I Heart New York and New Year's

It took awhile before I got to see this sign last Friday. Fearful of missing my extremely early flight (yup, it's been done a time or two), I got a hotel room the night before near the DFW airport. Simple no? Nope. Mr. Motel Nazi was 30 minutes late with my wake-up call and then I nearly missed the shuttle. Alas, all was well as I boarded the plane, turned on the iPod, closed my eyes and woke up in Washington, DC at 10:15 a.m. All's well now? Nope. Merv was an hour from the airport in a loaner car. Don't even ask why she was in a loaner when her brand new car was only a week old, but it'll suffice to say the new car went berserk and she thought she'd rather put the miles on a loaner. We thought all the travel ghoulies were behind us, but apparently they lived on the NJ turnpike, where we crept along at all of 5 mph for what seemed an hour. It turns out a car had spontaneously combusted Spinal Tap-style and the lookie-loos had never seen anything like that. But back to the story: once we saw the city lights of NY my toes were a-tingling. Until......WTF? Searching cars at the Holland Tunnel!?!?!? We had 15 minutes to get to The Bitter End and I wasn't yet wearing my slammin' outfit I'd carefully chosen. Hey, a girl's gotta look good, right? So at a dead stop in traffic, CruiserMel hopped in the backseat, pulled the seat down and crawled into the trunk. (Did I mention my alter ego is McGyver?) Right there in non-tinted windows with headlights all around, I stripped, flashed a bit of nip hopefully to some lonely guy's pleasure or some housewife's horror, changed my clothes and shoes and spritzed on some perfume. We'd moved 3 feet since my quick-change began. It was 6:45 and we were finally moving through the tunnel. The show was general admission and there would be hell to pay if I didn't walk through the doors when they opened at 7:00. At 7:01, we were inside! I did a little whoring-up in the bathroom and a quick brushing of teeth later, I was sippin' a cocktail on the first row. We so totally rawk, Merv.
Nice knees, Kas. The show was a complete pleasure. Kasim (and his cohort, Doug) were awesome. Was there any question? We visited after the show and he signed my 1978 Utopia poster. He said something about them spelling his name correctly on the poster or maybe it was something about world hunger after that. The blood was rushing to my feet at this point so I can't recall what was said. Sorry. All I know is that some time after that he was sitting next to me at what NY calls a Mexican restaurant. I remember feeling his leg against mine. As I was having an out-of-body experience at the time, I get a little fuzzy about what happened next, but pictures exist so I know it actually happened. I do recall that he was his usual charming self and Merv tells me she was proud of how cool I was. Here is a picture of us to prove it really happened. Yeah, we rawk. I'm the one with red, er reddish, hair on the left, btw.
We left there and drove to Queens to stay with some friends of Merv's. Queens living in Queens; you can't make this stuff up, people. Actually, their place was lovely, their dog Mimi was so cute she almost got dognapped, they put us up in a great bedroom and they even fixed us a breakfast the next day to rival IHOP. M even threw in his best Flo impression for effect. "Kiss ma grits."

That afternoon, Merv & I took the subway with no incident to Grand Central where we had a quick cocktail at the bar overlooking the main lobby. It was gorgeous. Cute bartenders, too. Why is it I can meet eastern European men wherever I go? I totally rawk.We tore ourselves away and walked to Ground Zero. Wow. Just wow. Nothing more to say about that, except our advice is to go. Just go.

We set out to walk from Ground Zero up to where we had planned on meeting M & L & their friend G for dinner. We grabbed our map and set out to blaze a path that would include some window shopping and general people-watching. Being women of a certain age, we sometimes need a little help reading fine print. Neither of us had our reading glasses, so we had to rely on the kindness of strangers to help us read that dang map. We are both college educated and can certainly read a map, but not when it may as well be printed on the head of a pin! Luckily we got there just in the nick, and had a fantabulous Greek dinner, complete with "tall food" which Merv happens to love. Here we have something called Tuna Tartare. I wasn't touchin' it. But Merv rawks.After dinner and Patron shots we made a stop at what may be the only gay sports bar in North America. It was depressing. Beautiful men all around and not a one interested in either of us. First the reading glasses and now this??? Seeing our discomfort, M & L drove us home to their place, accompanied by the most interesting conversation regarding penis color and degree of bentness ever heard by these ears. Honey, you ain't lived 'til you've heard queens talking about penises! We crashed out awhile later and woke to a sunny, beautiful day to drive from NYC down to West Virginia where Merv lives. We saw this on the road home: This just struck us funny. AND I felt like a complete NYPD detective sneaking this picture.

We arrived in WV in time to see Merv put away an entire 750 ml of Absolut Citron while I think I made quite alot of bourbon disappear. We popped some champagne at some point. She IM'd with potential mates while I enjoyed dancing solo on her hardwood floors in my slippers. We watched Dick Clark and Ryan Secrest (OUT!) ring in 2007, pawed at the TV screen when Kasim was seen backing up Meat Loaf in California (no he doesn't time travel from NY to California - it was prerecorded), called our friend E in Philly and yelled into the cell phone on speaker for a couple of hours and somehow each ended up staying up until 4:00 (or was it 5:00?). I'm not sure how I got up the stairs to her guest room, but it involved some crawling, I'm sure. Though she'll probably kill me, here's a pic I snapped sometime during the call with E. That's what cha call wasted, kiddies. Learn from the pros.The next day we played the Soundtrack to my Life game using her iPod and she somehow drove me to the airport through beet-red eyes.

By midnight I was home. And sick. My voice is so screwed up that my sneezes sound like the horn on an 18 wheeler or a very warped goose. This isn't pretty. Good thing I don't have to see you-know-who until the end of January. Heh.

Awright - git on outta here. Quit being so impressed with my ability to post pictures, huh?