stormy monday

All the hatches are battened down and we're in our oilskins this morning, riding out a rough sea.

The good ship Apartment Six C is not completely water-tight, the hallway ceiling is our vulnerable point, so we're watching it close.

Windy like a bastard out there, too.

No reason to leave the ship until this evening for a Community Board meeting about the re-zoning of the Lower East Side (there are plans to turn it into a giant mall/Disney theme park "Boho Village") so I'm going to hunker down right here at the desk and let the winds blow and crack their mighty cheeks.

Great weekend. Finally saw Ethan Coen's Almost an Evening over at 45 Bleecker Street. Almost everyone dismissed it, benignly, as fluff, but I loved it. Nancy and I know half the cast so that goes a long way, but man alive, people forget that comedy is a hard thing to pull off and I laughed consistently yesterday and a few times I even startled the people around me with my whoops and shouts.

Del Pentecost always makes me laugh but I hadn't seen Joey Slotnick on stage for, oh, eighteen years, so that was a real treat. And Johanna Day and Mary McCann and Jordan Lage and Tim Hoppper and J.R. Horne are all up there reminding everyone of the depth and strength of the New York acting pool. All perfect.

But the kick, of course, is watching F. Murray Abraham and Mark Linn-Baker go at it in the last piece, The Debate. Watching Abraham as Jehova (beard, long white robe) call us all a bunch of dipshits and telling us they're called Commandments and not "Useful Fucking Suggestions" is something I'll carry and smile about for a long time.

The whole thing is well put together, as usual, by the attractive and versatile Neil Pepe.

Yesterday morning, shopping for household supplies (whiskey, hardtack, etc.) I came across a bin of CDs at the Home Basics store on Clinton Street. All marked down to 2.99. That's a penny less than three dollars, I calculated on the fly, so I bought one. It's a compilation of rock and roll classics, put out by Best Buy, the appliance and electronics store. All over the CD case it says, "For Promotional Use Only- Not for Resale", so three bucks is a bargain, right?

Great CD. Sweet Home Alabama, Maggie May, Born to Be Wild, Styx doing Come Sail Away, even has the concert version of Kiss singing Rock and Roll All Nite. Spelled "Nite", that's right.

So, using your intuitive and/or psychic powers only, today's MMMQ asks,

Is the straight-faced title of this fine compact disc:

1. Monsters of Rock

2. Rock of Ages

3. Rock, Rock, Rock!

4. Essential Rock and Roll

or

5. Damn, That's Some Good Stuff, But Whitesnake, Really?

Stay dry if you're in town today and watch those gusts.