Meghan Taylor Mastro

It’s Wednesday and it’s a day off. And it’s actually a pretty good day too. I did not go to the Cigar Night at the Eagle. Too much trouble, bringing a change of clothes and then a schlep from the 8th Avenue train to 28th Street and 11th Avenue.

Not worth my time. If they ask at work I’ll think of something to say. And I also had an interview of sorts this morning.

I applied for a position online and was under consideration for a few weeks. It was a tease mainly but today the agency had me in to meet with me to see if I passed muster.

Bill was able to print out the resume for me and I met him on the corner of 43rd Street and Broadway as he made the hand off. I walked right up to him and gave him a great big kiss (mwah!), then headed up to 56th Street.

I was dressed business casual and therefore did not sweat as much as I usually do. I sat in a sleek lobby and waited for Marisa to meet with me. I heard the click clack of high heels approaching and figured that it was my recruiter.

It was.

She was nice and looked at my resume as we chatted about previous salaries and bonuses, all the while she would complain every couple of minutes about the problems the keyboard was giving her. She left after about 15 minutes and in came Erica who also posted a similar job.

I met with Erica for just a few minutes and thanked her while wondering if there was any info regarding my status. Nothing I could do about that. I walked down to the Path train in the shadows of the skyscrapers on Sixth Avenue. Barely anyone headed back to Hoboken, leaving me to sit in an empty car that was fully air conditioned.

Came home, sent a thank you email and had a decent lunch before running out and dropping off clothes at the dry cleaners for Bill & myself and also picking up Bill’s laundry. After that I just chilled out at home for a few hours, watching the Daily Show and the Colbert Report which I rarely see anymore.

It was too nice a day to stay indoors and walked over to the river where I read the news and New York magazine. Also talked on the phone with Meghan Taylor Mastro, whom I might see on Monday when she starts painting the new Guitar Bar which will be on 11th Street in Hoboken.

I was out long enough to meet up with the UPS guy parked outside the post office and picked up a toaster over that Annemarie’s friend Audra has been trying to send me for a couple of weeks. It’s a lovely toaster oven.

For some reason ‘He’s Got the Whole World In his Hands’ and ‘The Way We Were’ have been playing endlessly in my head today. I know ‘Whole World’ is in my head after reading the lines in an article about an English footballer, but Barbra Streisand?

“Can it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line? If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me would we? Could we? Memories, may be beautiful and yet, what’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget. So it’s the laughter, we will remember, whenever we remember…the way we were.”

Oh Alan & Marilyn Bergman and Marvin Hamlisch, what have you wrought?

I’m looking forward to watching Macca from his White House Gershwin Prize tonight on PBS.

Saturday night. Things are getting back to what could only be described as relative normalcy. Last night was quiet. Juan was out gallivanting, Bill back in Stuyvesant Town.

I watched Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which was actually the first Charlie Chaplin film I had seen from start to finish. Also the first Chaplin film that I had seen where he actually speaks.

I never knew that he spoke in his later films and often wondered how long he would have done silent roles. Apparently in 1940 he was speaking in films. According to Wikipedia it was Chaplin’s first talking picture.

It was a daring movie that he made, since the US was at ‘peace’ with Germany at the time and it certainly pissed Hitler off which was an added bonus. A year later we were at war with the Axis powers.

After that I basically started reading a book that I had gotten from the library, John Lennon- The Life by Philip Norman. Supposed to be the best biography of Lennon so far. It is pretty good.

Philip Norman wrote an excellent biography on the Beatles in the 1980’s called Shout! The Lennon book was written with Yoko Ono’s blessing and she asked her son Sean and Paul McCartney to cooperate with the author, which they did.

But as luck would have it, once Yoko and Paul read the galleys they both did some furious backpedaling and denounced the book.

So far the only dodgy thing was John accidentally touching his mother’s breast and wondering what else he could get away with.

That would raise some eyebrows, but Yoko did give access to Lennon’s diaries and journals and as great a songwriter and musician Lennon was, he was also a flawed individual and he would probably be the first to admit it.

It’s a weighty tome and carried some heft as I had it in my shoulder bag and wandered around Manhattan en route to the Guggenheim Museum where I was meeting Bill and Meghan Taylor Mastro with Lily and Ruby, as well as Pat Paterson and his wife, the one and only Ann Boyles Paterson.

I do prefer going to art galleries instead of museums but the Guggenheim was on the agenda so it was off to the Upper East Side. Bill got there a minute or two before me and as we were waiting for the others Juan called wondering what was going on.

It was around 3:00 and he had just woken up. Nice life, which Juan has. I would have invited him along but this was the first I had heard from him since yesterday. He was cool with it, he had to go back to Trenton anyhow.

The Glen Ridge contingent arrived and soon we were inside the Frank Lloyd Wright designed building. I’m always reminded of the roller skating joke from Hannah and Her Sisters regarding the rotunda of the Guggenheim.

After walking around being nonplussed at the exhibitions we were on the street again, $18.00 lighter in each of our wallets. We could have gone to the Bergen County History Museum and looked at the mastodon bones, that would have been cheaper.

I used to go there with Annemarie when I was growing up. It was cheap then, but could be about the same price as the Guggenheim nowadays.

We decided on a bus downtown so we would roll past the Rockefeller Christmas Tree. Unfortunately it was stop and go traffic for about 40 blocks which screwed up my spine somewhat.

Still the company made all the difference and we had shared some truffles and other chocolates and had many laughs as well as taking snapshots of each other. Bill and I got off at 14th street, the others continued onto the West Village to meet up with Jim Mastro.

After parting ways with Bill I stopped by Farfetched to try to persuade Harpy to come with me to see Ann and Meghan but he just wanted to go home after working retail in a shop that’s taken quite a beating this holiday season.

Nothing that Farfetched has done, just that no one is buying anything anywhere these days.

So now I’m home, just had a nice dinner, watched a decent documentary on Groucho Marx and here I am sitting at Bill’s Mac and writing this.

What have YOU been up to?