Saturday, April 09, 2005

“I don’t want to, I want to stay here and annoy you.”

The Movie: New York, New York, 1977 (Earl Mac Rauch and Mardik Martin, screenwriters; Martin Scorsese, dir.)
Who says it: Robert DeNiro as jazzman Jimmy Doyle
The context: Jimmy chats up Francine (Liza Minnelli), a girl singer, until she tells him to go away.
How to use it: Aggressive flirtation with your crush object – always recognizing the fine line between persistence and stalking, of course.

New York, New York, it's a hell of a town. I stayed overnight with the hilarious Meredith McLaughlin and Michael Driscoll, one of my favorite married couples. In the cab downtown last night, Michael said, "See, this is why you get married: so you can drive each other crazy for the rest of your lives." It looks like fun when the Driscolls do it.

They live in a fifth-floor (walkup) railroad apartment on the Upper East Side. "Why do they call them railroad apartments?" I asked Meredith yesterday. "Because the rooms are lined up in a row, like a boxcar," she said.

Elaine's is their neighborhood bar, so we stopped for a cocktail before dinner and discussed today's royal wedding with the bartender. Neither she nor Meredith understood my need for that ASDA ring, so I was glad to see Sue's comment about it the other day. I'd hate to think I was the only one.

Dinner, at a biergarten on the Lower East Side, was one of those events that is already passing into legend: a birthday gathering for our friend Maeve where we almost had to mug our waitress just to get a drink. This is not how we celebrate Maeve's birthday... today's mission, obviously, is to make up for that experience.

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