Jefe's Next Chapter

It has been a few weeks since I made time to update you on my NY adventures and I apologize for being remiss.

A week or so before Halloween I took a fun ride up the Hudson River Valley to visit the small town of Sleepy Hollow and toured the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery with my friend L. She had never been on a motorcycle before and was very brave about the whole experience. We made a stop in Central Park before really hitting the highway, it was a way for her to decide if she was comfortable on the bike and a way to say “Ok, that was fun, now take me home” before we got out of the city.

The town of Sleepy Hollow is a pleasant little community not too far north of New York City. It looks like it would be easy to ride alongside the Hudson River the whole way, but the through road runs a few blocks to the east and most of the little roads actually on the river don’t go through. The cemetery is in the National Register of Historic Places, there is a chapel that has been is use since before the United States declared independence from Great Britain, there is the Irving family cemetery plot with Washington Irving’s grave decorated for the holiday with a flag and a pumpkin. There are some enormous monuments to the very, very wealthy with familiar names like Carnegie and Rockefeller as well as some amazing old tombstones of people who dies very young in days before modern medicine.

In addition to spending some time on the road I’ve also been enjoying all sorts of interesting entertainment in Manhattan.

On Octobet 16 I was priveledged to see the Wordless Music Orchestra perform Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells as part of the News Sounds Live music series at the spectacular Brookfield Place Winter Garden. WNYC also recorded the performance, and you can listen to an audio stream of the show it is really worth hearing.

New York is rich with opportunities to see music, but I’ve also really come to enjoy the “story-telling” scene here. I was introduced by a common fried to a wonderful guy, just around my age, named Jefferson. When we met he said “Oh, you know Lee? I suspect that we’ll probably being seeing each other naked”. THAT hasn’t happened (yet), but I have been really enjoying the events that he organizes. Twice a month there is “Foreplay“, an open-mic event where anyone can get on stage and tell a story at a club near the Bowery, just off the Williamsburg Bridge and then toward the end of each month there is BARE, in Greenwich Village at the Sidewalk Cafe which is more “formal” in that there is a door charge and instead of an open mic they are more experienced, skilled storytellers. I have had a great time watching the pro’s do their work, but also really enjoying getting up in front of an audience and telling stories. It’s a blast.

I have not been ignoring my neighborhood or my kitchen either. It is so much fun to live in a place where most of the local markets carry Scotch Bonnet peppers as well as a range of Caribbean ingredients. Sure, there is a McDonalds and a Domino’s Pizza, but there are also more places to find callaloo or curried goat than there are gas stations (by FAR). Since I’m home most of the day I do a fair amount of home-cooking. Most of it isn’t all that exciting because I always enjoy cooking for others more than cooking for just one. The 2 photos below are taken with my cell phone in my kitchen as I was prepping to make a jerk marinade. There is no shortage of jerk chicken or pork around here, I just wanted to miz up a batch on my own. It was enough for a few pork chops as well a some chicken leg/thighs so I was able to put a few on marinade and freeze them for later. I’ve also been cooking a lot of greens, and a fair amount of pasta. Almost every day I finish my evening with some cookies baked off in the toaster oven from a store-bought log of cookie dough. Goodness, I think the 2 kitchen things I miss most right now are my digital scale and kitchen-aid.

A couple days before Halloween I caught The Allman Brothers Band final run at the Beacon Theater I didn’t take these photos, though I had 10th row center seats, thanks to my long time friend Kirk West. My camera was in Laredo, Texas being serviced and I grabbed a few snaps with my cell-phone but these images from Flickr are much more interesting, and the diversity of perspectives gives a better sense of the venue a classic 2,900 seat theater which was conceived and designed during the roaring 20’s but didn’t open it’s doors until about 2 months after the 1929 stock market crash, and the show which rounded out over 200 performances that the ABB has played there since they started an annul run in 1989.

Halloween in New York is a HOOT. Greenwich Village is like the Castro in San Francisco and they have a huge parade of floats and costumes etc.. I saw it advertised someplace as “America’s only night-time parade”, which only acknowledge that they don’t know anything about Torchlight in Seattle, and probably some others. M and I watched the parade and then met up with her college buddy M at a near-by bar, it was a good night!

Now that it is 1/2 way through November, this brings me up to date with the end of October, I have a bunch more photos and stories to tell, and have just been keeping myself so busy. I’ve actually tried to keep up with a few TV shows but find it really difficult to carve out time for that. I am home working most of the day and if I don’t have class in the evening (taking some online classes) I tend to go out to social events, workshops, music or something else, and then come home tired. It is common for me to turn on something I want to watch on Hulu, Netflix, or the CBS app on my tablet and then pass out before it is half over. I have been to a couple movies, enjoyed “Birdman” immensely and look forward to the opening of “Infinite Jest”.