Third Visitors OR What The Halal?

Today's post is our first "guest blogger" contribution.

Barb has been a friend of ours for over 35 years.

I will be back with more soon.

And now from Barb:

A couple of months ago I booked a trip to New York to attend a conference, present a case study, serve on a technology panel, and head back home. In the meantime, Bill and Toni were making their way out East with plans of finding the perfect apartment for their year in NYC. Knowing that they would be in New York made for a nice opportunity to visit but then it got even better. With a touch of serendipity, the Laverys found their perfect apartment at the corner of 53rd and 7th which just so happened to be directly across the street from the hotel I had booked. This made for a very different New York experience than I had ever had in the past.

The first night I was there, Bill had arranged some VIP tickets to see David Letterman. I knew I would like it but I had no idea just how much I would like it. First of all, being in the Ed Sullivan Theatre is an honor all by itself. I could close my eyes and see the Beatles on stage, complete with “sorry girls, he’s married” displayed on the monitors when the camera is on John. The energy of all those screaming girls is still there. While you wait to enter the Letterman show, cheerleaders rally the crowd to get everyone ready to laugh and cheer at all the right moments during the show. You get all the appropriate warnings about no pictures, no whistling, no groaning, and the most serious threat of all, if you don’t laugh really hard, Dave will revisit the script with his writers during commercial break and save his “good stuff” for another night. Once you are appropriately energized, they let you in … and then, SO VERY COOL. Paul Shaffer’s band totally rocked, Ashton Kutcher was a very entertaining guest, Dave was on his game, and I don’t think I stopped grinning through the whole thing. There was also a weird magician but he’s not worthy of a lot of blog attention.

Barb secretly snapped this elicit photo on our way out. Cameras are strictly forbidden.


As you can imagine, with that being the start of my week with the Laverys, the Letterman Show was going to be a tough act to follow. But we tried…and we did a pretty good job. There was the wonderful Indian food in Hell’s Kitchen where we stuffed ourselves and hurried home to watch the season finale of Modern Family. Then there were all the New York firsts for me…drinking wine at Bill and Toni’s dining room table, doing laundry with Toni in their building, watching TV and just living like a resident. I would finish my workday, drop my stuff in my hotel room and wander across the street to have a friendly doorman open the door and welcome me into their building. He was just like Carlton the Doorman except you could see him.

When the weekend rolled around, my husband, Kent, came to join in the fun along with a couple of other friends that happened to be coming to NYC for the weekend. The six of us made it our mission to cover the town and we did not miss much.

Friday afternoon I had my last presentation at the conference, which ended at 5:30 or so. With the freedom of knowing that work was over the week, it was time to get serious about this whole New York thing. Our group hiked over to Lexington Avenue and caught a bus and it was no time at all before we were enjoying a delicious dinner in Chinatown. We followed that up with a stroll through Little Italy. It was a beautiful night and we took advantage of that by eating desserts in a “backyard garden” that did not entirely seem to be in a backyard. But the atmosphere was lovely…I don’t know if it was the healthy pours of Grandpa Cha Cha’s red wine or the accordion player that did the hard sell for a tip by refusing to leave the table until his needs were met.

On Saturday, we saw many of the sights from a cruise ship on a three-hour tour, yes, a three-hour tour around the island. This was a fun way to orient ourselves and see a lot of points of interest that we didn’t plan to see up close. Once we left the ship, we covered a lot of ground seeing everything from Battery Park and a distant view of Ground Zero to dinner at Jerry’s Café in Soho ending our evening on a bar stool in the very, very crowded Marie’s Crisis Café in Greenwich Village listening to Broadway caliber piano bar sing-alongs. Stories from Marie’s could make an entire blog entry all its own.

On Sunday, Kent and I made our way to our favorite breakfast spot, Moonstruck, and enjoyed a tasty meal then strolled down 5th avenue before heading over to Broadway to find the obligatory I heart NYC t-shirts for our grandchildren. We met up with our cohorts and Bill and Toni treated us to a cultural delight at the MoMA where we ooed and ahhed over the expansive Abstract Expressionist collections. A performance art exhibit was in progress and it looked a lot like the childhood game where two people stare at each other and see who blinks first. I always blinked.

Before we could head back home, there was still one more “must do.” The Halal cart. Now this is not just any Halal cart, but the one with the long line and yellow bags; the good one. We walked over to the cart on 6th avenue, across from the Hilton, and committed to the long line. We had to. It was the good cart….or was it? Bill’s keen eye spied that there were no yellow bags on this cart. The cart across the street, however, was sporting yellow bags. Nice save, Bill. We darted across the street where there was no waiting, as the imposters had fooled all the others who stayed in the long line, and we ordered our meals. Again, enjoying the benefits of having friends who live down the street, we took our savory treat back to Toni and Bill’s place and ate our $3 meals in comfort.

Thanks Toni and Bill for asking me to be a guest blogger, but thanks so much more for opening your home to us and letting me experience New York as a resident….or should I say a Townie.