Awwww, yeah! It's the March Roundup! You know the dilleo: in here you'll find all the pics I took in March that didn't end up in an entry of their own!
Wednesday, March 1st
Late Wednesday night, Chris and Andrew arrived in NYC! I met these guys on a jungle trek in Thailand (back in the spring of 2005) and when I heard that they were going to be stopping in NYC for a couple of days before heading home to the UK, I told them they were more than welcome to crash at our apartment.
After the birthday cake had been sliced up, passed around and eaten, Siege brought out the special "King Cake" that his mom sends up from New Orleans every year! A "King Cake" has a little plastic baby baked into it and if you end up getting the piece of cake that contains said baby, YOU ARE THE KING! In this case, the Kingship entitled you to VIP treatment at the stripclub the party was soon moving on to!
Here's a group shot of a whole bunch of us waiting for a car service to show up to take us to the "next location!" By the way, what's that Nina's doing to KT over there in the corner?
Next stop on the "It's Siege's Birthday!" party train? Pumps! (For those of you not in the know, Pumps is a shady-ass biker-gang n00dy bar out in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The people at the bar aren't typically too welcoming to "outsiders," but they tolerated us because we showed up with a whole bunch of girls who were all willing to get up on stage and dance! Hahah. Here's Ellen and Katie up on THA POLE!
Brandon was in town from Budapest and he came to the Annex to meet up with us! (Which meant that I was now hanging out in the Annex with two guys I met while traveling in Thailand who were in New York staying with me and a guy that I met because he read this site and offered to put Grant, Jake and I up at his friends' houses in both Berlin and Budapest! Crazytown!).
Chris thought that March in NYC would mean warm temperatures and didn't have a coat with him. Whoopsie! Here he is diagonally zipping-up his face to hide it from the 20° wind chill on the walk home! Hahah.
While I was at the bar getting us one more round of drinks before heading out, I started chatting with the really cute girl on the left (yep, the one making the awesomely stupid face). While were chatting, Miye and Miriam came over and introduced themselves and we learned that the girl had just moved into town from somewhere in the Midwest and didn't know many people in town yet. We invited her to come out with us and she agreed but then the people that she was there with came over and they were these horrible, JAPpy modeling agency casting director type harpies that you'd see on one of those VH1 shows about New Yorkers that try to act like their life is JUST LIKE Sex and the City and they whisked her away from us...never to be heard from again. Until...I awkwardly ran into her on the street the very afternoon!
My ugly face! (Hahahah. Jesus. I know I've done this face like a million times and I should be used to it...but even I've got to say that this particular instance is shockingly ugly!
When it came time for Miye and Miriam to joing up for a TEAM UGLY FACE, I gotta say I was pretty impressed with their initial offering. But, as the saying goes, practice makes perfect...
...I think it's safe to say that Meredith and my TEAM UGLY FACE prevailed. The best thing about "UGLY FACE" is that it usually always leads to you making friends with people who overhear you laughing and are like "Yo, what the FUCK are you guys doing?" And then after you explain their like "Oh..."
"...can we try?" Hahaha. Here are three totally random strangers joining in for the TEAM UGLY FACE! Then, just when I was beginning to think that the night couldn't get any better, who should stroll into the bar?
That's right! It's ASIAN PORNO LADY! (For any readers who may be new, Asian Porno Lady is an Asian lady (duh!) who goes into East Village bars in the wee hours of the night with a little push cart that contains packs of cheap smokes and hundreds of bootlegged porno DVDs. She announces her arrival by subtly yelling out in a thick Chinese accent: "Smokes! Porno! Cigarettes! Asian Pooooooooor-no!").
Even the bartender came over to check out my purchases! (I'm not even that big of a fan of this kind of porno, I just know that if there's an tiny Chinese lady running around bars in the middle of the night selling bootlegged porno, I've got to motherfucking support her!)
Hahahahaha. This photo is comedy gold. Miye literally could not believe how big this girl's asshole was. She just kept pointing at it and laughing. She totally couldn't get her head around it (but I bet she could get "it" around her head! Ha!).
This picture was taken on March 4th after midnight which means that it was technically taken on MEREDITH'S BIRTHDAY!!! WOOOOO! Happy 26th Birthday, Gorgeous! I love you! She didn't really feel up to going out on a Saturday night (the Lower East Side on a Saturday night = Guido Nightmare), so we had a nice, quiet birthday celebration in her apartment.
Later that night Meredith and I went back to my apartment where we discovered that one of my British house guests had come home sooooooo drunk that he couldn't even be bothered to inflate their auto-inflating bed! So here's a pic of Chris totally just sleeping on the hardwood floor. Ouch!
On Tuesday night I went to some bar that Leigh was promoting a new party at. Merlin was there for the party, while I was there for the FREE PIZZA! (PS - How much do you love the fact that it looks like we're wearing different colored versions of the SAME WIG!)
Julien was there with a really sore throat. I told him that if he opened his mouth really wide, I'd take a picture of it so he could see how red it was!
Update! Little Ms. Leigh Lezark just IMmed and reminded me that the reason I was actually sticking my camera down Julien's throat wasn't because he was sick, it was because he has two uvalas (the hangy ball in the back of your throat) and I was trying to get a picture of them!)
On Thursday night I stopped by that speak-easy bar in the Lower East Side (the one that used to be called the Lansky Lounge) and ran into Will McD! It's a running joke that we both look like the bad guys from the movie The Karate Kid, so here we are pulling our best impressions of "Bad Sensei" and "Sweep the Leg Johnny."
The crowd was entertained, though! Well, everyone in the crowd except for Larson! He's the guy in the navy shirt who's totally just glaring and waiting for her to hurry up and finish so that his turn to sing can happen sooner).
Finally, it was Larson's turn to take the stage! He always comes prepared...and by prepared I mean he always carries around an inflatable guitar with him just in case karaoke breaks out.
After watching the karaoke competition (I didn't RSVP in time to be a contestant), I headed over to Pianos to SING some karaoke! Hahah. Here's me and Shanthrax.
Sparkle Boots was there! This was a girl that Fatty dated for a while (whose proper name I still don't know because we all just called her Sparkle Boots!).
I also ran into Kevin (only his red Super Mario pants and blue shirt are visible in this photo). He's a karaoke character that I know from way back in the early Nolita Tavern days of Sid & Buddy karaoke! I'll never forget the night the karaoke machine broke and the 5 or 6 of us that were there all agreed to go up and sing our karaoke songs a capella! Every one did fun, sing-a-long type songs and then Kevin went up and sang the theme song from M*A*S*H. (You know, the one that has 8 verses, each followed with a refrain that goes "suicide is painless." Needless to say, no one really felt like singing again (ever!) after he'd finished!
...and I smoked so much pot that my eyes got teeny tiny and I kept laughing so hard that I was crying. I'm not even sure if we ended up watching a movie. Yay, movie night!
Later, while walking down Houston Street I came across this flier taped to a pole near Ave B and totally lost my shit. Hahaha. This is probably only instantly funny if you've ever lived in NYC and know about the infamous "Man with a Van" moving dude who used to be the king of flier self-promotion. Looks like someone (with a giant magic marker!) decided to try to one-up him. Hahah.
And it turns out she was there with a girl, who now I realize in retrospect, I might have at one time traded dirty photos with online but had never actually met in person....er, until now. So, yeah, nice to meet you. (Awkward!)
On the walk back east, Grant and I came across this poster advertising the sequel to Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime (the album that basically defined the year 1988 for me). There was only one thing that could express how we felt about the fact that Queensryche had finally gotten around to releasing the sequel Mindcrime 18 years later...
