home sweet home, pt. 2

i really had a good time hanging out with my friend (also one of my former employers) at the guggenheim. it was really great to see her. the last time i saw her, this past april, she was really unsure of her decision to leave chicago. but, she looks happier now and she has a lovely apartment and her work prospects are very promising. after spending some time with her, i became more and more disappointed that i hadn't made more of an attempt to see more friends of mine now living in nyc... i just knew i'd want to spend more time with them than we had... :(

anyway... after an hour or two, we met up with the thin man back at the steps of metropolitan. it must've been around 4:30. we had to get back to the hotel because i had bought tickets for us to watch the harlem renaissance orchestra which was playing at lincoln center's midsummer night swing. we wanted to freshen up and eat dinner somewhere before dancing.

btw - we still had not eaten anything since breakfast... and we were running on fumes... we took the subway back to times square and made it back to the hotel in one piece but the tell tale signs were there - headache, backache, nausea, exhaustion, seeing spots... i knew that if i didn't eat something soon, that our evening might be ruined.

we barely made it out of the hotel. i was feeling like i was going to faint inside the cab. then, when we finally got to lincoln center, i was upright while we got our tickets at will call. fearing the worst, we stopped into the tgi fridays or bennigans or whatever the chain restaurant is across the street from lincoln center to eat dinner (don't. tell. metrodad). where i ate enough of what they were passing as fish and chips to regain some semblance of myself. by the time, the bill came, i wasn't feeling faint or nauseous anymore. it looked like i was on the road to recovery. yay! :) so, we walked back to lincoln center and after a thorough security search of my (grocery) bag of (two) dance shoes, we were listening and dancing to some fine swing tuneage!

THEN! then, a guy who didn't look familiar to me says, "aren't you *insert mamazilla's real name here*? didn't you teach lindyhop at the doghouse in san francisco with jason?" my mouth just about dropped because that's who i was and am - i was sure this was some weird swing dancing punk'd reality show... he went on to re-introduce himself and said that he had taken lessons with us years and years ago. we had some great catch-up conversations and a great dance afterwards.

AND THEN! then, as i was watching the band and the dancers, i saw another acquaintance/friend of ours from san francisco, mark kapner, founder of swing out new hampshire, doing the same thing! so, i walked over there to say hi and he said, that he was just talking about me to another dancer about a notorious disagreement that occurred between me and some dance teachers at another camp a whiiiiiiile ago. honestly, i can't believe some people are still talking about that... so, we had a laugh and caught up and danced a bit too...finally, it was time to pack it up and go... (in that picture below, see those two HUGE banners in the back of dancers - those dancers were actually moving in slooooooow motion. it was tres kewl.)

all in all, it was a beautiful night and i didn't want it to end and although we were both exhausted, we decided to walk back to the hotel. well, first we walked by the closest duane reade to pick up two more souvenirs - one for the porkchop and the other for the lovely commenter, alice. :) i don't know what we were thinking... maybe it was dancing with each other and listening to the fantastic live music or the hilarious people watching and of course, the special surprise reunions, yada yada yada... the city was totally awake and calling to us to stay up and up and up... :)

the more that i think about our walk back to the hotel and our trip and even the relationship/marriage between the thin man and myself.... the more it reminds me of a quote in this lileks.com post:

"....I expect it’s one thing to be a hard-core spinster who’s forged an individual path from day one and has a hard shell, a gimlet eye, and a perspective on human relations as vaulable as a film critic's assessment of cinema. (He's never slapped a reel o film in a camera, but he knows the difference between Citizen Kane and Porky's IV.) It's different to be be a 60-something who just shed Hubby the Dull and exults in the chance to attend an exhibit on Salvadoran Textiles without the glum red-hot resentment that follows from knowing your husband doesn’t care about Salvadoran textile exhibits, never did, never will, and doesn’t get why you like them. It’s a consequence of the triumph or Romantic Love, I suppose; if you don’t mesh at the elemental level, something’s wrong. The notion of simply inhabiting the same road as you move towards the horizon isn’t enough; you must both be fascinated by the same things. I prefer the model where one person is interested in the flowers that grow by the road, and the other discourses on the history of pavement, and you both speculate on the birds in the boughs above. But that’s just me. (Or rather us.) I’m sure marriages built around interests intensely shared work just as well. It all depends on what you put it into it, to state the obvious. It’s like a fireplace: you can let it go out, or you can add wood. Ahem."

i have to admit i can imagine a life without the thin man ('cause deep down, my roots are morbid and goth like that) but it would be a truly sad, lonely, agonizingly long life.... in the ten years we've known each other, we have foisted a handful of relationship boulders on each other like quarrelling giants. often, we drive each other completely bonkers, attempt murder with eye-rolling and silent treatments (of doom!) and then almost immediately, we raise a tattered white flag, toss each other the antibacterial ointment and the nemo band-aids in an effort to bring things back to "normal".

hopefully, despite our combined neuroses, years (!) from now, when we visit manhattan again, we'll still be walking down that same busy street - he'll be the one continuing the tradition of his bad joke telling tribe and spouting random trivia and i'll be the one soaking in the life and vibrancy of the city, watching a young couple sharing a good night kiss, maybe even a first kiss, under an orange streetlight, as the firetrucks go roaring by.