Saturday Night Snapshots

— I met up with Liam and Paul at a bar called The Magician on Rivington Street. I had never been there before, but within 5 minutes it became one of my favorite joints in town. (New York is packed full of bars and clubs, but most of them suck. Or are so pretentious you can barely breathe.) The Magician is an enormous bar, but not alienatingly so. It’s candlelit, with a back room… the whole place has a white tile floor, a big neon clock, a polished dark wood bar, a gleaming mirror behind the bar, and film-noir-esque blinds on the windows. You walk in and step into another time (but it’s not pretentious, or like a movie set). It really looks like it’s from another time, when life was a bit slower, and you had a bit more room in life. Lydia joined us later, after she got off work. It’s always good to be with family, to see my family, to connect with them. The night was a real blessing, in that way. Especially because we had been planning this night for 2 months. How rare does that happen, in New York!!! You say, “Oh yeah, we really should do that, that sounds cool” and then you so rarely actually DO that. One of my New Year’s resolutions has been to actually DO the things that I say “Ooh, that would be cool” about. (Hence: the Hamilton exhibit, the Diane Arbus exhibit, making sure I saw The Gates, seeing Kathleen Turner in Virginia Woolf, etc. You see there’s a theme here, a method to my madness). So. The O’Malley cousins SAID we wanted to do this back at Liam’s birthday party … and whaddya know … there we were, following through. Sadly, my cousin Kerry could not join us – she was much missed.

— Doors at Bowery Ballroom opened at 8:30, so we hung out at The Magician for a couple of hours, drinking beer, catching up. Marveling at how much the city can change in a matter of days – suddenly it’s springtime weather, the days are a bit longer, and now the streets are clogged with people. You can feel it in the air, the change-over of seasons. We were on the Lower East Side, and there was a parade of Saturday-night traffic strolling by, people with jackets over their shoulders, wearing short skirts, flip-flops … a visible and tangible sense of freedom, release from the winter.

— Many funny stories told. Much laughter round the table.

— After the Queen show, we reconvened on the sidewalk outside the Ballroom, all blissed OUT. Just raving at each other, “Wasn’t it inCREDIBLE?” “God, that was SO. MUCH. FUN.” It was about midnight, so we wandered off in an easterly direction, deciding to have another drink somewhere. We didn’t know where. We didn’t care. There are so many bars down there, all you have to do is walk half a block and you have 6 choices. We ended up finding the funniest randomest place, and hanging out there for about an hour. It had no name – at least no signage, nothing that I could see. It was a hole in the wall. It was PACKED. I said to Lydia, “I have no idea where I am right now but this is great.” I can’t tell you what street it was on, nothing. We strolled by it, said, “This looks okay” and walked in. Music was blaring, there were ratty old 1950s style tables (not retro-chic either. These tables looked like they actually came out of somebody’s grandmother’s garage). Chrome and leather … big long red-leather seats, stuff pasted all over the walls (furry dice, old postcards … but everything very haphazard and ratty). We drank PBR out of the can (ha!) and played pinball. FUN. Just FUN. I need to figure out just where exactly that place was, because it would definitely be a fun place to re-visit. It was jam-packed, and loud – but not TOO packed, and not TOO loud.

And finally:

— At around 9:15 or so (earlier in the evening) we left to head to Bowery Ballroom to see the show. And on the way there, some information was passed onto us, which I would like to impart to you. Because: IT’S NOT TOO LATE. IT’S NEVER TOO LATE. We walked across Rivington (I love it down there, it’s so grimy, grafitti, huge padlocks on the grilles in front of shops, pitch-black brick walls, random pristine galleries, and teetery tenements … an odd mix). At one point, we passed a sex shop. None of us noticed it (because you just don’t notice those things in New York), but as we strolled by it, Liam noticed a large sign in the window which declared: IT’S ANAL APRIL. Liam stopped us when he saw the sign: “You guys! It’s Anal April!” Laughter … hahaha We all had to see the sign, because it was just so ridiculous. We kept walking, laughing about having a MONTH devoted to “Anal” – and having this be proclaimed with no shame in the window of some dingy sex shop on Rivington Street. I said, “It’s Anal April, huh? I better get on the stick!” which, naturally, ushered in a ton of other terrible puns. “I gotta get my ass in gear for Anal April!” “Bottoms up, everyone! It’s Anal April!” So, dear readers. Just in case you missed the announcement, just in case you didn’t see the full-page ad in the New York Times: Consider yourself enlightened now. You still have a good three weeks to fully celebrate Anal April.