The week just passed

It's been a fairly intense April so far, and we're just halfway through. Here are today's talking points:
1) Ian moves to NY.
2) Jenn and Jason visit New York, and the corollary
2a) Jenn and Jason visit Ian in New York.
3) Jenn begins to wage her campaign to make Jason enjoy his birthdays more. The 2004 version of that campaign goes off very well.

Now for the particulars.

Two Saturdays ago, the 10th, saw the end of an era. Ian Allen, co-founder and artistic director of Cherry Red Productions brought his tenure in Washington to an end by moving to New York City. It is a harbinger of Cherry Red's own demise in Washington, which is well publicized and rapidly approaching (possibly more rapidly than even most CR folks believe). There were six of us on the crew that moved Ian out of DC: Ian (duh), Monique, Lucas and Lindsay, and Jenn and I. It was a bittersweet event. I've come to appreciate Ian as a dear friend over the past three years of our acquaintance, and I've relished my role as a Cherry Red insider. The past few months, beginning with Malcolm's arduous rehearsal process, have seen a marked decline in the joy I've found in Cherry Red. I still am not entirely certain whether or not the animosity he would display toward me on occasion was real or not - I doubt it was - and I have even less of a clue as to its origin. Jenn tried to explain it to me as she saw it, and it made sense to me only in a vague way, and certainly not enough sense to be able to reproduce the explanation here with any degree of understandability.

Regardless, things have been strained between Ian and I for a sizeable length of time, and though I am sad that he has moved on to the proverbial greener pasture, I am in some small measure relieved by the move as well. It's for the best, really. Not just because his acting out starting encompassing (and pissing off) more people, but because he's done with DC, and DC's done with him. The theater scene has changed since he got a taste of success. Cherry Red changed too, but the directions in which the audience changed and we changed were not the same. So after two seasons of railing against the changes, he decided to leave the city, burnt out husk of a theater town that it's become.

It was by no means a teary good-bye on Saturday, however, since Jenn and I would be seeing Ian in downtown Manhattan in a matter of days.

I saw Jenn's office Saturday after the move. She has a cool office. Her boss' is even cooler.

Sunday saw the two of us hip-deep in the preparations for going to New York. She spent the day doing laundry and packing, and I spent a good chunk of it at my office getting all of my loose ends together, making sure that nothing fell apart (that I had any control over, at any rate). We then spent the night at my house (first time that's ever happened, for either of us - something made possible by my acquisition of Ian's bed frame and box spring). We got an early enough start on Monday - a miserable day for traveling, and the first in a series of miserable, cold, rainy days - but had a hell of a time trying to get a cab down by my house. One would think that, with the circus playing at the Armory that day, you'd be able to get a cab. But you would be wrong. We got a cab just in the nick of time, and made the bus with about a minute to spare. (I hate the bus, and have since that dreadful journey from Minneapolis to Bloomington in August of 1998, and this harried start to the day didn't make for a promising journey.) I survived the bus, which was a small accomplishment, but I still made for a poor traveling companion. Jennifer retaliated by taking a nap and drooling on my shirt.

We got to the Port Authority terminal and a relative amount of free space... enough at least to walk around. We sat down at Varo's café, Jenn consuming a knish, me a couple of hot dogs surrounded by what appeared to be bagel dough. I stepped out to have a cigarette, and in my absence, Jenn's mom arrived (a planned happening - we were to meet her at Varo's, and she would accompany us back to her house on Long Island). The rest of Monday was uneventful. Marge warmed up some leftovers from Easter dinner, I met her SO Jim Duffy, who has a history worthy of being at least a peripheral character in a Tom Clancy novel. We sat and watched TV, and retired early.

One of the main goals for me this vacation week was to arise without aid from the things our society has created to aid us to wake up. So we almost always woke up whenever our systems said we were ready to. On Tuesday, we did have a bit of a schedule - meet Ian, then meet up with my friends. We took the LIRR (pronounce the letters - don't just call it the “lerr”) to Brooklyn, then metroed in to downtown. It was a miserable day, so we made a B-line for the Shakespeare Book Company, a fairly decent bookstore. While there, the plan for meeting up with Ian must have changed half a dozen times. At first we would be meeting him near NYU, then we were gonna have to go out to Brooklyn, then it was back downtown... between this and calls to her mom asking the best way to get around (because Jenn was a little rusty). Eventually we did meet up with Ian downtown on 8th street, and promptly decided to eat a late lunch at a diner just down and across the street from the book store.

This version of Ian we spent time with at the diner was more the Ian I remember and enjoyed hanging out with for the first two years I was involved with Cherry Red, the Ian who consoled me to some degree a year ago after the journals were stolen. We talked about Cherry Red stuff, and about the review for Cinema Verite, which had just come out in the Post that morning (and was lukewarm-to-indifferent), and about his roommate, the World Famous Bob.

The rain let up some while we were eating (a great burger, a fantastic pea soup), so we walked down to St. Mark's which is this little boutique-y part of the village kind of like South Street was a decade ago. Jenn bought a pair of shoes, I got some comics in this awesome comics store we found, and round about 6:00 I got a call from Ingrid letting me know that she would be at the Corner Bistro (where she, Trish and Chris were meeting up with Jenn and I for dinner and drinks) within the half-hour. Then came the ordeal of figuring out lower Manhattan. Jenn and I needed to go to the west Village, Ian needed to get on the L Train back to Williamsburg - opposite directions, really. Confusion massed upon confusion as we were trying to determine why we were all headed in the same direction, precisely which intersection we were standing at, and which direction we were pointed. This, then, had to be only moment that made any sense for a downpour to occur. So it did. And inside of 15 seconds, Jenn and I had hailed a cab, gave Ian our cursory farewells and left him somewhat stranded somewhere in the Village.

We met Ingrid outside of the Corner Bistro - there was some confusion about whether or not Chris and Trish would be joining us, though. Chris had been displaying some hesitancy toward coming back into Manhattan for an evening's romp. But he and Trish showed up not soon after we arrived. (The sudden rainstorm, coincidentally, had stopped nearly as suddenly as it had started, and it was not even sprinkling when we arrived at 4th and Jayne.) The Corner Bistro was just across the intersection from a bakery where Jenn had worked when she was 15, and our being on that corner reminded her of that occupation. The bakery is now under new ownership, and its internal arrangement is significantly different from 1986, but it was definitely a place from Jenn's past, so she reports.

The Corner Bistro was at capacity (as Ingrid had feared), so we walked down the street, to the Art Bar. The front of it was a typical bar, while the back - where we sat - had more of a lounge-thing going on. We sat, we drank, we ate, we talked, and amongst the trio of old friends (I've known Chris and Ingrid for ten years - a shocking figure, really) Jenn held her own very well. I hadn't seen Ingrid, we figured, since I visited her when I made my western PA trek in December 1997.

I don't know if they've changed a bit or I have, but the three NY SUers seemed inordinately preoccupied with pornography. I don't remember seeing that much porn in college (though my girlfriend at the time was not averse to it in the least), though Chris and I did talk about our escapades with some regularity. Maybe I really have turned more prudish in the past ten years. I don't know.

Next time, I'll resume the tale with Wednesday, and my first visit to truly hallowed ground.