The Two Night Show

Well if you were wondering if it is summer in New York yet. It’s fucking summer. After struggling last weekend to resist the urge to turn the heat back on after the nighttime temperature plunged back down into the 40s, this week has been a parallel struggle to not install the air conditioners. It has been 90 degrees every day for the last three days and now we are supposed to be grateful that this horrible storm from the Midwest (that dropped enough twisters to get Dorothy a dozen round trips between Kansas and OZ) will be the thing that breaks the hot and humid spell that has fallen over the city.

But I can’t complain about the heat (even though that is exactly what this sounds like) because our winter was so arduously long this year that anything, even 90 degree highs, are an improvement. I was commiserating tonight with another New Yorker at a party about the temperature swing but more importantly, the long winter that made everyone I know question our decision to live in this urine soaked wonderland.

I theorized that the reason we hated this winter so much is that people who live in New York live by a set of unwritten, unspoken, yet universally acknowledged rules. This is why tourists think New Yorkers are rude. It is because they broke the rules that no one told them about. It hardly seems fair but nothing about Manhattan is fair, including the weather. So this is the rule: we put up with the brutal summers and the miserable winters because we know they will end. And when they do, they are replaced by our most magnificent seasons: spring and fall. So when winter stretches into April and then May, our goodwill gets stretched to the breaking point. Snow on the Fifth Avenue tulips is NOT what we signed up for.

Meanwhile, this heat makes me not want to do anything. I just want to lie in a pool of my own sweat and not move. I don’t even want to lift the remote control. I just want to control the TV with my mind and have it play Contact but fast forward to the scene where Jodie Foster is in the pod.

"I'm okay to go. I'm okay to go."

Also I want a plate of Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies nearby but I don’t want the chocolate to get melty until it is in my mouth. Also I don’t want this carbo-loading and lethargy to make me fat. The opposite: I want to sweat the pounds off me and arise on a cooler day, magically with a fit summer body.

Unfortunately, even in my delusional state, I knew I had to leave the house. First, I had to go to work yesterday. And Skater Jonathan (who wants you to know he hates my alternate nickname Johnny Lazy very, very much) wanted to hang out after the show. So Friday night, we abandoned the studio the second the show was over and raced down to Vlada to see hotter than summer StephenBauer do his turn as a tight-shirted DJ (a local rite of passage).

Stephen was not spinning on Friday (it turns out he was spinning on Saturday instead). But we decided to stay and I tried to order a Bloody Mary. This prompted the extremely impatient and rude bartender to wave me away like Sigourney Weaver trying to get the Alien queen’s attention at the end of Aliens (another favorite heat wave mind control movie scene).

"A bloody mary? No. I can't make that for you."

Can’t or won’t? In either event, the end result was the same. I didn't order anything. Then while not drinking, I confessed to Jonathan that I couldn't possible date someone who wore a lot of loose fitting horizontal stripe tank tops (which were everywhere on bodies that had no busy leaving Brooklyn in those things). Another unspoken, unwritten Manhattan rule: if you wear a tank top here, you better be either a straight construction worker or have the body of a stripper. And those loose horizontal stripes make everyone look like an old beach umbrella that just doesn't care anymore. Everyone. Even you.

After that we went to Therapy (Bar) and had a really nice time. Of course we started downstairs and never went upstairs and I instantly regretted that decision. The fun, young people always go upstairs. The tired old people look at the stairs and the crowds and think, the bar isn't crowded down here and I can get my drink and hear my friends when they are talking. Smash cut to: you are sixty and leaned up against the wall to the men’s room waiting for someone in a horizontal stripe tank top to make eye contact with you.

Jonathan was supposed to join me out tonight at Ryan Hahn’s party, mere steps from his apartment in Chelsea, but he lived up to the moniker he hates and stayed home. “My stomach doesn't feel right,” which I am pretty sure is code for the guy I was seeing just got back into town and we need to have sex. So I went to the party alone, which I dread. As you can tell, just from all this, I have a lot of issues, and plenty of reasons to instantly dislike someone. Plus, I just hate meeting new people and making small talk. It is the worst.

“All anyone talks about here is work, their apartment, and the weather.”

That was Patrick, this adorable blond with full, swoopy hair who naturally had my instant and immediate attention. But there is a reason we talk about those things. They are the great levelers of the New York experience. Everyone has (or is hoping to) have a job. Everyone has a story about their apartment (most of them bad). And the weather is the cruel mistress always disrupting our love of the city or occasionally joining in some very pleasant three ways with us, usually around late April and mid-October.

Besides, I have to stick to these topics or I will end up in very deep discussions about other things. I do not have Oprah’s gift for taking a difficult conversation and finding something uplifting in it. And so it was that the nice lady in the floral print dress was nearly driven to a quarter life crisis in our brief discussion about how she lives her life pleasing other people and how can she make a living while still pleasing herself. She’ll have a good cry on the subway about that one someday soon.

Things took an equally deep turn when Dan (who I met once before at Industry) and I escaped into the bedroom where the air conditioning was stronger and I made him realize that living in New York was much harder than he had previously thought. I mean, he already thought it was hard but I pretty much convinced him it was like the darkest episode of Oz but with more confined spaces and fewer viable options.

I would say I won’t be invited back again but I think Ryan likes me anyway, despite all my flaws. Or maybe he is just a naturally sunny Midwestern person and he doesn't see or acknowledge them. Then again, maybe he is in his polite way trying to get me to retract saying that he is “cute enough” in my blog which Brian Gianelli mentions every single time Ryan comes up in conversation. So if Ryan isn't sensitive about that, Brian sure the hell is. 

“Look at you, all blond and tan.” Ryan gushed warmly, even though in reality I was just flushed from the heat and tall enough that my grey hair might be mistaken for a more flattering hue in the right dim lighting. “You look like a Ken doll. Do you get that a lot?” 

"I don't understand the question and I won't respond to it."

I asked Ryan what doll he gets mistaken for but he got all Midwest and shy and insisted no one mistakes him for a living doll. But he is genuinely adorable (which is what I said about him first, Brian!), not just cute enough. I should be forgiven for my first impressions, just as I hope others will forgive the first impressions that I give. Everything should be forgiven, except those horizontal stripe tank tops. And long winters. Those are unforgivable.