A random act of kindness from a drunken stranger was all that kept my fairly sweet New Year's Eve trip to New York from being an incredibly bad one. Several people have already written about the trip, so as usual I'm stuck trying to think of something clever to say that hasn't already been said. (N.B. this will be my last heavy dose of Phi-Speak until the next time I decide to grim it up with those jawns)
LBJ and I rolled down to New York on the RMFW on Friday morning and arrived at the Port Authority at about 1:45 that day. I called Lopez to make sure he was home (predictably he was still soiling from the previous night's bender). He gave me some typically useless advice on which subway lines to take to get to his joynt, but thankfully I had printed out the relevant section of the MTA map from the interwang before leaving Boston.
When we arrived at Lopez's apartment we found him, Steele and Rhéaume in various states of undress and soilage. While they composed themselves we hung out and checked out the surprisingly funny flick, Anchorman. After some tasty south-of-the-border fare cooked up by Lopez we headed downtown to Radio Perfecto, which Lopez et al had reserved for NYE in advance. There was open bar and hors d'oeuvres (after a $100, of course) and the scene was legit. Throughout the night the few other people there who knew me would recognize me and drunkenly shout, "Rigs!"
Things took a potentially disastrous turn around 1AM when it became evident that nobody knew what had happened to Lopez. All the other Phi's seemed to have other plans for sleeping arrangements: some people were kickin' it old school, some people were checking out girls with very large buttocks and some people were draped on complete strangers. LB and I eventually decided to just take a cab back to Lopez's apartment in the dim hope that somebody would be there to let us in.
When we arrived at his place there was nobody there to answer the buzzer. I spent the next 30 seconds thinking about how I was going to avoid sleeping on a park bench when 5 or 6 fairly drunk revelers went into Lopez's building.
"Are you trying to get in here?" they asked.
"Yeah," Laurie said, "Our friend lives here."
"It's a good thing you don't have a dishonest face!" replied our new best friend.
So at this point we were at least inside the building. We trudged up the stairs and lo and behold, the door was completely unlocked. Inside, Lopez was snoring on the couch in his boxers and socks. LB and I wearily crawled into bed where I said a silent prayer of gratitude that we weren't being accosted by pimps and crack dealers on the streets.
The next day we had a pretty money game of tag football in Central Park, where team B-Side outlasted team Q-Syyd in a spirited victory. Well it was spirited except for a couple jawns who spent most of their time chatting on their cell phones instead of focusing on their post routes. We all went to bed early (this time LB and I had a hotel room near Times Square).
On Sunday LB and I saw Democracy, which was a pretty solid show all around. I guess I'll save my in depth review for another entry, though. We kicked another BoW with the Phis and then took the bus back on Monday morning. All told, not a bad weekend.
