Quality Family Time

[NOTE: MANY MORE PICTURES TO BE ADDED ONCE MY SISTER GETS OFF HER ASS AND SENDS THEM TO ME]

After a 5 hour delayed flight, my little sister and brother-in-law flew in to visit me for a long weekend. After giving them the standard tour of historic New York City sights, we stopped by Canal street to buy fake purses, scarves, jewelry, etc. Upon our immediate arrival, we succeeded in getting into one small and fruitless backroom. I told them basically there were 50+ backrooms, so if they don’t see anything they like here, they can just try the next place. Well as we were walking, I didn’t hear the tell-tell beckoning call/whisper of GUCCI, PRADA, COACH, ROLEX. Plus all the jewelry, purses, and sunglasses out in the open were closed up or covered with hanging sheets. Now I’ve only seen this behavior once before and it was when the police were patrolling the area. Sadly we were turned away by every back room being told that they were “closed”.

I don’t think I made our chances of getting into a room any easier when I approached a small Asian store keeper and said “purses….”. She replied in a hushed whisper “what looking for”. I blurted out “COOCHIE” which was supposed to be Coach or Gucci! She gave me a confused look and motioned to move on.

Well we paraded up and down Canal street for an hour desperately looking for any open backroom because we had a list of items to get for back home. Finally Aaron (who is a good foot taller than the crowd) spots a small Asian woman poke out a back door and beckon some customers. He points and said “Tiff look”. As we all turn to start towards the door, a burly man in a cap standing next to Aaron turns to him and says “thanks” before pushing us all aside and barreling towards the woman yelling “POLICE!”. We watch in horror (okay amusement) as the woman tries to flee back behind the door and lets out this squeaky ‘ahhh’ scream while the policeman slams her against the wall and searches her. The shock is written all over Aaron & Tiff’s faces and he says “I think I just busted them”. Yep, if the policeman thanks you, you probably helped them out. The rest of the day we noticed the out of place men with earpieces peaking out from under their stocking caps milling with the crowds. We even passed the center of operations van which was open and full of electronic equipment, radios, and more plain clothes policemen.

The next day we went to the Broadway play Legally Blonde. Okay sometimes the movie does not translate directly to the stage. Case in point, it was sooooo much dirtier/racy than the cute and cheesy movie. Seriously, they jiggled each other’s boobs, pledged their love over holding one’s hair back while the other pukes, and even had a song entitled “Gay or European”. Hilarious I swear but soooo not appropriate for children and guess what, the theatre was full of them! I had on girl behind me who obviously owned the original score CD and played it more often than Hannah Montana or some other tween shit and memorized the whole fucking thing! Seriously, she would sing along (even for the boy parts) in a wispy airy high pitched little girl voice that melted my eardrums. I kept looking over my shoulder at her in an effort to quiet her down or at least shun her for repeating some non age appropriate premarital sex lyric. One time I caught her mother’s eye and then put my finger to my lips as if to silently say “put a muzzle on that underage bitch, I paid good money and want to hear real performers sing, not your trampy little eleven-year-old, sheesh…oh and Santa Claus isn’t real”. It got so bad that during intermission, I gave the usher my ticket and asked her to have security tell the girl to shut the hell up. Kids suck balls.

Tiff forced Aaron (according to him) to watch all of the Sex in the City seasons, so their hours and hours of dedication were rewarded with the official tour. Granted Aaron was one of the few males who actually was not dragged onto the tour. One of the stops involved seeing “Carrie’s stoop” which is basically down in the West Village even though the show depicted it on the upper east side. I had been on the tour once before, and the guide let us take pictures actually sitting on the steps as long as we did it one at a time and quickly. Well the tour guide this time was a real hard case and only let us walk single file along the opposite side of the street. You could see how the level of naughtiness progressed as you got towards the end of the line. The first few took pictures of the stairs from afar, the next took pictures of them with the stairs in the far background, the next took a step back, the next stood in the middle of the street, and finally the last (us since I knew it would be okay) actually ran across the street and sat down on the steps. By that time the majority of the group was down the block and around the corner. The few girls dragging in the back saw that we were able to actually sit on the steps and were like, oh hell I why not. Well while we were walking back to the bus, the tour guide whipped around the corner, ran by us, and started shouting at the girls for sitting on the steps which is a clear violation of a public sidewalk. Oh well, I don’t feel too bad about getting them on the bad side of the tour guide since they were able to take home pictures that were better than 90% of the rest of the group.

Monday was a “only in New York” day. We started off by signing up for Letterman tickets. I guess we were interviewed (although it was brief) and Aaron aced it, so we got tickets. We ended up sitting front row in the left part of the audience. Dave came out and asked everyone about getting a tick disease and a woman in the audience said she also had it. I think she stole the show when Dave asked “well what did the doctor tell you when you visited him?” and she said “menopause”. Seriously, the rest of the show, Dave kept bringing up menopause. One of the guests was Demi Moore and she is decidedly crazy. Yep, I was there when she talked about the leaches. Totally crazy! You could tell Dave thought it was all nonsense and asked her if there was actual proof that the leaches provided some kind of benefit you. She was all “well they do blood tests, oh yeah the test show that your blood is cleansed, oh well the leaches release this enzyme that thins your blood so it totally makes it better, yeah the enzyme”. Okay does anyone else immediately think ASPIRIN! Later the Counting Crows sang a song and I swear the lead singer was tripping on acid. He kept moving around and feeling his body like it was all electric or something. Ah well, I still like the band regardless.

Afterwards we headed up to the upper east side to watch an episode of Gossip Girl being filmed. Yeah, there is a website that tells you where all the shows are filming in NYC. We rounded the corner and saw the lights and equipment up and got all excited. Well we failed to register that the actress ‘Jenny’ brushed right by us. Yeah she walked by and Tiff and I paused and started giggling. Aaron asked what was up and lamented “Jenny…really! She is my favorite! Tiff why didn’t you tell me”. We stood on the opposite side of the street and watched them film a whole herd of extras entering the building and passing by a heated conversation between ‘Nate’ and ‘Vanessa’. We suspect that the two are trying to break up ‘Dan’ and ‘Sabrina’. Don’t you love teenage soap operas! The next scene was of exiting the building, so they were shooting right at us! Yeah, we were totally in the background of the camera shot. Aaron whipped out his phone and pretended to talk (I guess that is his way of acting) while Tiff and I just gap mouthed stared like proper tourists. Yeah, it didn’t fool anyone, and they asked us to move out of camera. What, you want it to be real right!

That night we went to a Knicks game at the Madison Square Garden. I’ve always wanted to go and see a really horrible team play. Too bad I couldn’t wait two more days until the Knicks played the Heat. Talk about a pillow fight. The only interesting part was the half time show where circus performers bounced around with giant inflatable tubes jammed in their crotches.