Three's Company

All number one seeds have officially made it to the Final Four. Who would’ve known? My bracket would be pointless by now had I not the extensive basketball knowledge and foresight to pick UNC and UCLA in the finals.

I still have a chance.

We are coming up on the end of a weekend of just the three of us. After six consecutive weekends of friends and family visiting- we had a weekend to ourselves without an agenda. It was glorious.

Friday night we made plans and met at a little (and by little- I MEAN little) Mexican restaurant on Ninth Avenue called El Centro. We met up with some friends, and then called it an early night after dinner and all went back to our respective homes. I caught up on basketball highlights from the evening and my eyelids felt so heavy that I called it a night at around 11:30. Brilliant.

Saturday we woke up at a leisurely but not lazy hour, made coffee and pigs-in-a-blanket and chatted with VHI in the background all morning. I’m fairly confident it was exactly the sort of morning we’ll all miss one day down the road when we have children who wake up early, regardless of the day of the week, and want to be entertained at all hours. It makes me tired just thinking about it.

We shopped around Columbus Circle and Fifth Avenue for the afternoon, and ended up at the flagship Sak’s location. To make things clear, we are not frequenters of this store. AV had a gift card from Christmas from her boss to use, and wanted to check out the make-up counters to find some new products.

We roamed around, looking much like little orphan Annie’s to the Sak’s personnel, and as we were leaving the Bobbi Brown counter a bored Giorgio Armani make-up artist lassoed us to a mirror. Undoubtedly inspired by our naturally glowing and make-up-less complexions, the woman proceeded to lecture us for 30 or 40 minutes on the relative merits of her products. Not sure whether to laugh or cry, we all had our turns with her as she attacked our “blotchy redness,” “uneven skin-tone” and “un-sculptured eyebrows.”

Affronted, yet bearing free samples of the Armani foundation and countless perfumes, we finally left the store of the unhelpful but grossly over-eager sales people poised in attack-mode with their perfume and back into our own territory- Anthropologie. There was a brief period of browsing and surveying of new merchandise, and I eventually found AV and KR half-asleep amid the kitchen section of the store on a huge distressed-leather couch.

We returned home, only to instate a mandatory naptime from the hours of 6-7:30 PM. Evening naps are tricky- and must be handled properly. Sleep too long and you’ll be worthless the rest of the evening, go to bed for real and wake up too early the next day. Don’t sleep at all when you should and you’ll be Party Pooper yawning at the bar out with your friends later on in the evening.

We had pizza and wine for dinner, got ready and made our way down to the Village for our work-friend MT’s co-birthday party. It was at bar called Fiddlesticks with a decidedly college-feel that we had been to once before. The best part was that the bar was packed, probably due to the fact that they were showing the NCAA games, but MT and friends had rented the back room for their party, thus separating us from the dog-eat-dog riff-raff on the other side of the curtain.

We felt special indeed, filtering in with a nod from the dude with the earpiece, while the commoners in the main part of the bar could only watch with curious jealousy at what was going on from little glances when the curtain would part. They had a great turnout, so the room we were in filled up as well.

This morning we braved the sunlight for a few moments to catch the early showing of “Stop-Loss.” Apparently the older crowd on the Upper West Side has gotten wind of the Early-Bird Special at the movies on Sunday morning, since even though we were 10 minutes early, we were surrounded by gray hair and newspapers who had set up camp for the morning.

We had brunch and the roamed around the park for a while, admiring the early signs of Spring and the quality of roller-blading talent that had shown up for the day, and then called I called it an afternoon. Apparently AV and KR were near each other, sprawled out on separate rocks in the same area, because they both came home separately talking about a group of grown men practicing self-defense moves and gently throwing each other on the ground like it was completely normal.

We ended the weekend and started the week by going to church tonight.

Like I said- glorious.

"Hand me my purse, darling. A girl can't read this sort of thing without her lipstick."
- Audrey Hepburn, as Holly Golightly