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Avoidance
(Today, it comes in the form of Crowd Faces.)
Doesn’t he seem like a Stefano?
This is Julie, and she’s a little shy.
I think Mike just relieved himself a little.
Mary doesn’t like this.
Lisa’s never seen a man dunked in the water so many times.
Gary has.
The way he was watching everybody, I think Harold might be a cop.
Joe drives in business to the dunking booth with the. power. of. his. eyes. (Don’t look.)
Amy eats her gelato in a hurry.
Ray is really bored at work.
Dave had that smile surgically implanted.
And the Redrum Crew seemed very polite.
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A Somewhat Eventful Evening
Yesterday was interesting.
9:00 am Work
12:00 Still working
1:00 Post office: FUN!
2:00 Lunch at my desk
3:00 More of this working stuff
5:30 Duane Reade (where, apparently, I stood behind the Top Chef winner, who is a chatty fellow with many prescriptions in his life. Poor guy. But a happy guy, definitely. Jazzed about something in Vegas, so if you care about Top Chef, watch out: something in Vegas is coming.)
6:00 Watching Gilmore Girls rerun with Eric’s sister, Karen, who’s visiting New York this week
7:00 En route to San Gennaro
7:20 Meandering through Mulberry. Mini-lesson: This thing only makes sense if you attended as a kid. Pina coladas, margaritas, Tom’s BBQ, and techno-for-sale hardly make sense for Celebrating Italian Church Culture. Which explains why Eric and Karen kept making those faces at me.
8:00 Dinner outside at Da Gennaro
9:15 More meandering, and a game of cheat-your-ass Feast basketball, which netted Karen a stuffed blue monkey. No jokes, please. I exhausted them all last night.
9:30 Train to Astor
9:38 Walk to 1st and 11th: Veniero’s*
(*Why pay $5.00 for a crappy cannoli, when a delicious, cheaper one is available twenty blocks north?)
10:30 Still sipping cappuccino at Veniero’s, home of the slowest service known to man
10:40 Walking home, we can really see the Towers of Light; it was too foggy from downtown.
10:50 Home again, home again
11:08 Karen negotiates with Continental to rearrange her Ike-deflected flight. No dice. She departs for her friend’s apartment.
12:00 Decompression: watching an old Friends. But, what’s this, now? I’m not feeling so great. BURRRRP.
1:00 Same
2:00 Same
2:05 Attempt to go to bed. Same.
2:25 We hear the crinkling of metal and plastic and rubber on metal and plastic and rubber. Wait five seconds. The scaffolding at the corner of 17th and Union Square East comes tumbling down. Metal on metal on metal on wood on metal on concrete. It was nice and clangy for 2:00 am.
2:26 I’m feeling worse now, visibly shaking, partly thanks to the stomach, partly to my accident panic. (I don’t like car accidents. I know: who does? I really don’t like them. It was kind of like I just crashed. I was worried about the people down there like they’re my cousins.)
2:28 First responders: undercover cops in a silver Malibu
2:31 Ambulance, fire engine, police emergency unit, another ambulance, and so on, until eleven emergency vehicles arrive, lights blaring, engines roaring, sirens wailing. I’m glad we were already up.
2:37 HUGE crowd gathering on the street, those affected and not. A group of baby thugs run out from the shadows of Union Square park to scream and jump and peer into the cab caught beneath fallen scaffolding.
2:38 A fight breaks out, can’t tell between who or why.
2:40 NYPD shoos everyone away
2:41 Recovery is under way. Treatment of a girl who appears to have been hit, and removal of those trapped inside the cab on the sidewalk.
2:45 The cabbie from the other half of the accident stands around. Scant damage to his vehicle, none to him.
2:58 The sixth episode of Jessica’s Bathroom Fun since 2:00. (Who wants to read that in between all the action above? Not I, said the hen.)
3:30 Clean-up ongoing
3:50 Crowd dwindling
3:55 Stomach has drafted the entire corpus into rebellion
4:00 We close the window and attempt to “sleep”
5:00 I shake my fist at the sheep I’ve been trying to count for the last hour. Check the window to find two remaining police cars and the poor other-cabbie, who’s been there all night.
5:30ish SLEEP
6:00 Hello, stomach!
6:10 SLEEP
7:00 You again?
7:30 SLEEP
9:07 Time to wake up! late! for work! Hello, Friday!
9:07 Scaffolding crew on-site to rebuild; already on break
THURSDAY SUMMARY: not a lot of work done, lots of street fair mostly enjoyed, lots of wee-hours street drama, lots of body rebellion, and not a lot of sleep had
LESSONS: do not eat the garlic sauce at Da Gennaro. Or the calamari. Also, maybe don’t drink the cappuccino at 11:00.
