Melina's Evening in the City

Hi everybody, Melina here. Ma is traveling and studying in a foreign land, so this blog's going to be more me for the next couple weeks. I hope that's okay. Anyway, you'll learn more about how the New York office of Pratie Place conducts its daily life.

First event last night was that I had an e-date. Well, a real-life date with an e-person. No, that's not quite right either. Anyway, this person, El Vocabulario, impressed me with both his humorous responses to several questions on the online questionnaire, and his casual use of good vocabulary.

The date was good, as usual, but, also as usual, lacking in serendipity. I don't know if I am just too picky or if I am incapable of meeting anyone this way and taking it seriously. Or maybe he wasn't nutty enough. I have a soft spot for crazy dudes. Anyway, he was a nice, funny, mellow guy, with an excellent vocabulary, and if he wants to go out again, I'd be fine with it, but if he doesn't, I don't care in the slightest.

During this date, I felt my cell phone vibrating a number of times, as all the rest of my friends worked to make plans at the very last minute, which drives me crazy. The only way to make this work is if you either pick up the phone during a date, which is an awful thing, or if you just allow everything to happen by chance. I hate both of these methods.

Luckily, everybody I knew happened to be within ten blocks of each other. I met up with my high school friend Frankie V. and her beloved and dragged them over to a bar where my other high school friend Cat and her posse from work/college were celebrating somebody's birthday with great enthusiasm. The birthday girl had selected a bar that reminded me a fair bit of hell, or at least East Germany. It was in a basement room. Super hot and crowded, no air conditioning. Smell was bad. What would amaze my mother the most about this bar was that half of it was empty - but they were keeping it empty ON PURPOSE so that the other half would be more crowded. This was seen as a good thing. People who needed a break from the moshing, or a smoke, had to stand corraled together at the bottom of the basement steps, behind a concrete wall, because the bouncer did not allow anyone to loiter on the sidewalk. Frankie V and I wondered if we could jump over this wall and make a run for it, but her beloved thought that we maybe would get shot and we shouldn't risk it.

And people do this for fun.

Anyway, I was about to leave, when who did I run into but my professional colleague Machiavelli and four of his own friends, who were loping down the street at great speed, and ingesting various substances also at great speed. Before this moment, I had never even seen Machiavelli without a suit and tie, so I was very pleased to meet up with him and his entourage

We went back to this same stupid East Berlin bar for a while, then moved on to the original Coyote Ugly bar, notable for its wall decorations of hundreds and hundreds of bras. Also, the bartenders sometimes do country line dances on the bar, which isn't quite as sexy as it sounds, and it's certainly not serendipitous, but okay, it's still pretty sexy. Here we remained until last call (4:00 AM).

Then we went across the street, where there was a big party bus parked (imagine a standard communter bus with disco lights and an open bar) that had been rented for a bachelorette party. There were games inside like "pin the manhood on the man" and other various manhood-shaped objects. We invited ourselves onto this bus and partied briefly until the bachelorette and her entourage returned and the driver kicked us off.

Then we stood on the sidewalk until 5 AM with a bunch of random strangers who had also gotten kicked off the bachelorette bus by the peevish bachelorette.

THen it was dawn, and I went home.