Lazy weekend.

Last night I caught a nice little set from Johnny Gallagher in the East Village with my friends Louise and Rob, and then we hit my favorite Italian place followed by my favorite trashy dive bar.

I must say that my decision to wear cowboy boots was a great choice, and that Rudy's will stay classy forever. There was even a dance party to "Single Ladies" with a bunch of random cute hipster boys; my favorites were the trapper hat guy and the one who asked each of us who we were putting a ring on.

Today has been lazy, and I've loved every minute of it. In fact, I've barely left my room, let alone my apartment. I'll venture out into the icy air in a few to pick up some things, but aside from that it's a quiet night in HK, my friends. All the better to celebrate deadline week.

Back to reality, barely.

I made it back to NYC after a lovely little break in Tennessee and Texas. The holidays were nice, if uneventful. Actually, I think they were nice because they were uneventful. Mine were comprised mostly of hangtime with the family, playing with puppies, playing the piano and watching a lot of movies.

Then it was back to the city and "real life", if you can call it that. I've already caught up with most of my lovelies here in a span of 2 days, so you could call that a success. I also consider it a success that I was able to introduce Emma to the joy of Will & Grace. Seriously, she'd never seen it. Ridiculous, I know.

Somehow in that span of two days, I've also managed to hit up several of my favorite eateries, at least the ones in my neighborhood. Just FYI, ice cream shouldn't crunch - Five Napkin seems to have issues with their desserts, but we always come back. And it was a small joy that the barista at Amy's Bread remembered how I take my tea. Sure, it was only a matter of weeks since I'd been there, but considering how frequently I'm usually there, I considered it a success.

Yesterday was also a sad day - the final performance of Aaron Tveit (and therefore the OBC) in next to normal. Louise and I went, sitting in excellent seats I was able to get thanks to a tip from Adam, and cried our little eyes out.

I'd write a mini review, but most of you haven't seen it and wouldn't really be interested in the details, so I'll just say that it was an incredible show, though also incredibly sad, but I'm quite glad I was able to be there.

Now it's back to work. Joy.

Hey, strangers.

So, as you can see, I pretty much stopped blogging this year. Oops. I'm still all over the internet, but I spend more time elsewhere (like Twitter).

I'm going to try to be better about this though, because perhaps there are still some people out there who are interested in reading about what's going on in my life (besides the douchey comments I make on said Twitter).

So, here's my resolution - a blog a week for 2010. And I might need someone (cough*SAM*cough) to help remind me about that.

LOVE TO ALL!

(And a Merry Christmas.)

An update

New numbers for the countdown:

• 7 days until Kely comes to NYC to be my dapper date for the weekend.
  
• 9 days until the Tony Awards (the event for which I need a dapper date).
  
• 17 days until my conference in Houston. Yeehaw!
  
• 19 days until I see my dad in Paris.

Hope life is well with everyone reading this. :)

Equal rights! Right now!

This past Sunday in NYC, there was a big rally for marriage equality organized by Broadway Impact. I had the good fortune to get involved with this group a few months ago, and I volunteered to help out with the rally. This truly is the great civil rights fight of our generation, and I was thrilled to get to be a part of a day that turned out to be so amazing.



As you may have seen all over my Facebook, we've been promoting this pretty hard for the past couple of weeks, but when Sunday came it was time for the final push. My first duty as a volunteer was to pass out flyers the morning of the event, which I did for about 5 hours. I was assigned to the Theater District because I'm loud, not shy, and not afraid to engage people - not to mention the extensive flyering/handbill passing out experience I got in college. Thank you, CAC. I think I talked to around 300 people about marriage equality and the rally. It was so encouraging and exciting for so many people to engage and be so supportive of our cause.

I also volunteered to be a marshall at the rally itself. My friends Louise, Alexa and I were assigned to the 45th Street block, and then I got pulled to do crowd control at the southwest corner of 45th and 6th, aka where every speaker/performer entered. It was also the busiest place where people coming to the rally were entering, so there was a lot of excitement. It was definitely not a glamorous job though, mostly consisting of crowd control - keeping people moving along the sidewalks and making sure the rally stayed peaceful and that the "pens" in the streets didn't get too crowded.

Many notable people were at the rally, including Governor Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg, among other speakers. There were also live performances from fantastic Broadway performers like the cast of HAIR, Cheyenne Jackson and Audra McDonald. Seeing the HAIR cast march down 45th was moving, and speaking to them as they left after the performance was wonderful. I love how tuned in and turned on they actually are. The entire experience was truly touching. I only got to catch snippets of speeches in between directing traffic and answering questions, but all of the people there were so inspirational.

After the rally, I scored a great seat on the right aisle of the orchestra for HAIR. I mean, come on, I had to be there. So I went, still decked in my Broadway Impact shirt and bright orange armband. It was beautiful, amazing, fantastic, everything else I can't imagine to say to describe the feeling. I cried a bit during "I Got Life" and was moved during "I Believe In Love." Oh, and random but awesome - Bryce RIFFED THE SHIZ out of his note in "3-5-0-0." It was phenomenal - as in, I spontaneously burst into tears because of HIS SINGING. And at the end, dancing on stage was even more exciting than usual just because there was so much joy.

We had a great time at the stage door, and the moment Gavin (who is one of the founders of Broadway Impact; I don't think I've mentioned that) came out, saw all of us supporters there and threw his arms up victoriously was just a culmination of the way today felt. Hugs and love were all around, and we all couldn't help but grin and be exuberant at being a part of history. As Gavin says, "It's going to happen, because we're right." As a side note, as we were standing there all talking, we heard the news that HAIR won the Drama Desk Award for Best Revival of a Musical, which was thoroughly exciting.

There are not enough words to describe how wonderful the day was, but there's my feeble attempt. Now it's time for everyone to start calling their Senator and urging him/her to vote for the marriage equality bill. We have until June 20 to get this passed, and I know we can do it.

Oh, and I thought it would be cool to include some press coverage of the rally, too.
A video from broadway.tv
A story from Democratic Underground
Photos of the rally from Playbill.com
Photos of the rally from BroadwayWorld.com

For more info on getting involved, visit the Broadway Impact Web site.