I was getting pretty tired after all that burrito, but Mike said he was feeling good so we hunkered down and slip and slided our way through the rain into NYC around 3 AM. This gave us ample time to meet up with Mike's friend Ben for a couple drinks and a few games of darts before we headed back to our crash spot for the night. We'd be staying with Ben's girlfriend, Lauren in Queens. She had room for two of us in the apartment, which was awesome because it meant two of us would also get to stretch out in the van.
After an hour of searching near her place we finally found a parking spot around 5AM. This meant someone would have to wake up at 8 to move the van for street cleaning, a ritual they celebrate nearly everyday in NYC which was odd to me as they only do this once a month in Chicago. The argument over who would be the unlucky soul to wake up and drive around for another couple hours in Friday morning traffic looking for another non-street cleaning spot was underway. None of us had gotten any sleep really so far this tour so this was a tense debate. It was decided that either Adam I would do it, and that we would figure it out in the morning... a plan I could already see failing miserably.
Adam and I went up to Lauren's apartment to use the bathroom before we would head back down to the van, when Ben suddenly remembered the greatest news I would hear all trip. Apparently, Sukkot, the Jewish "feast of booths" happened to fall on Oct. 13 this year. And according to the NYC parking website there would be no street cleaning on the 13th or the 14th or any major Jewish holiday for that matter... At 5 AM on Thursday, after not having got a real night's sleep for 6 days, I almost broke down in tears. Adam and I embraced each other in reverence to our new favorite Jewish holiday.
We skipped to the van like little girls and slept like babies. The blaring horns and screaming cabbies that would try to wake us up two hours later didn't stand a chance.
We woke up around noon feeling refreshed and decided to kill the day using Lauren's internet and watching Flintstones cartoons. Chad cooked up some awesome potato, cabbage, sausage breakfast casserole and we all ate some home cooked food.
Around 6 PM we made the drive over to the Upper West Side to perform at a private party at the bar that Ben manages called Bar Thalia. Bar Thalia was a ritzy little lounge located right under Symphony Space theaters.
Ritzy would be understating it. The clientele looked like this.
And by day 7 we looked like this
It was an obvious match.
We homelessly launched into our set around 10 PM and after about 2 and a half minutes into the first song, the mic's went down and the power to the amps behind us suddenly disappeared. After a few minutes of assuming it was because we smelled, we were informed there was a Celtic musical going on in one of they Symphony Space theaters above us. It reminded me of the good ole days, when the neighbors used to call the cops every time we got together to practice. It was understandable though, and we were happy to push back our set an hour when the theater goers would leave the show and come down to the bar.
We began our set around 11 and performed for a small but lively crowd for an hour. We had a great time hanging out with Lauren and Ben after the show, and it turned out most people were not offended by our smell, probably just a few.
The Celtic group eventually came down from the theater upstairs and serenaded us for the rest of the night while we took shots of Irish whiskey and played Hungry Hungry Hippos.
Thank you so much to Ben and Lauren for all support and hospitality! Night one was a blast!
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