I blame my schedule in recent weeks. Covering as the producer for The Osgood File is fun, but it basically makes my schedule look like this....up at 1230am, into the office by 2am....work the Osgood shift from 2am to 10am....nap in the office til noon....work by normal shift from 12pm to 6pm...get home by 7pm...eat dinner...say hi to Jen...in bed by 9pm (hopefully) and then up by 1230am and all over again...
And of course, I hate going to bed early, so that 9pm bedtime usually turned into 10pm....and there were several days where the late morning nap didn't happen...I had one stretch of 72 hours where I got sleep in like 7 of those hours....oy...
Amazingly, we were able to do some fun things during this schedule nonsense, and in the days following it as well....so without further ado, here's 9 things that have happened in the past 3 weeks:
-- Singing karaoke at a Mob bar in Brooklyn. So a few weekends back Chris and Shirley had us, Dawn, and their friends Steve and Kelly over for dinner on Staten Island....Shirley teaches yoga now, so Jen, Dawn, and Kelly went to her class, while Steve, Chris and I hung out at the apartment...then after dinner we went to a bar in Brooklyn called Goodfellas....
Now its probably hard to believe that a place with a cheesy name like Goodfellas would actually be a place where Mafia members hang out, but I had been told that there would be made men there, and frankly, they were pretty easy to spot...some of them actually sang...along with those folks, there were other old guys with names like Johnny Sinatra and Mikey Suits who sang Rat Pack songs...
I eventually got up and sang two songs...and while I should have listened to Jen and not sang the first song "I Get A Kick Out of You" (since we already had TWO Sinatras in the house)....but my second song went over much better...."Help Yourself" by Tom Jones (better known by the youngsters as the dream sequence song from "Anchorman")....anyways, I sang, the girls danced, and we brought the house down...
All in all, a good time....can't wait to go back to Goodfellas again soon....
-- The reinvention of our Trivia Night team...most of you know that Jen, Dawn and I play trivia at the Piper's Kilt here in the neighborhood...we usually finished in 5th place every night, week in and week out....occasionally we'd finish 4th...once even 3rd...and that was like we'd won the Super Bowl....
So when the new season started, we reinvented the team a little bit....we had added Kieran, this old guy that I befriended on my first day in town, towards the back end of last trivia season...this season we picked up two people...Lori (who's good with the music, like Dawn)...and her friend Jim (who's good with obscure historical stuff and just about everything else)...
Now, we're unstoppable...we finished FIRST a couple of weeks ago, and then took second last week....we're still a little behind another team known as the Rangers, but they have like 14 people on their team to our 6, so frankly, they should be beating us....but we're holding out hope we can catch them by season's end...
-- Having our friends James and Laura over for dinner a couple of weekends back. James and Laura are friends who we met at trivia months ago, and who live in the neighborhood. We finally had them over for dinner a couple of weekends back, and of course, we busted out the Watts specialty for dinner parties...homemade gnocchi and flank steak....Dawn couldn't make it, and our friend Andy came over for a bit, but then had to rush off for a date...so the four of us had a grand old time....
-- Going to the Bronx Zoo. The day after the dinner party with James and Laura, Jen and I decided to spend a Sunday at the zoo. It was so much fun, we decided to become members for a year...pretty cheap actually, and we can go whenever we want. Cool exhibit on Madagascar, with lemurs, and a couple of Nile crocodiles...and other cool stuff...I could always spend hours at the zoo...
-- Celebrity spotting: A few of the folks we saw wandering around town over the last couple of weeks:
Colin Quinn (corner of 57th and 10th as I was walking to work)
Martin Short (inside Borders at Columbus Circle
Debra Messing and Kelly Ripa (walking outside Columbus Circle)
Lou Dobbs (over by the Time Warner building)
-- My new shift at the top radio station in the country. So when we had the layoffs in the company a while back...one of the guys that got let go was the guy that did weekend news at WABC for us....so we've been filling that hole every weekend, and I've been chosen to cover some of those days over the past six weeks...good exposure for me...we should find out soon whether I get a permanent place on the weekend shift...would mean six day work weeks, but I'll take it for the opportunity to be on WABC.
-- Going to see "W" last weekend....it was good...wasn't great. Josh Brolin does a really good job playing George W. Bush, though...he's head and shoulders above everybody else in that movie...you should see it just for him...
-- Going to see "The Daily Show" last Thursday. Jen was able to get tickets for us and her sister Becca, who came into town on Thursday, and was with us til Sunday. I got the afternoon off, and we went to the taping. Jon Stewart was awesome...very funny. I'm glad we got to see the show immediately after the last presidential debate, made it even funnier...can't wait to go see the show again...good times...
-- Hitting Broadway Friday night with the girls. Jen, Becca, Dawn and I all went to see Speed-The-Plow on Broadway, starring Jeremy Piven, Raul Esparza and Elisabeth Moss (from Mad Men)...its still in previews, and it actually started 30 minutes late, we're guessing because Piven was sick ( he looked a little dragged, and he didn't sign autographs after the show like the others, who told us he was sick), but it was still an AWESOME show....
It's been a busy three weeks...and more to come. My birthday is Thursday, and we're headed to Connecticut for a couple of days to celebrate it with Will and Jen Selva....which is always fun....
So hope everyone is well, and we promise not to drag so much in between posts...
Mike
