1069 Friday Night on the Town, Sort of...

Saturday, January 13, 2007

[Later edit - screwed up the date again....]

Friday evening (last night) FirstWoman and I went to a Carl's List party in uptown Kingston. It was held in what used to be a furrier's shop, then a law office, and now an art gallery "and whatever" space on Wall Street. There was a front room, where the tables of food and drinks were, then a second round room, where two different groups played and sang, then a hall lined with restroom, kitchen, and smaller gallery rooms, leading back to a huge concrete and steel furrier vault room (very cold in there), safe door standing open.

It was an interesting space, but not really ideal for the group. Unlike last month, there were few chairs, and no tables other than those used for the food and drinks, and there wouldn't have been enough room to set tables up anyway. The round room had a double row of chairs (perhaps 20?) around the wall opposite where the band was set up, leaving the center of the room open, but people hesitated to stand in the open space in front of the seated people, so almost everyone was jammed into the front room, where it was so noisy no one could hear the music, and so crowded that a plate or drink got dumped on the floor every ten minutes or so.

It was more difficult to meet people than at last month's affair. Nobody was exactly relaxed.

We stayed two hours, and then headed to another something-or-other. (I don't know what to call these things.) The next thing was a Chronogram-hosted thingy in mid-town, in the old Shirt Factory (hi, Gypsy!) Parking was tight. We ended up parking in a 20-minute-only spot right across from the post office doors. (I'm such a rule-follower, I fussed about it for a bit.)

We had passes, so it cost us only $10 to get in. When we arrived, there was recorded music in a darkened room, with multicolored multishaped spotlights waving all around, and large projected pictures on the wall (seemed to be mostly pages from the Chronogram, a sort of free community newspaper). They had some kind of dust in the air to make the waving lights more interesting, I guess, and the dust really got to my nose.

FW was very unhappy, whether she didn't like the music, or the look of the crowd, or the fact that it wasn't open bar ($4 for wine/beer, $2 for soda/water), or what, I don't know. We were there about 20 minutes when she decided she wanted to leave, even though there was a band that was supposed to be very good slated to start within the half hour. She tried to get our money back, but the management said no. So we left.

There was supposed to be a good band in Saugerstock that FW wanted to hear. I had earlier told her that I probably wouldn't be up for Saugerstock, but since it was now only 9:45, I said ok. She was going to follow me, since she's unfamiliar with central Kingston. We got just around the corner, when she hit the horn and flashed her headlights, and stopped in the middle of her lane. I pulled over to the curb and ran back.

She had a flat rear driver-side tire.

She called 911. (Rule-follower me again: "Uh, this isn't exactly an emergency." "Well, what else are we going to do?" "Um, we could change the tire, do you have a spare?" "Yes, but @#$%^&*!!!" "Oh, ok.")

The town police actually came within minutes. Also, we happened to be stopped in front of a county cop's home, and he heard the call on his scanner, so he came out, too. They were very nice (all the police around here are always nice), they didn't even yell at FW for calling 911 or for sitting in the middle of the lane with her lights off (I was at the curb with flashers on).

They changed the tire. FW's jack was a little screw-type, so the county cop got a big pump jack out of his garage, and then when it turned out FW's donut was also flat, he provided an electric pump. We kinda had a little party there of our own. The town cops asked where we were from and where we had been, so we told them about the big party around the corner. They didn't know about it, which surprised me a bit. We jokingly told them that since they had done us a favor, we'll do them one, "if you're in the mood for writing parking tickets, try around the corner."

So Saugerstock was off. The cops advised FW against attempting the drive home to Newburgh on the thruway on the donut, so I led her to route 9W, and she limped home. I was home before 11.

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Some people object to my calling police officers "cops". I have enormous respect for good police officers, so there is no disrespect in my use of the term. I don't think it's disrespectful at all. I think maybe people who think it's disrespectful don't know where the nickname came from, and perhaps they get it confused with "pig" - same number of letters and all that. Most police officers I've met don't seem to object to "cop" - after all, that real-life TV show is called "Cops". So there.

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Some idiot woman brought a dog to the Carl's List party. I don't know what was going on in her head. It was a Jack Russell-Chihuahua mix, a little bitty very nervous beasty. It wouldn't have been so bad if the woman had held the doggie in her arms, or if she had positioned herself in an out of the way spot, but no, he was on the floor, in the middle of the room, on a leash. The room was very crowded, people stepping back to let others through and all that. The little dog almost got trampled several times, and looked very frightened. I was just waiting for someone to trip over him and fall on him, or get nipped. The woman acted completely oblivious. She was way past old enough to know better.

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At the Chronogram party, there were several men about our age at the table next to ours. They looked like businessmen who'd gotten lost, really uncomfortable and out of place. They brightened when they saw FW and me, one pulled out my chair for me, and so on. But for some reason, FW was already turned off by the place, and wasn't at all welcoming, thunder faced, so that went nowhere.

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And that was my big night out.
Sigh.
.