Rock & Roll

All week long, mountains of A/V equipment piled up on the sidewalk behind the Beacon Theater near my apartment. In addition, lanes on both sides of Amsterdam Avenue and on the south side of W. 75th Street were blocked off for trucks and trailers. All this was for some Rolling Stones concert that filmed there one night.

Mostly, all the hooha annoyed the crap out of me by constricting the flow of traffic, but as I rushed to the subway on Wednesday evening, I noticed that 75th Street was entirely closed for vehicular use. However, a man was removing a blue barricade as a green Caddy with yellow curtains shielding the backseat (!) approached. Either it was the strangest hearse ever, or there was someone famous inside, so I loitered for a few minutes on the corner, peering down the street. Sure enough, a very thin person with longish brown hair emerged from the car when it pulled curbside and then disappeared into the stage door. I’m 99% sure I caught of glimpse of a walking corpse. Scary! No! It was Mick Jagger himself! Rockin’!

Yesterday morning, I accompanied Dr. P on a trip to DC, where she is interviewed for an ass doctor position at a local hospital. I plead temporary insanity, as I agreed that it was a good idea to take save $60 each and take Greyhound, rather than Amtrak. (I figured that although Amtrak is much more comfortable than the bus, it often is delayed too.) Of course, the bus left NYC 30 minutes late, then made a 25 minute pit stop along the way, then hit nasty DC rush hour traffic, so a full 30 minutes after we were scheduled to arrive in DC, we had only arrived at the prior stop in Maryland. Fortunately, it was the last stop of a Metro line, so we hopped off the bus and onto the subway, and were at our hotel a half hour later as opposed to at the Greyhound bus station at that point. Rolling!

After we checked into our hotel, we met up with the ever delightful Tessa for some free bluegrass music at the Kennedy Center. There was also some sort of Halloween family night at the symphony, as people of all ages kept arriving in mostly clever Halloween costumes. Fun! Then we headed over to Georgetown to meet a friend of mine from high school who I literally had not seen since we graduated in June 1994.

Our mystery dinner guest (Tessa said she felt like we were going on a blind date) looked a bit taller and skinnier, but was very nice and we had fun. (I am always pleased when people of that area randomly reach out to me to say hi, which he did this summer after seeing a little clip about outspoken bloggers (moi) and their employers in The Washington Post, as some of my actions were less than the usual unbalanced ones of angsty teens.) After dinner, we politely walked him to his car in DuPont Circle (Dr. P, Tessa, and I are very gallant as a blind date trio), and then we headed over to a bar with fun Latin music. Before we were driven out by the smoky conditions (DC is a savage town with no smoking ban!), I drank almost a full plastic 8 ounce cup of amaretto sour - light on the amaretto, heavy on the sour, just how lushes like me prefer it.

Dr. P and I are roadtripping it back this afternoon with Tessa on what she calls “some back roads.” Very fun. Go me and my rock & roll week.