Sunday, December 20, 2009

holiday party, number ten


And so concludes our segment. Ten parties down . . . and bottles and bottles of red.

What can be said about an office Christmas party at our founder's loft, but that it felt like getting drunk at a museum after hours? We sat politely at clothed tables, nibbled on spiral ham and Carr's crackers and waited to make a break for the bar.

We were given meager bonuses: a nod to the recessive fiscal environs of good ole twenty oh-nine. I received a "not cashmere" scarf in pink and brown houndstooth from my Secret Santa. No music was allowed. We wandered awkwardly through the opulence and then called it a night.

Most of us made a night of it at an NYU pub on Bleecker, but I decided to walk way the hell west in the frigid, skin-ripping wind and found myself (an hour later) on a barstool in the village, sipping a glass of Refosco with D to my left. He had the charred octopus (sensational) and we closed La Nacional. I accidentally decapitated a rose somewhere between the subway turnstile and the purchasing of seltzer.

Friday was a beautiful and much needed escape from the trappings of the daylit world.

Saturday I was back at it, auditioning The Show and staying for a seasonable nibble at the Landmarc bar, watching snow blow sideways up the glass walls of the Time Warner Center. I should have gone home—I did go home. But then it was grab those shoes and trudge back to the subway platform time because—god forbid—I did not want to be that girl who missed a milonga on account of a little weather. By the time I got home, sloughing up a foot of snow on the un-plowed sidewalk before me, it was 3:30 am and the world was white and quiet but for the ice chips flying in my face.

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