This weekend, Linda and I headed down to Brooklyn to hang out with her friends. It was a fun and memorable weekend.
We headed out early Saturday morning (waking up at 9:00 on a weekend should be outlawed) and hopped on a train. Thankfully, there's free parking at the station on weekends. We'd planned on a "jazz brunch" at B.B.King's, to which Linda's friend Rachel's boyfriend Charlie had gotten free tickets for the four of us, but it turned out to be a Motown brunch, which was still fun. The food was a strictly average buffet, but Carlton Smith was a riot. This guy is a character. During the latter half of the show, he pulled me up on stage along with two others during "Heard It Through The Grapevine" to be one of the Pips. So I got to do some silly Motown dance in front of a few hundred people. Without the dancing-related confidence that's come from my lindy hop experience, I'd have never been able to do it. But it turned out all right. Charlie's supposed to get us copies of the pictures he took soon.
After that, the four of us headed to a book fair. Charlie has worked as an editor at DC Comics for over 10 years now, so he's a bigwig, and DC had a booth at the fair. It was fun, and I actually managed to win a mp3 player at Audible.com's booth. Its 128MB will hold just under 4 hours of mp3's, not nearly as good as my other mp3 player, but I'll probably end up using it as a portable flash drive more than anything else.
After the book fair, we grabbed some wine & cheese and headed back to Rachel's condo where we rested, listened to Ray Charles, and watched Mount St.Helen shoot off smoke.
Soon, people started showing up - Anne-Marie and Brandon, Jeff and Michelle, and Ed - minus his Canadian fiancé who's visiting India. We headed out for Thai food, which was very good.
On the way back from dinner, the girls sent the guys on an errand to pick up chocolate, since we had port wine, which apparently tastes better with chocolate. So the girls went back, and Charlie, Jeff, Brandon, Ed, and myself went in search of a store. I don't know how we ended up in a bar. Two drinks later, our cell phones all started ringing and we figured it was time to go. We managed to find a store, and eventually made our way back to Rachel's place, where the girls eventually let us in. I just wish we'd managed to get a photo of us and five random girls to show our various significant others. :-)
When we got in, the girls were playing "Hit The Road, Jack" and dancing around crazily as if they hadn't missed us one bit. Uh-Huh...
We finished the night off by drinking, eating junk food, and playing Taboo, which was actually a lot of fun. By the end of it all, I was dead tired and dozed off before we could even fold out the couch-bed.
Sunday morning, Rachel, Charlie, Linda and I got french toast at a little restaurant where the waitress sang us a segment of "Who Will Buy?" from "Oliver". That was a first. Then we hit a flea market where I got yelled at for looking at a very interesting book. Maybe I'll buy it elsewhere - I'm certainly not going to buy it from the woman who scolded me for looking through it.
Linda and I caught a train home, and I slept on the train, then slept for nearly two more hours at home. I love weekends. Why is it only Monday?