An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

A little write-up of my trip to New York. Every year a group of my high school friends gets together for dinner in Manhattan around holiday time. I try to attend when I can, and this year the stars aligned well: I was overdue to visit with my brother, and the weekend of the high school "Duck Night" dinner (so named because it's held at a Chines restaurant called Peking Duck) was the same weekend as my brother's birthday. I took the bus up to New York, something I hadn't tried before. It probably took me an hour longer in each direction than driving would have, but I didn't have to worry about having a car in New York and at $30 each way it was cheaper than driving. I took an early bus so that I could make it to New York in time to grab lunch and see a matinee of a Broadway show before heading out to Brooklyn.  I had recently bought Valerie some really pricey tickets to see John Groban, which made me feel a little less guilty about treating myself to a ti...

Just a quick report on a marathon day of music on Saturday. I had two gigs back-to-back - I must be a professional musician :) The first gig was a holiday party. The basic outlines are pretty normal - nice ballroom at the Sheraton Pentagon City. Great views out towards DC and Virginia. Extensive buffet and open bar. Then there was the host. Rob is an ostensibly extremely wealthy dude who spends most of his time in the Virgin Islands but still has connections back here. He cuts quite a figure at these parties - tuxedo, spats, a hairstyle that could be described as the Donald Trump look with a ponytail. Quite a dude. And he has interesting musical requests: he always wants a sing-along of corny traditional songs (Oh Susanna, Yankee Doodle, and such) as well as a medley of the Armed Services songs. Last year we played the service songs; this year they went with a recorded version. Plus, Rob has a hearing disorder which makes him hypersensitive to loud noise. So he hires live entertainme...