
The plan for the evening was to attend the Yo La Tengo concert being held in the Prospect Park bandshell, right up the street from my apartment. I'd emailed with my neighbor Rachel about going up together, but she also had an out of town guest and the coordination was difficult so we just split up. After getting some beers, Jenny G and Betsy decided they didn't want to go to the show afterall. So I waited for Jed and Jen and walked up to the Park with them. The place was absolutely packed. So we wandered around for a good bit. Rachel told me she'd be "to the right" of the stage, which encompassed about 40,000 foot square area, so I didn't put much effort into finding her. We sat for a while across the rode from the bandshell area, and could hear the music well but not see anything. It was a beautiful evening in the park. I'd never been in there at night. When I heard a song I knew or liked, I wandered up to get a better look. Then we decided to look for James, who was somewhere amongst the thousands of people. Cell phones work poorly in the park for some reason, so we were left to wander aimlessly. We saw one guy laying down, being massaged by two girls, who looked exactly like James, and even sported a shirt and pants that were classically "James." But it wasn't him. So we kept looking. Jed spotted our neighbor Miss Charming Melodee, which was sort of ironic since she's was the smallest of the people we knew were there. She couldn't find Rachel either, so we wandered over to the entrance to the pay-area seats. On the way we found James and his girlfriend Rosario, and debated whether or not to pay to get into the area where you could actually see the band. It was a suggested three dollar donation. Miss Charming Melodee wanted to go look for her friends, and I decided to go with her rather than pay to get in. Plus, I'd long ago vowed that I would never again pay money to see Yo La Tengo live. I like them a lot on CD, but live it's really pretty bad. It's cacophonous and loud and just annoying. Though on Friday night they seemed less into that and into really long space-jams. Still, I had made a promise to myself, and stuck with it. Later on this was my main excuse for not going in.
Miss Charming Melodee gave me one of the beers she'd brought up as compensation for helping her look for her friends, and we wandered back to the same area we'd met earlier, where we saw the James doppelganger. And there were her roommates Rachel and Morning and a few others, right where we'd been standing earlier. So we spent the rest of the show sitting around there. The music itself ended up being pretty inconsequential. Every so often I'd listen more closely and hear them jamming away, but for the most part I was just listening to the conversations going on around me, while rarely speaking. This was pretty impressive for me, since normally when other people talk I just phase out and start thinking about food or music or something. I spoke with Rachel's friend Ann(e), I think, for a while, and found her interesting enough.
Upon my return home, I found Jen, Betsy, and the friends I'd separated from at the concert, all sitting on the stoop drinking beer. So we spent the rest of the night doing that. For a good long while. It was a great night to be outside. Jenny G also showed me some shirtless pictures of myself from when she was here a year ago. Scary.
I just had Chinese food for lunch. Not one time in the last 20 fortune cookies that I've opened have a got one that had the "Learn Chinese" words on the back. Not once. One time when James and I were out to eat, I mentioned this to our waitress. She grabbed a handful, and opened some for me. None of those had the chinese on them either. It's really very weird. Sometimes, it's blank, sometimes it has advertisements for cable channels, and sometimes it has a link to www.wontonfood.com. All very weird.
Anyway, on Saturday morning, as expected, Jen and Betsy were up at the butt-crack of dawn. Well, more like 10 o'clock, but still way to early for a Saturday. They wanted to go wander around the East Village, and being the gracious host I am, a-wandering we did go. The main items they were looking for were two very specific pieces of New York clothing. So we ended up going into every hip-hop store between Astor Place and Houston on Broadway. That's only about eight blocks, but you'd be surprised how many of those stores there are. Jen never did find her red Brooklyn hooded-sweatshirt. But we did see a preacher in Tompkins Square Park. He was talking to a group of about 9 kids sitting in front of him, looking bored. Betsy and I wandered in closer while Jen sat on the benches further away. He looked and talked a little bit like Bill Clinton. The guy kept saying that we needed to remember that we were created for God's good pleasure, or something like that, which sounded really dirty, in a biblical way. God's pleasure this and God's pleasure that. It sounded like he was talking about some sort of divine penis. Anyway, the last thing we heard was a little anecdote- or is it an allegory- he told about finding God in a Dumpster on a mountain top. I don't mean he found a corporeal version of God in the Dumpster, I mean he said God revealed himself to him in the Dumpster. I have no idea how he got to that point. But I thought it would make a good song lyric in a country song or something. "Found Jesus in a Dumpster on a mountain top," or something like that.
I added more reference books to my collection on Saturday, courtesy of the Astor Place Barnes and Noble and a 75% off sale. I go three little books, that is Little guides, which are just small reference books, each one centering on different topics. I got one on herbs, one on flowers, and one on reptiles and amphibians. I passed on the shark book, but at a buck fifty a book, for a three hundred page book, i wish I'd gotten it. books lists other volumes and in the series in the back. Apparently, there's a guide to pizza. I'd like to see how one can write three pages on pizza in reference book form.
Once we got home, we all conked out. That's the problem with getting up early. You get a lot done in the first part of the day, but you're completely useless from the hours between 4-6. So you might as well sleep those extra two hours. Though there is a lot to be said for afternoon naps. Jenny G collapsed on my bed for a few hours, and I tried to watch the Royal Tenenbaums, which I bought on DVD earlier in the day. But I just had to sleep. I slept for about 15 minutes before Jed came home and told me we had to go shopping. So shopping we went.
The reason for the shopping was the cookout we had planned for the evening. Jed and I had decided to have a Bastille Day BBQ. So we walked down to C-Town to get the goods. Out of the 40 dollars we spent- which jed estimated to within 36 cents, amazingly enough- I'd guess about 15 -20 dollars was spent on joke items. We needed to make the bbq somehow relevant to Bastille Day, or at very least, to France, so we decided to make theme-foods. Not baguettes and brie or anything like that, but to actually use food as raw material for grand food constructs. We used a baguette cut in half to make to Frenchmen out of bread, using olives for eyes, mushroom slivers for mustaches and noses, onion bits for eyebrows, and the best part- portabello mushrooms for little french berets. Then we stuck skewers in their "mouths," which we burnt at the end to make it look like cigarettes. Because all French people smoke.
Next, the grand poo-bah of the Bastille Day BBQ was a Fleur de Lys made entirely out of Kielbasa sausage. We called it "The Fleur de Meat." Everyone was way impressed with our little theme foods. I'm pretty sure we coined the phrase "Fleur de Meat." And, huzzah! a quick google search for the phrase returned no results. So its ours.
The bbq itself was a low-key, intimate affair, with only about six or seven attendees, including Jen and Josh. Dylan had returned from his cross-country jaunt with Matt earlier in the evening too, so he sat out with us for a while. Rodzilla showed up as well, but not until the festivities were just wrapping up. Besides the french-themed foods, Jed and I also performed several songs from Les Miserables, sometimes singing along with a recording, sometimes not. Jen remarked "It's a good thing I'm so confident of your guys' heterosexuality."
After the BBQ, Jen was rip-roaring ready to go out. So out we went, minus Rodzilla, who had to go home, and Jenny G, who just didn't feel like it. I actually didn't feel like it either, but I toughed it out. We met up with Matt and ended up at Loki, this bar I hate on 5th ave., after running into Susannah when we fled the band playing at Great Lakes. I was reminded again why I hate that bar. It's too Manhattan pretentious. It's the only bar on 5th Ave., the only bar I've gone to in Brooklyn for that matter, that actually has someone checking ID at the door. The actual space is nice, but the people are terrible, and the seating isn't conducive to coversation. Jen, Matt, and I went back to Great Lakes an hour later, but just decided to call it a night and went home.
I watched a good bit of the Royal Tenenbaums, before it got too depressing. I liked the movie when I first saw it, but now I love it. I don't know why, but I can appreciate it so much more now, particularly Ben Stiller's part, which I found sort of flat at first.
The drinking continued on Sunday, over a few bloody mary's at brunch at Sotto Voce on 7th ave. Betsy and Jen were kind enough to pay for my meal as well. Then it was time for the ladies to head back home. Or at least, back into Manhattan. They convinced me somehow to go drink beer and play pool with them, which was about the last thing I wanted to do. I just wanted to go back to sleep. So I suggested the Fat Black Pussycat, since it was near the subway. We were the only ones there for a long time. Turns out not a lot of people had the idea to play pool and drink pitchers of beer at 3 pm on a Sunday afternoon. We played a three-man game for while, called cut-throat, where I was cheated out of multiple victories by their questionable non-rules. After a few games, a light-skinned fellow who said he was from Morroco wrote his name on the board, and we played several games of 8-ball with him, during which we drank several pitchers of beer and ate copious amounts of the snack mix provided by the bar. Jenny G and I played remarkably well. Especially considering how nervous I get when I play someone who looks like he can play. This fella had his own cue stick and black glove. And while he was watching us finish our 3-way game, I played like shit. But I had some pretty impressive runs, and Jenny G and I managed to win 4 games out of seven.
At first Jenny G and Betsy C planned on taking a 3 o'clock train. Then a 4:30. Then the 5:50. By the third pitcher of beer, it was the 6:50, and we played about a dozen games of pool. When they first proposed the idea, I said "Ugh..." and felt far too tired to go out drinking more. The plan for the weekend, when she first decided to come up, was to just sit around and get all drunk and have a good time. Well, we never really went out and got drunk. Jen didn't go out at all, actually. But we also never really stopped drinking either. I did terrible things to my body all weekend, between the constant influx of beer and sausage and cheese and other meat products and lack of sleep. So the pool playing and beer drinking wasn't high on my list of things to do. But in the end, it was probably the most fun I had on the weekend. There was almost nobody else in the place, and we just had a blast playing pool, doing silly dances, hi-fiving, drinking, and cursing loudly. It was definitely the most content I'd felt in one place in days. It's too bad they had to leave when they did. Though I doubt I could've taken another day of it.When I got home, I was pretty headachy. I went and got food stuffs to eat with the leftover meats, and on my way home I saw a group of children and their mother posing in front of the French bread-men and taking pictures. They made a point to remark that one of the bread-men appeared to be smoking. They thought the other looked like a paint brush. But then the all figured out that both were actually smoking. I don't think they approved. I just walked by without saying anything, but watched for a little while inside my door. This amused me greatly. I'll tell you, those French breadmen were about the greatest thing I've ever created or helped create. If my first child amuses me half as much, it'll be a grand time.
The French Bread-Men. Jed was particularly proud of their expressive eyebrows.
A rather pretty sunset sky above our bbq
Betsy, Jen, and Jed at the Bastille Day BBQ
Jed, playing French Bread-head
The Fleur de Meat. It featured three different types of sausage: Full-flavored beef (top), turkey kielbasa (sides) and low-fat sausage made from beef, pork, and turkey (stem)
Jed, and his beloved Fleur de Meat. He burned his face a little posing too close to the grill.
On Sunday, Bastille Day, I placed the French Bread-Men on our stoop with little greeting signs for our friends and neighbors.
Sometimes I really can't believe how life-like they look.
(l-r) French Bread-Man, Me, Jenny G
Jenny G lining up a shot at the Fat Black Pussycat