Skinny fella in a charcoal P-coat sitting at a table in the window of the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at 86th and Amsterdam.
He's got middling gray, shaggy hair, but it looks washed, and generic black restaurant sneakers, and a mustache, and a pile of Zabars receipts on the surface in front of him.
I make a call, struggling to hear over the corporate coffee music mix - Elvis Costello meets Taylor Swift, Serge Gainsbourg and Tina Turner, then a Carribbean sounding cover of the classic Rolling Stones track, "Angie" - and the fella turns his head, chin on his left shoulder, to leer at me.
Now, in front of him he has a coupon supplement from a newspaper. A supermarket rag with specials on lunch meats. I'd disturbed his reading, and now he turns back, shakes his head, turns the page to the tomatoes.
There was this bum on Bond Street that made his home on a thin pad of boxes next to a failed bank, out in the open - not tucked into a doorway but out toward the center of the sidewalk.
I'd seen him there last winter, bloated and fat and refusing a coffee from a stranger. He wore a black sweatshirt over layers, a large knit cap and bare feet. I tried to speak with him and he answered with a sort of rhythmic nonsense, and would crescendo to a shout, his eyes wild as if desperate to make me comprehend:
"Fa-fa fa-fa fa sha faaaa faaaa!"
I saw him in spring in the same spot, catty-corner from a new Chinese bistro, but now his hat dwarfed his cheeks. He'd shed his winter skin, gone forth and returned home half himself, like he'd gotten younger. And then, in spring, he added an extra phrase to his spewing:
"Fa-fa fa-fa fa sha faaaaa faaaa! Fa-fa sha-fa sha-sha fa!"
Every afternoon, and in the snow and rain, a dark-haired woman pushes an ancient German Shepherd in an oversized baby carriage down the north side of 78th Street and into Riverside park.
In the park, the tiny woman, who in the cold wears a parka that covers her face, lifts the Shepherd out of the carriage and sets her lightly on the ground, to pee or just to feel the grass.
After 15 minutes or so, the woman lifts the dog, gingerly moving her past the carriage's jogging tires and into the basket, letting her debilitated hind quarters rest. The dog props herself up with her front paws, her ears always back and tight to her head.
The woman pushes the carriage back up the hill on 78th Street, across West End just before sunset. The woman pushes the carriage again and again.
-11/20-
West Cafe's about to close. It's quarter of five on Saturday and the musician and artist Robert A.A. Lowe walks in and looks my way. We've met but he clearly has no recollection of me, tousling his wiry beard before heading right toward the counter.
West, named for Vaudeville star Mae West, has a saloon style bar and half of a swinging saloon door leaning against a baron white wall with the message "BEER + WINE COMING SOON" scrawled in chalk at on the door's top panel. Its denizens sit on a series of pine-colored church pews set end to end against the back wall.
The counter girl with the half-shaved scene hair has left, and I'm relieved to not have to give her a review of the vegan raspberry muffin she guilted me into trying.
"What kind of muffins are those," I'd asked.
"Well, they're all vegan," she said.
"Maybe not," I said, "I like eggs in my bread." By bread I meant baked goods.
"Well, you know most bread doesn't have eggs," she said. "Just putting that out there."
"Okay. Fine. I'll try one," I said, "you convinced me.The raspberry." This was a healthy choice for me, I said.
"Oh that's not healthy. Just because it doesn't have animal products doesn't mean it's healthy," she said, handing me the eggless, butterless muffin on a white saucer, the base of the muffin nestled into the teacup groove.
It's time to go and she's left and two girls with riding boots and stretchpants stand at the counter waiting for coffee or a bagel - which usually doesn't have eggs in it, unless it's an egg bagel - a point I made to the girl with the dark scene hair and sleeveless shirt.
"Except those," she said, flush.
Robert A.A. Lowe has left and two girls in riding boots wait at the counter at five.
-Joel Silverstein
-11/11-We walk in late, past the press and downstairs, where we run into the actress S. Epatha Merkerson and her date. She and Belzer joke about having to descend two flights into the orchestra, as in a dungeon. Have a shot at the orchestra level bar before the curtain goes up. Belzer tilts his head to the side after taking his tequila.
Same show we saw on Saturday mornings as kids, but live and with a few updates for cultural relevance - like a nod to gay marriage and Pee Wee's obsessive jaunt on the social web - and a self-deprecating jab or two by Reubens. Brilliant in the way that reliving ephemera can be, 20 years later. Magic word and all.
When the lights go up, the writer Fran Lebowitz is there, and she and Belzer embrace, before conferring with Lisa Robinson, music journalist extraordinaire, on how best to get access to Reubens to say hello.
He isn't seeing anyone until the party, so we head to the party at some superstructure of the Bryant Park Grill, where cast members are trickling in and a press line is set up. I skirt around the cameras while the rest pose, and then we all find a table and sit watching the crowd.
I notice the dancing bear coming in, now in a suit and tie, and mention to Merkerson that "he cleans up nice."
"You recognized him?" Lebowitz says. "I wouldn't have recognized him if he came in with his bear head on." She has her own premiere coming Monday, Scorcese's documentary portrait of Lebowitz, "Public Speaking," which will air on HBO.
It's made clear that the real party was inside the restaurant and we all get up.
Alan Cumming waves at the group and everyone filters into a booth in the corner. Belzer and Lebowitz go out to smoke.
Outside, Rosie O'Donnell sits on a park bench next to the actress Natasha Lyonne and they are talking with Radio Man, whose real name is Craig Schwartz, a fixture at New York film and television sets on location in the city. He wears a small boom-box fixed with a rope around his neck.
"What you don't recognize me 'cause I lost a little weight?" O'Donnell says to Schwartz.
-Joel Silverstein
