Black Friday

Instead of getting up for 4 a.m. doorbusters, I tried to sleep in today. But with my lower back hurting more and more every day, I can't get several hours of uninterrupted sleep anymore. Still, I was able to hang out in bed til 12:45 p.m., which is exactly what I was looking for.
Last year I went to the mall on Black Friday and marvelled at how empty it was, but this year there was no way I could haul myself out that far so I settled for some midtown shopping. On my way to Lord & Taylor, I stumbled upon a Bank of America-sponsored pop-up store on Fifth Avenue and 36th Street, where I got a free cup of coffee (with a splash of hot chocolate) and a free massage! They're also offering free gift wrap, free holiday greetings you can videotape in front of a green screen, and "concierge services" which they steered me away from since they could tell right away I was a local.

The massage was OK, in one of those massage chairs like they have at the nail salon, which sometimes actually make my back feel worse. But, you get what you pay for, and since it was free, I was trying to enjoy it as much as possible.

Bank of America is, of course, trying to get people to sign up for their new "Americard," but I think people are just drinking the free coffee and using the public bathrooms. I saw lots of people taking a load off and piling their shopping bags up on the couches, munching on the free chocolates, but nobody signing up for anything. Oh well, thanks Bank of America for a very expensive and enjoyable marketing promotion. 'Tis the season for giving.

Afterwards I was inspired to spend $75 at Ann Taylor LOFT to get a free sequined clutch purse, and to buy new jeans and a fancy dress at GAP.

Braving Herald Square on Black Friday stressed me out again so I stopped by HRC for a dip in the hot tub, and back home to eat a leftover turkey dinner.

I tried to go out last night, but nobody - not even Rodeo Bar - was accommodating a wayward soul such as myself on Thanksgiving night. I got a couple of drinks at The Magician, but it was nothing compared to Thanksgiving 1997 when I got drunk at Down the Hatch with Neal and was at the all-night McDonald's on W. 3rd St. til 5 a.m.

Oh well, at least I still have tonight and tomorrow before back to work on Monday.

Happy Thanksgiving

I'm thinking a lot about my family today. I haven't spoken to my parents since January but I normally wouldn't see them on Thanksgiving anyway. But as I'm hanging out in my apartment baking pumpkin bread and making green bean casserole, I'm reminded of my father's side of the family, big dinners at Grammy's house and weird German desserts.

I grew up with a lot of German vernacular that was poorly pronounced and never spelled out or written down. I've actually been a motivated baker lately (like baking my own birthday cake) so I set my mind to trying to track down recipes of some of the things I grew up eating that I actually liked. There were the molasses Christmas cookies that used to be my favorite, Lebkuchen, and an anise and nutmug dessert called Gesundheitskuchen which is more like a cake but is baked in a loaf pan and sliced like bread. None of the recipes I found online were exactly what I remembered, but I think I've become a good enough baker to fiddle around with the ingredients to try to replicate my grandmother's version, which had been replicated by my mother after she became absorbed into my father's traditional German family.

Especially after my grandmother died when I was 10, Thanksgiving (or any other holiday for that matter) with my family was never really about home and hearth. I do have fond memories of waking up to the smell of the turkey already cooking, of my father carving it and doling out the crispy skin for us to snack on, of eating whatever we wanted and as much as we wanted, all washed down with grape juice to mimic a sophisticated dinner experience. But mom always acted like it was a huge bother and never enjoyed herself, and made us feel guilty for all the effort she put into it. And it was almost always just the four of us, four people who didn't get along with each other, eating in silence.

Besides, this time of year, I am missing my father's brother, my favorite uncle. He died about a year ago at Thanksgivingtime and I still feel guilty for not going to Syracuse for the wake or funeral. I couldn't deal with seeing my parents. I hope, wherever he is, that he understands and forgives me.

I chose to spend today alone, despite a genuine invitation from Maria's family, because I've been too stressed at work, travelling too much for work, and not sleeping enough. I wasn't sure if I was going to cook and didn't want to have any plans today, but so far it's turning out ok. I'm cooking about half a turkey dinner, with turkey roulade contributed by Murray's, stuffing contributed by Edith, and green bean casserole and mashed potatoes made by me.

Van Halen

Van Halen is now 3/4 Van Halen, with the replacement of Michael Anthony with Eddie's son Wolfgang. Wolfgang doesn't really rock, but he's only 16. Still, he looks like Valerie Bertinelli before Jenny Craig. With her hair from One Day at a Time.

I never thought this before, but at the MSG show last night, I thought all Van Halen songs sound alike. Correction: all David Lee Roth Van Halen songs sound alike, at least performed live. I thought I would know more of them, but sticking to the Diamond Dave repertoire and leaving out the Sammy Hagar stuff limited my knowledge, so only about half the songs sounded familiar to me. Still, with Eddie's guitar and pretty good harmonizing vocals, they all had that Van Halen something that made me really enjoy the whole show.

We had terrible seats. Pretty awful, as in, the last row. The speakers blocked the big screen behind them so I couldn't even watch the show on that. But Roth, replete with a variety of brocade jackets and tophats, had an onstage demeanor that was more circus ringmaster than rock band lead singer, so I could definitely see him gesturing wildly and flipping around the mic stand like a baton.

Dave looks good. I know you won't believe me, but he does. He lost a lot of weight and looks pretty fit, and even his thinning hair was smartly cropped and neat. His wide smile and flamboyance makes him a great showman and draws the eyes to the face rather than to the laced-up crotch of his leather pants, but it was all a bit...Fosse.

And you know what? He can still do those jumping kicks. It was like 1984 all over again.

As a 9 year old I loved "Jump." I didn't understand it at all but I think I was kind of attracted to Dave's charisma, and at the time I couldn't resist a good synthesizer.

When I agreed to go to the show, I figured I would just get drunk and eat popcorn. I did have a couple Pork Slaps at Fat Annie's before the show, but I wasn't drunk. Instead, sitting in my seat, the fifth wheel to a married couple and a couple of dudes from work who are a little too friendly with each other, I just got depressed. I remembered myself as a 9 year old. And I felt old and sad.

Oh, I didn't feel pathetic for being at a Van Halen show (pretty cool actually). Everybody there was actually much older than me. It was more the comparison of my current self with my former third grader self, who loved Van Halen and Def Leppard and dreamed of dating a rock star one day. That hasn't happened yet.

The only Van Halen music I own is from the Sammy Hagar era, but I do own a David Lee Roth solo album on vinyl. I don't think I'll ever play any of that stuff at home, but I have been humming "Dance the Night Away" to myself today...

Detroit Rock Sandi

I had to work again this weekend, this time travelling to my second least favorite city in the U.S.: Detroit. (Houston is my least favorite.)

This is the second city where I've seen the KIDZ BOP WORLD TOUR so far, and fortunately I didn't have to do a lot. But still, I left my house at 2:45 p.m. on Saturday and didn't return til about an hour ago - and after working til 8 p.m. on Friday night and too tired to go out after, that's pretty much the whole weekend.

It's a surprisingly quick flight out there, on a cramped regional jet. I was lucky to be travelling with Sebouh and Kevin, and we all ventured out to Dearborn for an authentic Lebanese dinner. At Al-Ameer, I felt like I was back in the 70s at a family dining restaurant, with stained glass chandeliers in every booth. Except Seb was speaking Arabic to our waitress and half the food was on a stick.

It was great, actually. Seb is our resident Lebanese expert (despite my jaunt to Edgware Road with Claude Chalhoub in 2002) so I let him order for me, getting a nice selection of kabob and shwarma, hummous, salads, rices, falafel, and plenty of stuff to dip it in (like tahini and lebneh, sometimes called "yogurt cheese" and really good). Topped off with some baklava and I had a happy tummy ache.

I was going to go to bed early, but my hotel - the Atheneum, where I stayed the last time work brought me to Detroit about eight years ago - was recently part of a revitalization of Downtown Detroit to include a new casino as part of Greektown. Curiosity got the best of me and I braved the cigar smoke to walk through the entire thing and even play some slots. Competitiveness also got the best of me and I dropped some serious $20s in the PONG-themed slot machine just trying to get to the bonus round where you actually get to play PONG for cash. Silly me - I always forget you can't play slots like they're video games. They're WAY too expensive.

So after losing a wallet-full of money, and being disgusted at how NOT-nice the casino was (and didn't even pretend to be like the Atlantic City casinos do), I headed back to the hotel to do what I'd been dreaming about ever since I booked the room: take a bubble bath in the "deep soak tub." The rooms are sort of Greek-themed like the rest of the hotel (and the neighborhood), so there's a certain hedonism you feel when you walk in. It's not as bad as Caesar's, but I definitely wanted to take advantage while I was there, especially with the way I've been feeling lately.

Sipping some white wine while listening to Mariah Carey was all the relaxation I needed to get ready to work the next day...

This morning I woke up early on my own after hoping to sleep in, but that meant I could forage for breakfast in the very dead downtown area. I found the Detroit Breakfast House & Grill, the only hoppin' spot for miles, at about the moment I was going to give up and go to Au Bon Pain. It's definitely a hometown favorite, filled with post- and/or pre-church worshippers nattily dressed, surrounding themselves with stuffed French toast, chicken and waffles, and cheese grits. I went a little easy on myself and had the turkey sausage benedict, which still came out on a really buttery grilled English muffin with some slippery breakfast potatoes on the side. My first batch of poached eggs came out hard - and the waitress knew that was bad so she put them down and took them right back, apologizing all over the place. When the new wet eggs came out and burst all over my plate, I knew it was worth the wait.

It was a little unnerving because everybody there called me "young lady," but when they could see I was all by myself and I was nice about the hard eggs and the wait (and I think I was a little sniffly too with a cold weather scratchy throat), they started calling me "sweetheart." That was some hospitality I had never before experienced in Detroit.

I had a good full stomach in anticipation of drinking mimosas at the pre-show reception we threw for our colleagues at Dodge, who sponsored the show at the overly-ornate Fox Theatre. The Byzantine gaudiness of the place really overwhelmed my interest in its history - apparently built by the Fox movie studio in the '20s as a movie theater. The live acts that play there now are mostly of the "heritage artist" variety, like Neil Young last night and Kenny Rogers in December. KIDZ BOP really livened up the place. I was still hoping for more confetti.

Back home now to an undecorated apartment, with all Halloween decorations down (except the candy corn lights) and a little too early for the Christmas stuff to go up. I'm always looking for a little more sparkle. And the face painter at the party today told me I wasn't allowed because I'm an adult.

*sulk*

Duran Duran on Broadway

About 1000 middle-aged women, gay men and myself lived out a childhood fantasy last night and saw Duran Duran in the small Barrymore Theater on Broadway.

I'd seen them a year or two ago at The Garden, but at this show we were close, in the third row in the balcony. John Taylor actually raised his eyebrows at me and the screaming woman next to me.

It was a gamble to go see this show because the main focus is their new album, but I was intrigued by its production by Timbaland and collaborations with Justin Timberlake. Still, does anybody want to hear new music by Duran Duran?

The new stuff is pretty good. About half of it I actually really liked upon first listen. Some of it screams JT, and I kept hoping they'd break out into a cover of "Sexyback."

Like any Broadway show, there was an intermission, and the show was actually split into three acts. Act One was the new stuff, and Act Two was a special Devo-like "Electroset" where they lined up downstage with keyboards and did robotic versions of "All She Wants Is," "I Don't Want Your Love" (!!!!), and a weird electro remix of "Skin Trade."

Act Three was what they called "Essential Duran Duran," though I don't consider their relatively recent single "Reach Up for the Sunrise" essential despite the fact it was in a commercial or two. Still, I was happy to jump to my feet for "Notorious" and "The Reflex," and bounce around to "Planet Earth" and "Girls on Film." I'm betting the audience was disappointed they didn't hear "Rio" (I personally was hoping for Arcadia's "Election Day") but instead they got "A View to a Kill" (the James Bond theme) and "Ordinary World."

The band looks good and they had nice matching outfits, though Simon was the only one with a huge bulge in his pants. The addition of a horn section (saxophone solos!) and a soulful backup singer really filled out the sound, and in that intimate setting, it sounded great.

I kind of want to go again.

Thru 11/13.

Duran Duran Continues Its Revival With a Debut on a Broadway Stage - The New York Times

Halloweentime Jaunt to the Midwest

Spent the weekend in Minneapolis - again - this weekend. I actually don't mind it so much. I tell everybody it's a surprisingly cosmopolitan place.

This time I stayed at the Hilton, which was a mistake because it was a prime convention spot crawling with badge-toting midwesterners and gigantic football players (North Dakota State U, to be exact). I was pressed up against the back of the elevator during each trip to and from the 21st floor, praying for oxygen.

The stress of the throngs needed desperately to be relieved, so I ordered an in-room massage from the former LiteSpa (now an Aveda salon called Sanctuary). Spa services outside of a beach cabana or New York City can be a bit dodgy, but this ended up being really good - in fact, I think, better than the massages I get from Deborah at Crunch. This one included a great head/scalp massage, and also uncovered some real pain I'm having...drum roll...behind my knees. In the lymph area. Apparently I'm clogged.

So the massage was a great release in more ways than one, and for the first time in weeks (maybe months), I woke up the next morning and could walk without hobbling. Score!

Besides the access to in-room massages, the one good thing about the hotel was its proximity to a great restaurant called Hell's Kitchen, a new discovery. Aptly named, the wait there is hellish, as is the attitude of the people taking reservations and names for the waitlist. Saturday I tried to go there three times, and finally ordered a ham and pear toasted sandwich to go and ate it on the stairwell in the building. But this morning I planned ahead and didn't have to wait too long to brunch with Sebouh, who shared the delicious sausage bread (made with bison meat!), topped with butter, homemade peanut butter and preserves. It's practically a meal on its own but I managed to make some room for the catfish breakfast special, with poached eggs and a sauce with a real kick to it.

Minneapolis always brings the good food and drink, if you know where to go. (DON'T go to the NewsRoom.) We tried the bar in the new swank Graves 601 hotel, where I had the deliciously unsweet Mojito "8" cocktail and some sweet grilled cheese sandwiches topped with truffle honey. The scene was weirdly New York, and we were surrounded by Emmy winners of the Upper Midwest Chapter of the National Television Academy. Bizarre.

Even more bizarre was our trip to the sticks for the Trail of Terror, supposedly the Midwest's best Halloween attraction. It paled in comparison to some of the New York area ones I've visited over the last couple of years, but the haunted house-slash-maze had some neat tricks of its own that kept me on my toes (and grabbing for Vic). They kept it really dark, and with my night vision pretty bad as it is, I was blind the whole time. Then we hit the hallway with the big horn sound and a bright light that bleached our retinas and really blinded us.

I can't say it was worth the long drive, the muddy school bus ride from the parking lot, and the long wait in line, but I was spooked and startled and we laughed a lot. Mission accomplished.

It also gave us the excuse to have dinner at Bennigan's, which we spotted from the highway. We were hungry for fun, and thanks to Vic, now I can say I've tasted the deep fat fried and battered Monte Cristo sandwich with raspberry jam. It's so wrong. And so good.

Thankfully, considering everything I ate while away, I got the chance to swim a little at my hotel. I also spent a fair amount of time on my feet walking back and forth between hotel and Target Center, where I was wrangling some children for the KIDZ BOP WORLD TOUR. Rock!

If I have to go back to Minneapolis again, I hope it's during better weather, so I can visit De Smet, SD and complete my Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway journey.

Photo Essay: Great Jack o’ Lantern Blaze

I guess it's a family event, but since I didn't have any kids to bring, I dragged Edith, Eric, Michelle and Joe an hour upstate to Croton-on-Hudson for the annual Great Jack o' Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor (follow the brown signs).

The manor itself - which you can tour throughout the year during the day - was pretty spooky, with illuminated pumpkins lining its railings and the colored spotlight changing periodically.

Skeletor made sure we didn't get lost through the winding paths...

Some really elaborate designs...

It takes about an hour to go through the whole thing depending on how stuck you get behind the kids in the "Dead Sea" section, but you can grab a hot cider and a cider doughnut on your way in, and it's a pleasantly spooky way to spend a crisp fall evening.

Through October 31.

Photo Essay: Open House NY

This weekend is Open House New York, always a highlight of the year for the last five years. You get to explore places that are normally closed to the public (and sometimes kind of condemned).

Highlights from my weekend:

ferry to Ellis Island, stopping first by Liberty Island

Checking out Ellis Island's restored Ferry Building, where the old ferry "Ellis" sank in the 1960s (and you can still see some of it sticking up through the water surface)


Rubble outside the abandoned psychiatric hospital

broken glass windows in the stabilized walkways between the various sections of the abandoned hospital


hanging light socket in the old staff's quarters

toilet in the old Contagious Diseases Hospital

Washed rind cave in the basement of Murray's Cheese

More moldy cheese in Murray's Cheese cheese cave - stinky but well-worth standing in line for the wait list

There were tons of other things I wanted to do - canoe the Gowanus, explore an MTA Substation - but they were all on Saturday and I couldn't fit everything in. Sunday I decided to go to the mall and do a very different kind of urban exploring (resulting in shoes and lots of Halloween crap from Target).

NPR: Capturing the 'Dark Side' of Ellis Island

Back on East Coast Time

My internal clock has been so messed up, ever since we set our watches back an hour in Nashville, only to find out that directly north of there in Kentucky, we had to set our watches forward again. At Maker's Mark (NOT our first stop of the day), we realized we had no clue what time it was.

So back to Nashville and back on Central time, then back to NYC on Sunday for a little (r)EST, and then out to LA on Monday to mess me up even further.

All week I've pretty much still been on New York time, going to bed at 9:45 p.m. and waking up on my own at like 6:45 a.m. I needed my rest anyway: the all-day conference was exhausting.

Wednesday night I made the stupid decision to go to a conference-related after-party at the Mondrian's SeaBar. The highlight of the party - besides the host who invited me and who looks like Sawyer from LOST - was spotting Simon Rex (who I love because of his association with Felicity) in the lobby, not being able to get into the party that I was in.

The only other celebrity sighting was actually conference-related: Carson Kressley at the Lifetime-sponsored cocktail party just prior to Seabar.

I've been under an allergy attack since last week, but my antics on Wednesday night - which included a late-night stop at In-N-Out Burger where I lost my bag and then quickly retrieved it - set me over the edge. Now it's a full-blown sickness.

It's a bummer because I really did try to lay low this whole trip. I even skipped dinner after taking a Cardioke class at the Hollywood Pop Academy, though I did think twice after walking by Hooters...

From a business perspective, the trip was really good, but I didn't get much out of it personally. Knowing the Hollywood Roosevelt's rich history (and renowned hauntings), I was really excited to stay there, but it was definitely not worth the hype. And I didn't spot any glitterati there despite it currently being a hotspot for celebutantes.

The conference was at the historic Cinerama which was really cool to sit in - and make a presentation in. Its domed roof looks like a honeycomb both outside and in. And the attached Arclight Cafe is a nice spot to grab lunch.

Most bizarre moment of my trip?
A tie:
- Approaching a guy in In-N-Out Burger and saying, "You're cute, but you look like you're on drugs" and having him respond, "Well, I am on drugs. You need to work on your tact."
- Synchronized swimming exhibition at the conference wrap party

Now back in NY and I hope I sleep normally. I won't be changing time zones for another month, when I have to spend the weekend in Minneapolis.

What I Remember from the Kentucky Bourbon Festival

Actually I remember a lot. We thought we would get a lot drunker than we did, but considering each tour was like an hour and each tasting was only like five minutes, we had plenty of time to recover between each of the distilleries.

We flew into Nashville first and then drove three hours to KY on Thursday. The state of Kentucky is basically built on caves and caverns, but we didn't have time to explore any of them. Also, given its rich history in war and military battle, it's really haunted. In fact, the Bourbon Festival's home base, Bardstown, is known as one of the most haunted places in the country.

Thursday night we actually got to take a ghost tour of the town, which took us to the old Jailer's Inn, a local cemetery, and our own hotel - The Old Talbott Tavern. During our tour we saw some supposedly ghost-induced chandelier flickering, but that was our only encounter with the supernatural there. Thank God, too - we were a little afraid to wake up with somebody standing over us.

The Tavern is the place to be during the festival, which actually isn't saying much. We thought the whole event would be a lot more exciting, with a lot more people. Nevertheless, we had fun in the bar that night, hanging out with the locals, drinking cheap bourbon and dancing to the live band and DJ.

All told, we managed to hit five distilleries and eat a lot of bourbon balls. We got so hyperglycemic that we succumbed to chain restaurants for food (like Pizza Hut and Longhorn Steakhouse) when we got too crazy to drive any more.

Best Tasting: Heaven Hill, where we missed the tour but got to sit in a larger-than-life barrel and try some great high-end bourbons like the Elijah Craig 18-year

Best Tour: Maker's Mark, where our tour guide Betty let us stick our fingers in the tubs of corn mash in various stages of yeasting and taste the bourbon-making process in the works.

Best Distillery: Woodford Reserve, which has a beautiful plot with really old buildings, and a barrel track for barrel-rolling (which essentially replaces trucks)

Hardest-to-Find Distillery: Woodford Reserve. It's hidden in the middle of a bunch of horse farms, and there aren't really any signs. Google Maps and GPS think it's somewhere else and sent us off the beaten path. We got lost on the way there and on the way out.

Most Bizarre Tourism Moment: In the Jim Beam tasting room, which we shared with a huge group of Japanese tourists who didn't speak any English. Those poor Kentucky women pouring the bourbon didn't know what to do with them.

We also visited Buffalo Trace which was pretty unremarkable for me, but cool for Edith I think, who liked watching them bottle the Blanton's. We missed Four Roses and Wild Turkey because we ran out of time, with most tours ending around 3 in the afternoon. We were kind of sick of hearing about virgin white oak, white dog and angel's share anyway, and had gotten to the point where we just wanted to taste the bourbon.

I think some people must come and have a life-changing experience during the festival like in the movie Sideways, but for us, it was just a cool thing to do, that we could probably only do with each other.

By the time we left, I was glad to go, but maybe it was just to get back to some normal drinking water. The running water in our hotel was so gross that I didn't want to wash my hair with it.

Fare of the Country; Where Kentucky Makes Its Bourbon - The New York Times 1993
On Kentucky's Bourbon Trail - The New York Times 2007
Riding the Bourbon Trail - The Philadelphia Inquirer 2007