As you may be able to discern from the time on this posting, my brain is still on East Coast time even though my carcass is decidedly situated in Pacific. That was one of the longest spells I've ever been away from home in my life and I found myself wishing the trip had been shorter…though so many great things happened during it, I can't imagine which days I'd have given up. A better hotel room in New York, a little less rain and better Internet access would have made things just about perfect. Oh, yeah — and it would have been nice if the lady who was housesitting for me hadn't phoned to say that a water leak from an upstairs toilet was creating an aquacade in my kitchen and dining room. There's a fun bit of news when you're far, far from home.
Here are a couple of other things I'm remembering from the trip, none of them particularly important…
- In Times Square, even in the rain, there are guys handing out leaflets and sales pitches, trying to get tourists to visit some night spot or store. Right outside the Marriott Marquis, there was a gentleman touting Dangerfield's, the comedy club that was owned by and named for Rodney Dangerfield. I've never set foot in there but the rumor is that if you do, you see a lot of underpaid comics perform to an audience of tourists, many of whom came under the delusion that there was a chance of Rodney putting in an appearance. Since his death, the odds of that happening have only gotten marginally worse. When he was alive, Rodney was filling big rooms in Vegas at $100+ a ticket. There wasn't much chance of him spending an evening surprising folks who'd already paid to be in a small room on First Avenue. Anyway, a week or so ago out in the New York rain, I was watching this guy hawking reservations to the small room, and I'm guessing he was on some sort of commission deal, getting X bucks for every outta-towner he caused to pass through the club portals. He was great, putting on a little show and doing an uncanny Rodney imitation. The logic of the sales pitch wasn't too sound — it was kind of like, "Go to this club because you used to love the comedian who sounded like this…" but he got the attention of passers-by, which few other street barkers were able to do. And he was probably funnier than half the comics you'd see if you did go to Dangerfield's. Also, cheaper.
- U.S. Airways has gone to an odd system for the boarding of the plane. Other airlines generally divide you up into three or more groupings based on rows — rows 21-30 get on the jet all at once, rows 11-20 get on at the same time, etc. U.S. Airways divides the plane into seven or more "zones" that seem to be based not just on rows but on whether you have a window seat, an aisle seat or one in the middle. Carolyn and I took two U.S. Airways flights yesterday and on each, we were assigned different zones even though we were sitting side-by-side. But the rule is — and they don't explain this very loudly — that if you're travelling with someone who has a lower zone number than you do, you board when they board. Since about 70% of all passengers (that's a guess) are travelling with someone else, this kind of wipes out the whole point of the new divisions…or would if everyone understood the part about boarding with whoever has the lowest zone number. I saw a number of people who didn't know and who had to figure out which of them would carry what onto the plane because they thought they couldn't all get on at the same time.
- I understand the need for security in office buildings these days but in order for Sergio Aragonés and me to get into the offices of MAD Magazine, the editor had to leave his desk and come down in the elevator to the lobby. Is this the best use of this man's time? In fact, isn't this the kind of thing MAD Magazine would be ridiculing?
And I'll probably think of more of these over the next day or three.