After dinner, Vin and I went out for drinks. Here's my attempt at trying to make a halo over Vin's head by waving a candle around in a circle. Mostly just caused a blurry Vin.
On Thursday night I went to a Korean restaurant in Brooklyn to surprise Vin on his birthday. Here's Aya and Josh with the birthday boy right after we surprised him!
I took a bunch of his drawings that he scanned and built him a website to show off some of his portfolio! Looking to hire a great illustrator in New York City? Check him out!
After about 30 minutes of waiting, word came down that they'd be called into the Justice's chambers in just a couple of minutes! Here's Vin striking his last "disco pose" as a single man!
Meredith caught Vin and I taking one of our signature "Tough Guy" photos that we've been doing as joke since at least 1998, and wanted to give being a "tough guy" a shot.
On Saturday afternoon, Meredith and I met up with Vinay (seen here holding a disposable camera that I found that was from back when he and I were in college!)...
Since I like to play devil's advocate (almost as much as I like to see people I love get kicked in the face by accident), I asked Eric to see how close he could come to kicking Vin in the face without actually hitting him. (Pretty darn close!)
On Saturday night I met up with Vin and Eric P. (who I hadn't seen since college back in '98!) and we went to our friend Connor's house party to see Conor and Josh play in a new band.
I hadn't really planning on doing anything to celebrate my actual birthday, but I relented and decided to text a few people and see if anyone was available to meet up for a last-minute, low-key dinner at Kate's Joint. A few people texted back so at 8:30 Meredith and I headed over to Kate's to meet up with Ellen, Vinay...
Later that night I met up with a whole bunch of old school friends to do a little bar pre-gaming before going to see Lifetime (one of my fave bands) play at the Bowery Ballroom. Here's Vin and Dave.
...to celebrate Vin's birthday! Ninja is a theme restaurant and when you walking in the entrance, all you find is a 5' x 5' room with a hostess and two big, stainless-steel elevator doors. The hostess gets your name, quietly whispers something into a walkie-talkie, and the elevator opens. It takes you down one floor and then you're led to your table (by a ninja!) through a dark, twisty passage where all sorts of other ninjas jump down off of platforms and pop out of trap doors and scare the shit out of you. Here's Vin waiting for the elevator to open!
After the book store, Vin came over to Sarah's (where I was still staying before moving into my new apartment with Niki in a few days) and I gave him a bunch of nerdy Japanese action figures that I'd bought for him in Tokyo.
Grant arrived and literally couldn't stop laughing. Not only were we hysterically laughing we were also worrying the whole time like "Oh shit, how's he going to react? How are the neighbors going to react? Are they going to be pissed? Could the co-op board kick Fatty out of the building? WHAT HAVE WE DONE???" Hahahah.
Even though the mural wasn't finished yet, it was getting close to 6pm and we decided we'd better clean up for the day, hide all the evidence and clear out before Fatty got home.
Speed was of the essence! Fatty was going to be home from work around 6:30 and we had to have all the supplies cleaned up and the mural hidden away (more on that later) before he came home!
Vin was blazing along! In just three hours time, he'd managed to prime the wall with a few coats, sketch out the mural, and finish the Puerto Rican flag background!
Here's a view from the door to Fatty's apartment to give you an idea of the size. Clearly, this thing was going to be visible to pretty much everybody.
Fatty's apartment has this totally awesome private deck. But pretty much every single apartment in his building has a window that looks out onto his courtyard...so the mural we were about to paint would be visible to his entire BUILDING! (We hoped he'd find the mural hilarious, but we also had a huge bucket of white cover-up paint ready as a contingency plan in case any of the people in his building freaked out).
It was crazy to watch him work! Totally shocking to see how nicely it was shaping up when this was pretty much his first time working with spray paint!
After the flag background had dried (which in the 95+ degree heat didn't take too long) Vin used tape to mask out the flesh tones and started on the next layer of the mural.
And before I had a chance to change my mind, Vin busted out his roller and started priming his canvas. DOH! I was literally FREAKING OUT at this point like "Holy shit, holy shit. We're actually doing this! I hope he doesn't flip his shit!" Hahahah. A few minutes later, I got a call from my soon-to-be roommate Niki! We'd gotten the apartment we wanted and she needed to meet up with me so that we could finalize some paper work and submit it. I was only too happy to have an excuse to leave the scene of the crime.
We commissioned Vin as our vandal, er, artist...and on Sunday (with seven days left until Fatty's birthday), he came over to my apartment to look at pictures of Fatty and start sketching out some ideas for the mural.
Sweet shirt, btw. (Afterwards, we went back to my room at Sarah's apartment and started plotting our evil plan to paint a mural out on Fatty's back deck).
I tried to get Vin to wear it for a picture and he was like "No way, if anyone sees a picture of a brown guy in a bio-warfare mask, the terror alert status is going to increase. Fuck that." Hahahaha.
...and drove to nearby New Milford, CT to pick up Vin at his parent's house and bring him back down to NYC (coincidentally, Vin and The Fatty both grew up in New Milford).
On Sunday we headed back to Thompkins Square Park to enjoy the sunshine. (From L to R: Matt Lavin aka "Buddy" from Sid & Buddy fame, Vin, me and the Tins).
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