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brother can you spare some matzos?
Tuesday, April 2 2002
Today I met Gretchen down on 7th Avenue in Park Slope so we could do some bank business and a little shopping for ourselves and the keyads. After cat litter, the most important thing we needed to pick up was more matzos. When she'd done her pre-Passover food run, Gretchen hadn't anticipated how much of the stuff I'd be eating.
Unfortunately, though, Park Slope's matzos supplies had been depleted by the huge Jewish population of the area and we couldn't find it anywhere, not in Key Foods, not in any of the Korean-operated bodegas, not even in the Park Slope Food Co-op (which Gretchen just rejoined). Mind you, we weren't the only ones out hunting for matzos; we overheard one gentleman asking a couple Latino bodega employees if they had any in stock, explaining, "You know, it's for Jews...?"
On the walk back home, Gretchen hatched an emergency plan for securing more matzos. She'd go visit a nearby Hasidic group home on Prospect Park West and explain her predicament. Surely they'd be sympathetic to her plight.
But when she knocked at the door to their den of orthodox extremism, no one responded. So she wandered down to the Beth Elohim reformed synagogue at the corner of Garfield and 8th Avenue. There she found matzos a'plenty, for only $2/box.
This evening Gretchen and I overcame certain motivational difficulties and rode the subway to Tribeca to partake in a birthday bash being held for Ray's friend Hot Tom at Puffy's Tavern in Tribeca.
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Tribeca sits directly underneath the site of the World Trade Center commemorative spotlights, the bluish beams of light standing in place of the erstwhile towers (though the spotlights are not actually located at the World Trade Center disaster site itself). From Tribeca, the ghostly foreshortened beams are rather impressive, since (as Gretchen pointed out) they have none of the used car lot qualities they have when viewed from Brooklyn.
Puffy's Tavern is, I suppose, your fairly typical trendy Tribeca watering hole, complete with overpriced watered-down drinks, a squeezably cute bartender with flamboyantly dyed hair, and an all-80s jukebox. I'm eagerly awaiting the day when the 80s stop being cool (something that, judging from its jukeboxes, happened in Brooklyn sometime before I moved in).
In one section of the tavern, someone had set up a lavish spread of catered food for the celebrants of Hot Tom's birthday. I knew a lot of the people there, particularly the Ray and Nancy posse. But then there were plenty of people I'd never seen before, like Hot Tom's brother, who looked like he might have been a fireman from Queens. While most men are troubled by a receding hairline, Hot Tom's brother seemed to have the opposite problem.
At first I wasn't having all that much fun, staring into space and imagining how best to accomplish various things in my chat system. Gretchen was irritated by my moping and tried to get me to circulate, but I was completely uninspired by the prospect socializing.
But then I got to talking to Lin's boyfriend, a surfer dude from California. In New York, he's an unemployed graphic designer, and unemployment proved to be an amusing topic for both of us. "You know, they just extended benefits thirteen weeks," he said, smirking with delight. "Yeah, I know!" I agreed. "There isn't anyone on unemployment who doesn't know about it," he said. Somehow I think I managed to move the conversation to the topic of Flash, since that's all that is in my mind these days. It's not a completely inappropriate topic when conversing with graphic designers.
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