Mae Mae's Visit

Donna Mae arrived in NYC Friday afternoon in time for us to take a wondrously warm-weather walk from Penn Station to Fish's Eddy in Union Square to the park a couple blocks down, where we sat for a good half hour to Lunasa for happy hour to Arrow for Bram's heavy metal DJ set... On Saturday we got to work on the domestic tasks in front of us—recrafting the apartment bedroom with a new carpet, hanging a giant B&W canvas view of Manhattan on the wall and streamlining the room in general. We were so damn dedicated, in fact, that we took no pictures. Can you imagine?

Next came a walk up Fulton Street Mall, on the other side of Brooklyn Heights, where I discovered a store named after you, my faithful cool cat visitors! Then it was on to Sid's Hardware to buy paint primer, back home and start the major project that I have been determined to accomplish: repainting the living room from the gold it's been for nearly nine years to a rich, regal gray.

First, Donna and I attacked another major project: replacing the carpet in the bedroom that once belonged to my great aunts in Virginia. At one point, I'm sure this antique oriental heirloom was worth a pretty penny, but at this point, it was about as ragged as your mammer's hairline. So tough love: forget Craigslist, etc. It simply went down to the trashroom, replaced with the fun, fab new rug that I bought online some three months ago that has been awaiting its bedroom debut.

Okay, so I'll admit it took us almost three hours to figure out how to maneuver the bed, the old carpet, the new carpet... and ultimately realize that by lifting the mattress and bed springs, we would have saved outselves a bit of time. Okay, bite me. I never claimed to be a physicist, ahem.

Next it was on to priming the living room walls, cool cats, to move past the gold walls I've had for the past nine years, to replace with a rich, regal gray. We bought the primer, carried those heavy mothers back and set about dividing the room into quadrants. We got a good 35% done, hurrah. We were damn impressed with ourselves.

Ooh, is it nighttime? Fabulous. Time to head to Tribeca for my former workmate L.B.'s going away party. He was once an intern at Billboard, got a degree in film at NYU's prestigious Tisch School (where Ayhan also graduated with his master's in musical composition), and he was so fucking smart, he was then hired fulltime at BB. Now, a couple years later, he's moving to L.A. on his own to pursue film-making.

Ayhan joined us at the Patriot—one block from where I lived in 1999-2000 with Francie and Debbie, and boy, the neighborhood has come to life in this past decade. There's actually shit to do there now, unlike when I lived there, when there was little more than upscale restaurants and low-scale dive retailers. Seems it's at last found a bit of a groove. So Ayhan, Donna and I had a good ole time, indeed.