After Miss Julie

It's that time again! Time to purchase $20 Hiptix tickets and see a play, snack, drink and enjoy free issues of Time Out New York.

This time it was After Miss Julie. The play stars Sienna Miller, famous for being blond and dating a lot of people. The only thing I ever really liked her in was Casanova, where she played opposite Heath Ledger as a rebellious feminist tomboy out of place in a formal, male dominated world. The good news: she has tons of stage presence, just absolutely draws your eye. She's a stunner! Bad news: she acted stiffly and self consciously and kept making me remember that she was Sienna Miller instead of Miss Julie.

The play is about a one night stand between a servant and his mistress and the tension over class and gender that such line crossing generates. It was not particularly resonant in this day and age, although there was a lot of discourse about WWII that could be applied to our culture now- about what it means to go to war, to be around death and blood, to try and come home and go back to all those social norms that no longer make sense. After Miss Julie was dramatic but not moving; there was no one character to feel through and not enough distance to be meta.

But all this intellectual furor was appropriately quelled by free selections of cheese, bread and veggies and glasses of beer or proseco, not to mention Halloween candy! The American Airlines theater has a nice penthouse lobby with an outdoor deck. Next play is Carrie Fisher's one woman show Wishful Drinking later this month. When in New York!

NYPD pumpkin busting

Last night we held a successful Pumpkin Xtravaganza! where we had friends over to carve pumpkins, drink pumpkintinis and pumpkin ale, listen to scary music and have fun :)

Around 10pm the cops showed up at our door. They were responding to a domestic disturbance call that one of our neighbors had made (either to try and intimidate us by getting the cops to show up b/c cops have to respond to all domestic complaints as opposed to noise complaints or because they actually thought there was domestic violence happening in our usually quite apt).

So the two cops show up and ask us if there is a problem. We tell them we are having a pumpkin carving party. Here's what the cops see: a group of around 10 twenty somethings carving pumpkins and drinking beer. As my roommate says, we are pretty lame. The cops try to fight smiles but they are secretly cracking up. They asked is we were watching the game, but we were not even that cool. We were watching America's funniest videos with the sounds turned off and the Halloween soundtrack on.

The best part is then I asked them if we needed to be quieter- b/c the neighbors ALWAYS complain when we make the least amount of noise. And the cop shrugged and said "if you want to." That was the best! They smiled again and said goodnight. Quite an action filled party!

Here are our pumpkins:

teatime

Drinking Mighty Leaf Vanilla Bean tea in it's little silk baggie. Sometimes life is purely good :) Adding the "bean" in vanilla products is a new trend to verify vanilla's green naturalness but it's more believable in tea bags where you can see bits of it floating around.

Eating at fancy places for a living

I just finished reading Frank Bruni's autobiography "Born Round"

Everyone's a critic, right? But it truly does seem like a dream job to get to eat multi-course meals at all the best restaurants in town and then have the power to uplift or skewer their trajectories. Basically writing+food=happiness. Yay!

But the path to this dream job was harder for Bruni, who recently retired after a five year stint as the NYT restaurant critic. The book is astonishingly frank (no pun intended) as it discusses Bruni's eating disorders, body hate and eventual path towards a sort of punishing exercise routine to balance out the thousands of calories he consumed every night. The highlights of Born Round are Bruni's honesty and his likability as a byronic hero.

The worst of it his body hate, the complete opposite of the current trend toward fat acceptance. For anyone who finds themselves fat and happy, reading through Bruni's cycles of bingeing & purging along with his own caustic self disgust is not really helpful. In fact it's a pretty big slide backwards. Bruni's answer to his own fat is to exercise 80 minutes plus 2 out of every 3 days with the help of a couple of trainers. That's great for him, but what about all the other fatties? Why isn't it ever okay to be fat, to eat what you want, and to exercise at a normal, manageable and affordable rate? These issues are impossible to avoid in Bruni's book.

The book ends on a more even note. Bruni was able to satiate his hunger- a larger hunger than others, he allows- and enjoy his tenure as a food critic. He learns to like his imperfect body and share it with others. Born Round is an interesting, compelling read. I just wish our society was not poisoned with such body hate in the first place or as Bruni points out, the need to super size everything. There has to be a happy balance somewhere!

Parks and Rec

NYC gyms are $75 a year. That beats any other gym by far. Even crappy gyms are usually about $10-20 a month. So it seemed obvious to me that it was the recession-ista thing to do. Plus I'm not a big gym person. Treadmills bore me to death. I have no idea what to do with weights. But I do love to swim, and in the winter I need somewhere warm to expend excess energy. Woe is me when the pretty, sun dappled paths of Central Park are slick with ice.

For the most part, the city gyms are fine. They are decently clean and safe. And in the summer the outdoor pools are fantastic :)

But the downside is that they are filled with other savvy, pushy New Yorkers. It's like the subway version of a gym. Some of the people who work there are drunk on their small amount of power and their uniforms with badges. I usually can't go there more than once a week because that's all the patience I have for the men who try to dominate all the spaces (especially obvious in the pool & weight room) and the guards who demand to see locks and enforce bureaucratic tyranny.

So it's a mixed bag. At this point I can't spend more money on a better gym, and usually I get what I need. Just sometimes, you realize why it's only $75 a year.

OMG! I'm having a gasp moment

So heard through the Perez vine that VERONICA MARS (aka Kristin Bell) will be joining the cast of Party Down, the way under appreciated new Showtime comedy about cater-waiters. I'm literally have a television nerdgasm. This makes perfect sense because VM and PD have the same producing team and tons of the VM peeps have already appeared in the show.

This is the best consolation I could have for losing Dollhouse mid second season.

The Office binge

For a long time I had no desire to watch the Office. Zip. For one, it was a show based on awkward, humiliating humor and irritating characters. Two, it was yet another American rip off of British brilliance. Three, it was based in an office and I was on a vibrantly green college campus.

But then, I got a job in an office. With a cubicle. And office politics, funny coworkers, vacation requests and recession shuffling. So I started watching because now it applied to my life, the humor was mocking things I dealt with everyday and allowing me to see a new funny light on the complex shenanigans of office interaction. And like other shows that seem acrid and biting from the outside, it turns out the Office has a heart. Even the worst of bosses can have a bit of humanity in them (ie Michael). Or love can flourish in a stifling & stale environment (Jim & Pam).

But it's really the side characters that get me. Dwight and Angela- omg they are so brilliantly funny. Its the cast dynamics that make this show. Dare I say, it's sort of like Friends that way. You tune in to watch the interpersonal dynamics, to watch Ross lose his Rachel again and again, to see everyone dependably not change. That's one of the best parts of comedy as opposed to drama- the static, reliable world that becomes like an old friend.

I still skip some parts when the show goes over the top. That's what Netflix is for!

Pumpkin Ale in the Big Apple

Ah, fall in new york. It's like a cover girl commercial: easy, breezy, beautiful. And with it comes the delicious influx of pumpkin flavored goods. Pumpkin is great as a seasonal flavor because it can go sweet or it can go spicy. It can be incorporated into soups, gelatos, muffins, breads, cookies, pies, cocktails and my most favorite of all, beer!

I've done two tastings so far of pumpkin ale and they were markedly different. I will finish off next week with the last tasting, Smuttynose's Pumpkin ale.

I started with a trip to the Brooklyn Brewery which opens it doors every Friday night and transforms the small warehouse into a frat-like party barn. $20 bucks gets you six tokens which you can trade at the bar for 6 party cups (not pints) of seasonal brews. All of the beer is pretty good but my two favorites are the Brooklyn Brown (with a malty, coca-cola flavor) and the pumpkin ale. The pumpkin is perfect; all the notes of nutmeg and spice but still a very light, crisp beer.

The next beer I had was the Coors seasonal Harvestmoon Pumpkin Ale. Now, I have a very extreme relationship with Coors. I hate Blue Moon. Detest. But I love their summer seasonal, Honeymoon. Love! So I thought I'd give this more budget friendly beer a try ($10-12 a six pack, depending on your location). It was disappointing. The pumpkin flavor was underwhelming, although if it had been marketed as a brown beer it would have been pretty decent. I thought it even tasted a little like Dogfish Head's Raison D'etre, which is in my top five of brown, malty, caramel beers.

One left to go- Smuttynose! I'll update next week.

work & play

I've been a busy little bee! Traning for new stuff at work! going to plays! having fun! work, work, play, play

Last week I attended a play of the Night of Free Theater which is a national night where theaters give out a certain amount of free tickets to get people to come. So they are usually off broadway and not much in the spotlight. I went to see Penny Penniworth at Emerging Artists Theater. It was funny because you would never find this place unless you were seeking it out. The theater is on the second floor and is not marked, but it was quite a nice space and pretty big for off broadway (well technically broadway and 19th st I think). The play was a four person farce, with the joke on Dickens. There must have been only about 20 people in the audience, but they really acted their butts off and I laughed and laughed. We gladly donated $5 at the end and received a nice pumpkin oatmeal cookie in return :)

This past weekend I worked the New York Food and Wine festival, which is basically a 3 hour tasting session where people pay around $200 to taste the food and drink of a bazillion different vendors. It was crazy! I did see some Top Chef & Iron chef celebs and enjoyed the utter chaos that is mixing wine, liquor, food and people all together.