The Face is Peculiar, But I Remember the Name

One of the things about living in a big city is that you walk around with a certain assumption that you are usually anonymous as you make your way through the city streets. The few occasions when I see someone I know randomly on the street are truly remarkable. I think I am probably a fairly average looking white guy on the street and therefore mostly forgettable. Forgettable that is, unless I happen to be walking the eskimo dog that likes to eat garbage. People remember him.

On Sunday night I was walking down 50th Street with my dog and some tourists came up to talk to me. They told me that they too had an eskimo dog, and oh by the way, could I recommend a pizza place in the neighborhood. I recommended Southside 49 a little place down the block that had recently opened. They said "Merry Christmas" and went on their way.

This morning I watching the dog carefully as we walked down 49th street. As if I don't have enough problems trying to keep him from eating chicken bones and pizza crusts off the street, now I have to keep him from eating the dirty snow that is piled up all over the city. I've also discovered that the ice melt stuff people throw on the sidewalk burns his little eskimo paws and he has zero threshhold for pain. While trying to keep an eye on the dog, my headed jerked up when I heard someone say, "hey, thanks for the recommendation on the pizza. It was delicious." My tourists had returned. So much for anonymity. I'm officially the guy in the neighborhood with the fluffy white dog.

God Says Break a Leg

One of the things I love about New York is the interesting and historic churches that are all over town. I gone to mass in at least 8 or 10 different churches since I've moved back and they're all interesting. The church I go to most often is just a block away from my apartment towards Times Square and the theater district. St. Malachy's is known as "the Actor's Chapel" since it counts the Broadway show people in its flock. I love the fact that they have services Saturday night at 11pm to work around the schedule of people who work in the theater. Every week we pray for out of work actors and support people.

Tonight I was walking up Eighth Avenue and I heard the chimes playing at St. Malachy's. I listened to try to make out the tune among all the different noises coming from the street. Was the church playing some traditional church tune? A Christmas Carol in honor of the season? No, the tune from the church tower was "There's No Business Like Show Business." As they say, only in New York.

Shakin' Hands with the Governor

I was invited by a friend to a Democratic Party holiday party earlier this week. I had a very strange conversation with a man from the Veteran's Affairs office in New Jersey who had had way too much holiday cheer and seemed to think I worked for the City Council. It was quite an eclectic crowd and full house due to a scheduled visit by our (very unpopular) "accidental" governor David Patterson. He made an appearance and made a few funny remarks. It occurred to me that I wish he wasn't universally viewed as ineffective and weak -- he's carrying a 79% disapproval rating these days -- because he is a genuinely humorous guy and I like him. It made me think about his remarks after Fred Armisen did his hilarious impression of him on Saturday Night Live which portrayed him as a drug user who stumbles all over the set. The governor, who is legally blind, was highly critical of the sketch, because he considered it demeaning to the visually impaired. I am certain, as the governor of one of the biggest state's in the country, he needed to take that stand publicly, but something tells me that behind closed doors he had to be laughing, at least a little bit.


As it turns out the funniest remark of the night at the party belonged to councilman John Liu who was just elected Comptroller and is the first Asian to hold a citywide office in New York City. After he was introduced as such, he said, "I don't know what the big deal is. I've been Asian my whole life."

A Little Off the Top

I've written before about my barber shop in Greenwich Village. It's a fantastic throwback with bad 1970s paneling on the wall and three barbers who look like they're frozen in time. When I go into the shop, I just sit down in the chair of whichever barber is free, although I really prefer the haircut that the guy in the first chair gives me. The last time I was in the shop, I got the guy in the third chair and wasn't really pleased with the results. I've decided that you need to be wary of a barber with a bad hairstyle. This guy is largely bald but the hair that he does have is dyed a weird shade of red -- in fact, his skin on his head seems to be the same shade of reddish orange. He looks a little like something put together by a police sketch artist. He seems like a perfectly agreeable gent though.

Today, I lucked out and got first chair. As always, the place was buzzing with activity on a Saturday afternoon, Italian music blared the radio and the guys chattered to each other in Italian. After I sat down in my chair, an older man wandered in and sat in chair #2 -- he also was chattering in Italian. Then an interesting exchange occurred during which I understood two things:

Barber 1: Italian chatter
Barber 2: More chatter
Patron 2: Cheerful chatter
Barber 2: Increasingly emphatic chatter
Barber 1: [Italian] ... "You're wrong!" ... [Italian]
Patron 2: [Italian] ... "Tiger Woods!" ... [Italian] ... then much laughter by everyone, except me.

I got my haircut and then went home and took a nap. Interestingly, when I woke up my hair appeared to be much shorter than I remembered before I took my nap. I think I was too busy trying to decipher what was going on to pay attention to my haircut. Nevertheless, you gotta love chair #1.