A Manhattan Party

It has been a while since I have been to a party in a highrise in New York where the view is that classic New York view of loads of cut out highrises with lights sprinkled throughout.  Like they use for backdrops in Broadway plays about New York or in Woody Allen movies.  There was a bartender serving cocktails and loads of New York type people all waiting to talk to me I am sure.

I didn't really know anyone as I was invited as a friend of friends.  They were very nice getting me out and circulating and reintegrating.  Tough, but I must.  I talked to a few people including a guy who quite forwardly, well, I won't say. 

At one point in the evening this woman in fishnets and a rose comes in with an accordion and starts belting out Edith Piaf.  She was so fantastic that stopping a discussion about police watch in troubled neighborhoods was not a problem.   (These are the conversations I swear our parents used to have and now I am at that age and I am having them. Wow.)  Everyone just stopped and listened to this very talented woman.  She sang flawlessly in French, English, German and Russian.  While playing the accordion.


I was so taken with her as was everyone else. She really made the evening. Her name is Mira Stroika and if she gets a gig out of this post I would be very happy.  Check her out here.  She is quite amazing.

"There's Nothing Sexier Than a Lapsed Catholic"

This quote is from Woody Allen's Alice.  If that is true, I am Brad Pitt turning in his collar as he leaves the seminary! 

I had never seen this film and watched it tonight.  It is raining outside and I am full of the cold and what could be better than to be on the couch under a blanket with the cut-out skyline of Manhattan out my window as I watch a Woody Allen film shot in New York?  Perfection. 

I really, really liked it a lot.  It hit some of my themes. I shan't get into them.

I remember seeing Hitchcock's "Rear Window" at an arthouse cinema in San Francisco in 1983 and Mamet's "Glengarry Glenross" at the Curran Theatre in SF with my dad in 1985.  Those were two moments in my life where I felt inspired to write and create and actually thought it was possible.

Tonight was the same.  So it was 25 years later, so what.  (Alice wanted to be a writer, but she went to India to work with Mother Theresa instead.  MT is dead so I will have to write.) 

Tonight was perfect and I was perfect it in it. 

Even if like Alice, I have to lose 10 pounds....