The Sweet Smell Of Excess

You know you are in the bathroom of a very fancy apartment when you are halfway through peeing and you realize you don’t know how to flush the toilet. This is why we can’t have nice things. I am out of my element all the time in Manhattan, but never more than when I am hanging out with Reichen. It isn’t Reichen, just to be clear. He is in every way a very earnest and accepting fellow, like an Irish Setter whose only interest is setting. But like a magnet he attracts the who’s who of this and that. If it isn't always A-List, it is frequently at least, an act of becoming, huddled masses on the teeming shores of fabulous with me, the tempest tossed.

Reichen invited me to a private party for his new VH-1 show. Last I heard, he was on that LOGO show which is in every way the afterbirth of Andy Cohen’s very demon spawn. I adore Reichen, but I am not a fan of that particular version of reality. Actually the last I heard of Reichen was his fragrance launch party at Industry, which I had a delightful time at. And since I met my most marvelous new friend Ryan White there, I thought it only fitting that he join me as my plus one for this latest Reichen launch event.

I met Ryan outside a rather nondescript building on the outskirt steak of Chelsea. At first I thought we had the wrong address but Ryan assured me he went to a holiday party in the same building and it was quite fabulous. What the building lacks in curb appeal, it makes up for in soaring twenty foot ceilings and private car elevators so you can literally drive right into your apartment.  “But,” Blair hastily added with a mock sniff. “It’s only a one car garage.” And who can live like that!

Birthday Preppers

Life is really unexpected. You just never know what is going to happen. This is why my new obsession is Doomsday Preppers, the show where ordinary people hoard a decade’s worth of food in their basement in the unlikely event of a water landing. Even today, I was crossing Sixth Avenue at 48^th Street and an SUV was driving the wrong way toward me, right past the cops permanently stationed by their cars outside Fox News. Always ready to channel Albert Finney in The Dresser, a movie I have never seen, I stood in front of her car and simply lifted my hand. She slowed to a stop and gave me a funny look and I showed her the error of her ways by merely gesturing back past her. Seconds later, she was completing a U-Turn and we were both on our merry way. The cops didn’t even bother getting in their cars and chasing her. That’s New York. And if you are going to freak out at every little thing, don’t come here.

I was making a rare Saturday night appearance in the city for back to back birthday celebrations. It is also Mike’s birthday on Sunday but he doesn’t feel like celebrating this year even though now that we have our glorious new coffee station in the kitchen, amazing new bathroom and showstopping fireplace, there is every reason to rejoice! I even upgraded the shelves in the closets so our own doomsday prepping won’t look as sloppy as that girl in Houston who plans to shoot her kittens in the head when we run out of oil.

First stop was The Tenth Rail down on 10^th Avenue and 33^rd Street. The neighborhood is so sketchy, the highlight is the well-traveled drive through McDonald’s next door from which the pernicious glare of the fluorescent lighting is a vision direct from the worst nightmares of the Dowager Countess, minus the gaiety. Perhaps they should rename the place The Seventh Circle, although we were really only there for the Third. As the strangers streamed into the empty bar from the street, each entered with a bewildered look on their face. “I took the M-11 bus!” one woman declared incredulously. I would have been less surprised (or concerned for her safety) if she had said she took an M-16.