Two Years ...Two Posts

Happy V-day blah blah ... I'm sorta boycotting. Who is down for drinks against love after work? lol.. Kidding. Today marks my two year anniversary of blogging, so I thought why not put up two posts. (Two years on Xanga, less than a year on blooger if you were wondering). So here it goes:




From Sexy Beds to Snow Beds

“Can you be my date?” Marj pleaded with me.
Thursday night I got home at nearly 1:30am from a talent party, only to lack sleep because of an unrelenting adrenaline rush. It was now Friday morning, I was on five hours of sleep, and my best friend was asking me to do it all over again.
“Since when do you go clubbing?” I asked. She explained it was her friend’s birthday and without Erick around, she was unmotivated. Marj rarely asks for favors so, with my eyes ready to close, I conceded.
By 10:30p.m. I was decked out and ready to hit up Duvet. Within thirty minutes I had picked her up, drove into the city, found parking a block away from the club (unheard of in NYC) and joined the long line outside. It was cold, but we looked cute and the door dude noticed. He walked straight up to us, even though there were plenty of girl groups on the line.
“You ladies can come with me,” he said. Damn, my cream colored coat really is magic! Within moments we were inside, astonished at how easy it had been.
We joined the crew of Marj’s girlfriends inside who laid lavishly across a large bed. At Duvet, for the (outrageous) price of a Grey Goose bottle, you get a huge bed for you and your friends to take naps on in between dance sessions. I began to wonder if, at all, they change the sheets, but cancelled that thought with a swig of my Amstel Light. At midnight the DJs switched, and the new one plugged in his Apple laptop and got to work. Itunes is cool and all, but I’m beginning to miss scratch DJs. The place was suddenly so packed that I felt blessed to not only have a place to sit, but a place to rest and wrap up with a blankie.
Club/fashion photographer, The R, snapped a few pics of me and the girls:
(check out his site at www.daytonite.com)




Velvetlist found us too:




Then there was my own camera:




No hunny, the camera is that way.

That's better.

As always we danced until the wee hours of the morning and hit up White Castle at nearly 4am. Those burgers will be the death of me.

Saturday, what I thought would be a day leading into a night in the city with Anthony, turned out to be a day of oncoming wrath via mother nature. When the snow began to fall @ 4pm I called China Grill and cancelled my reservation. So sad, I had been dreaming of their fried rice since tasting it in Vegas. At home, I was left alone for the evening, watching the snow fall and still believing it wouldn’t be that bad. I became dreary by midnight and fell out to dreams of a psycho Napoleon Dynamite look-alike. When I awoke the world outside my window seemed rather bright. That was because everything outside was covered in more than a foot of whiteness.
“Holy snowy shit!”
I couldn’t believe how much snow had accumulate and how much snow was still coming down. It was 11am when I woke up. It took me four hours to convince myself that it was time to head to my mom’s where I was expected to shovel. There are pros and cons to living around the block from your mom, this was an obvious con. As I prepared myself for the blizzard of ‘06, I wondered where were all the little kids who used to come around the neighborhood and charge to shovel your driveway. Oh right, those were the smart kids who moved far away from home when they were of age. Nice one, Elle!
As I trudged through two feet of snow down my mom’s block, I saw what looked like a scene out of the movie Day After Tomorrow. Mountains of piled snow littered the sidewalk and street. Dozens of people were out shoveling, snow blowing, chatting and getting wind-whipped by snow gusts. I approached my mom’s house and was at first taken aback by the fact that she had not removed an ounce of snow from its fallen spot. The white stuff was piled so high up her front stoop and door that I nearly had to swim my way up to the door bell. I was instantly relieved to see that my neighbor had a snow blower I hoped to borrow. I was then immediately reminded that he was an asshole who knew my mom lived by herself and, even with an effortless machine like a snow blower, would still carve into the snow only up to the line that separated our houses. Bastard!
I grabbed a shovel, and with some help from my mom’s other NICE neighbor, dug out my mom’s car, walkway, steps and sidewalk. This would hurt me later, I was sure. After an hour I was finally done, but not without taking a picture in the fluffy stuff:



Snow can be fun, but not when you’re the one shoveling 100 pounds of it. Goodbye winter?

The NYC Battleground

Snow is always beautiful when it’s falling, even after it’s laid on the ground for a few hours…but never when it becomes slush. NYC becomes the capitol of slush after a snowstorm like the one we experienced this weekend. When I left my apartment in Staten Island this morning, I was fully aware that trying to wear business attire would not be conducive to the environment I would find myself trekking through. I had thrown on jeans and my spaceman boots, blessed myself with hopes that this would not be a gross or dangerous journey, and went on my merry way. The trip was neither clean nor accident free.
Within moments of stepping onto the street , I got sprayed with slush by a passing cab, and nearly swept off the road I was walking on by an oncoming car, because the sidewalks are non-existent. Oddly enough I caught an early bus and was at work with fifteen minutes to spare. The day was intense with travel issues and party list breakdowns. I was tired and looked forward to getting home early…Until I was asked to work a movie premiere. Run around for a few hours, get paid overtime and a free limo service home? Sure, why the hell not.
What began as a chase after cabs, became a walk from midtown east to uptown west. Every cab had someone in it, and the one cab that didn’t nearly took out my coworker who reached to open the cab door…while the cab ignored her and continued to drive past. By the time we reached Central Park West we said to hell with it and kept walking. We played a game of land or lake with each crossing of the street. Land meant we could cross safely because there was no slush. Lake meant what looked like ground was actually slush and needed to be avoided at all costs, or else you would wind up, up to your ankles in cold, icy, dirty water.
Making it to the red carpet much sooner than we had if we had jumped in the crazy cab, we linked up with our teammates and received our instructions. I was to be the runner, i.e. the person who would run tickets to the red carpet from the will-call station. What I thought might be a glamorous attempt to end up in the background photos that would appear in Entertainment Weekly, turned out to be a dangerous game of a) run and risk a slip, or b) walk slow and risk Bruce Willis being hassled for a seat ticket. I went for option A. Yes, I saw Bruce, Halle Berry, and Eddie Falco, but it was all momentary and without personal interaction. I also chased Star Jones up an escalator because she too had not sent someone to get her tickets. Couldn’t they just preload the seats with pictures of the famous people who would be sitting in them? From my walkie talkie busted announcements like, “Bruce Willis has arrived”, “Bruce Willis is coming out of the car”, “Bruce Willis is on the red carpet”. I thought they were even going to tell me when he was in the bathroom. They didn’t, and although I’m sure Bruce has fine hygiene habits, I was glad not to know the details.
Within a little more than an hour, we had ushered everyone inside and were able to call it quits. My co-worker found it only right that we have dinner and expense it. Sure thing…except the only eateries surrounding us would cost $50 a head. We just wanted pizza, and this was NYC, there were pizzerias on every corner…right? WRONG! We walked in what was probably a pointless semi-circle about to give up on our pizza mission when a dude walking beside us asked where we were trying to go. We were iffy about him, as every New Yorker is with every other New Yorker, but we mentioned pizza. He rattled off where to go and not to go, waved us goodbye and walked in an opposite direction. He was nice, that was rare. We chowed down on what I felt was the best scillian pizza ever, or maybe I was just that hungry. We topped it off with some Zeppoles, and called for our car service. Three cars and of course mine was the only one to miss the mark, parking on the opposite side of the street where I didn’t see him. When I was finally in the car, I kicked back and thought “I could really get used to this”.