40 ounces to freedom

On my visit down to NYC last weekend I got to experience a few firsts:

1. Finally met my long-time online friend Jenny. Aelis and I met up with her and her friend Mike and we got some dinner and went to a comedy club. We were walking the streets a few blocks from Times Square looking for a place to eat and were not having any luck (we wanted to avoid the chain stores and crowds) until we spotted this little mexican place nestled into a small, dark side street. So I walked in to see a small room full of Latino men stare up at me. The place was tiny and looked a bit suspect but I was hungry and forced the rest of my reticent group to enter. I grabbed the one open 4-top table (the place only had about 8 tables), which was situated right next to a circular 1-top table where an older guy was sitting sipping a Heineken. The rest of my gang was looking around at the gaggle of haggard-looking, mostly leathery-faced mexicali men with that scared look in their eyes. Slowly the conversations in spanish resumed and they relaxed a bit. The only woman in the place besides us was a waitress sporting glittery make-up. The dinner was actually not bad and during it I struck up a conversation with the guy sitting alone next to me. He spoke very broken english, so I asked him what was good on the menu. He replied that he had never eaten there! Oh well. Then I asked him where all the women were, and he pointed down the street with a smile. A sweet old guy really. In the middle of our dinner however, they started up the karaoke! The guy singing was standing about 3 feet behind us, right next to an amp that was pumping out the salsa music at an ungodly volume right in my ear. But actually, the singer was a good singer. He knew all the lyrics and had a good voice and I liked the music.
2. I went to my first comedy club. After our harrowing mexican dinner, we hit a low-brow, low-cost comedy club called Ha. We were in the upstairs room, which was tiny - the comedians were about 15 feet away from us! The show was quite good, consisting of about 6 acts and an emcee. A couple were stinkers, but the rest were very funny. A couple of them talked to Jenny a little during their routines, I think because she has a bit of that strikingly beautiful blonde bombsjell look and was sitting right in front of them.
3. Guzzling 40 ounce beers in Union Square. It was Aelis' idea, although I think at the time she was joking. But I took her up on it and we grabbed two 40 oz bottles of the High Life. You can see my effortless grace caught on camera during this foray into the life of an alcoholic street urchin below. The second pic is how Union Square looked to me after polishing off that beer...
4. I finally saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch, as well as my girlfriend performing a shadowcast of it as the sexily bearded Yitshak. I had purposefully been holding off on seeing that movie because I wanted my first time to be watching Jenn and her troupe of shadowcasters do it (if you don't know what shadowcasting is - think the midnight showings of Rocky Horror - they act out the scenes in the movie in full costume while its playing behind them). Each of their screenings, btw, starts with a Q&A with the creator and star of the play and movie - John Cameron Mitchell. He is a very personable guy, very funny (and ribald) and well spoken. He shows scenes from his upcoming movie (he directed and I think produced it) and then takes questions (his only stipulation being that he only answers questions he has never been asked before..lol).