Hot Riga Nights

I turned off the day and Tory and I went out for the night. If she were a gay man and single and living in New York and attracted to me, this would have been a perfect date. But even without some of these "must haves" it was a great night out of two old friends.

Flashback with harp to 22 years ago: We met in Venice, Italy. We were young, drinking red wine and smoking MS cigarettes. Nary a care in the mondo. She and my sister Eileen are AMS (Italian for BFF) and were on the year abroad program at Cal. I was a young, handsome travelling playwright/minstrel/international bon vivant/really confused young man.

Then we all lived around the corner from each other in San Francisco and finally two of us got married and one defected to Los Angeles. Mixed in with death, relationships, children, the usual.

Tory is in New York to hang with pals, see shows, catch her friend's cabaret act and just have some peace and quiet in the very loud metropolis. We got to hang and that was great.

Tonight we went out to the East Village to catch a film at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was a German doc about a man who found out in his 50's that he was adopted and was really from Riga in the Ukraine. Trying to match the proper food to a Nazi-infused needle in a haystack film was difficult, for reason too convoluted to explain we were headed towards Japanese until Tory spied Veselka (faithful reader Brad's beloved place) and we ate Ukrainian food which was perfect and more satisfying than the film, but hey we were at the Tribeca Film Fest and a 24-hour Ukrainian restaurant. You can't get more NYC cool than that.

Great to see you Tory!