back in new york, starting a rock band

Two weekends in a row in New York is always one too many–leaves me feeling anxious and bewildered, like I need to be hosed down and filled with leafy greens and put to bed in a quiet room for twenty hours to regain my equilibrium. In this way, Boston has made me soft.  Still, there are concert tickets burning a hole in my pocket and a lady scientist with a sublet deep in Brooklyn and we wander the streets of the city and drink enough beer to float away. We ride the train in the wrong direction and cover an enormously wide rage of conversational topics ranging from Ann Taylor pants (surprisingly awesome) to chronic mental illness to Leelee Sobieski’s boring-looking new cop show, which of course I am going to watch. The tomatoes on my poppy-seed bagel are delicious and shockingly red.

We’ve got shows every night, our own private festival: Drew Holcomb is lovely and the Head and the Heart busts my ribs right open, as always, although their opening acts are putrid and weirdly racist both and I edit in my brain to pass the time, shifting my weight in my uncomfortable new shoes. I yawn. Hunter Parrish sits down right beside me at Godspell and it takes takes every ounce of human restraint on my part not to poke him in the side. (“Did you poke him?” Jackie asks immediately, when I tell her over brunch.) We ride the Staten Island Ferry and eat guacamole at Rosa Mexicano, where there is a man sitting behind us with one of the best laughs I have ever heard. At Lincoln Center a little boy leans over the edge of the fountain, curious, his chubby starfish hands reaching forward. “Jacket or no?” we ask each other every morning, then invariably decide to go without.