What A Trip

UPDATE: Hippest Snippets linked to my post today. Thanks, Hippest Snippets, for now including links to my posts about lap dances -- I'm really classing it up...

In other news...


My latest humor column about a recent trip to New York City is up at the Oakton Patch. Check it out here.

And here's the rest of the (not quite as family-friendly) story that did not make the Patch:

I spent last weekend in New York City with my mom and my five-year-old daughter. And several bottles of wine that our hotel kept giving us in an attempt to keep us in our room so that their complimentary wine hour would remain child-free. Now that I know this, I may reverse my decision to stop at one (child that is...not bottle of wine.)

I organized a get-together Friday night so that we could get a quick visit with friends and family who live in the area, which is how we ended up with a party that included my cousin, a friend who did a semester in London with me during college, one of my husband's friends from high school, and a kid I used to babysit who is now married with children of his own. In retrospect, I probably should have also invited a rabbi and a priest, just to round out the joke in the re-telling of this story.

During dinner, I asked what everyone had planned for the rest of the weekend. My friend, Dori, mentioned that she was taking her seven-year-old daughter and her daughter's friend, Ben to the movies and would therefore be chaperoning their "date." I said, "Oh...that is so cute...or at least it would be if Ben wasn't 42." As I was worrying that I may have crossed a line, my friend, Rob, jumped in and added, "Yeah...but he has great candy." And then we all had a hearty laugh about pedophilia, the way good friends who don't get to see each other often will do.

On Saturday, we met my friend, Meredith, for breakfast. Somehow, this happened as we were waiting in line for the restroom at the restaurant:

which caused the woman standing in line behind us to ask, "you're not from around here, are you?"

Afterwards, we strolled around Rockefeller Center, and the NBC Studio store, where Meredith and I yelled loudly to each other across the store, "Here's that Biggest Loser Team Bob Christmas ornament you've been looking for" and "Here's that Dunder Mifflin snow globe you've had your eye on."

After twenty years of friendship, it really never gets old.

During all of this, my daughter found a combination fan/candy thing (a battery-operated fan that held Skittles in the handle, WTF?) that I promptly named "Fandy!" She asked if she could have it, so I agreed because Hey! We were on vacation. I got into the 40-person line behind people who actually were buying the Team Bob Christmas ornaments, and finally got up to the register where they rung up my purchase, and I realized that Fandy! cost $7.99.

Sheesh. For eight bucks, I could have gone one block over and received a lap dance from an aging Rockette.

It was a non-stop weekend and a truly memorable one.

At least everything that happened before all of the free wine.