Something I've Lost

"Really, Gina?" Chris said, interrupting our club meeting to call me out on the two-liter Sprite bottle I had just pulled from my purse and began drinking.

I'd had a huge crush on Chris Smith since freshman year, and this was the most he had spoken to me yet. And it was about my two-liter Sprite bottle.

"Oh,  it's not Sprite, it's filled with water," I said nonchalantly, raising the bottle to my lips and motioning to Peter, our leader, to continue with the meeting.

"Still," Chris replied, still looking at me without blinking, unphased.

The Sprite bottle was a last resort...

Thanksgiving

Laura George's Things I'm Thankful For print, available on Etsy

Yep, this pretty much sums it up.
Happy Thanksgiving!

Reasons to Love Rosa Mexicano

1. It has a wall adorned with flowing water and little statues of naked men.
2. It was awarded “Best Restaurant 2000” by Interiors Magazine.
3. Frank Bruni of the NY Times had a successful dining experience there with his nephew Gavin, 7, and his niece Bella, 5.
4. Did I mention the water wall covered with naked men??? To be specific, it's a 30-foot iridescent blue tile water wall that spans both levels of the restaurant and is adorned with 240 miniature cliff divers.
5. Yes, that's 240 naked men.

Rosa Mexicano (Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times)

There's also good food, a guacamole cart that delivers fresh-made guac to each table, plentiful portions, and fair prices. In the end, Rosa Mexicano's good enough to go back to, but not special enough to frequent. Honestly, the best part was the Coffee-Kahlua ice cream, which I'm thinking I'll have to order to-go every now and then. It was pure heaven, and I don't know where else to get it.

   6. Alcohol-infused ice cream and naked men. Now that's a hook.

Self-Explanatory

Photo c/o etsy.com

I saw this on the web today and thought it was a nice contrast to my recent, longer posts. It's so true, and just in time for Thanksgiving.

Literary Death Match

Literary Death Match, a performance that "marries the literary and performative aspects of Def Poetry Jam, rapier-witted quips of American Idol’s judging (without any meanness), and the ridiculousness and hilarity of Double Dare," turned 40 episodes old tonight, and I, along with my creative writing classmates, was there to celebrate.

The all-stars of the evening included New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, Moth StorySlam champ Angela Lovell, along with Rick Meyerowitz, co-illustrator of the New Yorkistan New Yorker cover, Sean Kelly, former National Lampoon editor and Heavy Metal magazine founder, Danny Abelson, author of The Muppets Take Manhattan, comedian Jena Friedman, who writes for Late Show with David Letterman, Teddy Wayne, author of the novel Kapitoil — a 2011 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize runner-up, and Jillian Lauren, author of New York Times best-selling Some Girls.  Said participants read their work, recited lists, described encounters with Jesus, and ultimately competed in a Cyrillic-Off,  in which they fought to de-code the names of Pulitzer Prize-winning authors that had been phonetically "cyrillic-ized."

For a detailed account of the energetic match, visit the Literary Death Match Website.

Photo c/o Literarydeathmatch.com

Stay classy in Orlando, LDM. Until then, we'll be keeping Drom warm for you here in NYC.

Midnight Run

It was sixty-two degrees yesterday and got as low as forty-three degrees at night, but you wouldn’t know it from Alice, who resides in Verdi Square in Manhattan. I use “reside” generously, as Alice is homeless and has been for the past three months. Her demeanor was anything but that which I would expect from a homeless woman; she was friendly, comical, even gregarious, and utterly willing to discuss her current state.

“I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t gamble, I don’t have sex, I don’t do any of that stuff,” she told my partner and me during our Midnight Run. “I want to live a wholesome life with good people. I may be homeless, but I still have my dignity.”

Not exactly what you’d expect to hear from a woman on a bench with a cart beside her.

Dream Dancer

Some fiction for this Sunday:


I'm on a stage, a big stage, the kind where people gather to see spectacular shows on Friday nights. I'm wearing a tight, purple button-up shirt. My hands coalesce with the darkness. The air around me is cool, vacant. And then a gleam of light.

There are curtains in front of me, curtains of dark blue, and they part, the ray of yellow spotlight becoming thicker and thicker. My fingers feel chilled but I lift them, slowly, and I swipe my right foot against the sleek, wooden stage chick-ah. My left knee bends and my foot brushes the wood faster: chickah chickah; and then a new rhythm: chicka chick-AH, chicka chick chick chick chicka chickAH AH AH AH. Both of my feet are moving now. I know how to tap dance. So I spin in a circle, my feet creating rhythm that rises up all around me, the beam showering me in yellow light.

Before I know it, I am flying to the front of the stage, sashaying, a series of perfect kickball changes, and I look out to greet the enticed eyes of the audience, but I am faced by a sea of dark blue. The auditorium is empty. I am alone. Clomp. My shoes meet the floor. As if by a strange hand beyond my will, the curtain closes, encasing me in darkness once again.

GO-ing

I learned this weekend that I got accepted onto Fordham's GO Adirondacks trip!! Before I continue, I guess I should explain that GO stands for Global Outreach, a student-started student-run cultural immersion and service program. GO sends groups of approximately ten students to over thirty international and domestic locations each year, for anywhere from one to three weeks.

Having said that, I know very little about the Adirondacks trip, except that we're working with Native Americans and that we'll be in the Adirondacks. The website says that we will "learn about the culture and history of the Native American tribes, namely the Mohawk and Abenaki tribes, and...focus on issues of the environment and sustainability through their work with various grass-roots organizations." Sounds good to me.

The Village.

There's nothing like an afternoon in the Village to help me appreciate the sunshine. My camera, comfy shoes, a pear-and-Gorgonzola salad in a cozy cafe, a glass of Riesling. My week was made.

I also ducked into the Cornelia Street Cafe for a screening of the Weimar-era silent film "Mysteries of a Hair Salon" complete with live music. Produced by Morningside Opera, the show was an exploration of the way film competes with, and sometimes upstages, opera. The soprano of the evening was not happy to be upstaged and kept trying to draw the attention away from the movie and unto herself. At one point, this included her musical rendition of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." It was pretty entertaining all in all.

More photos after the jump.