Under the High Line

The life of a new New Yorker is very glamorous, as you've no doubt guessed by trolling through the annals of my electronic Doppleganger. Not only do I get to be part of the mighty temping sisterhood--faster than a ringing telephone! able to leap massive spreadsheets in a single bound!--I also get to pass out fliers and collect email addresses for the Village Voice as a member of their Street Team.

Yes, it's a hard kitty life on this side of the ocean, but there are some benefits. Yesterday, the Voice sent me to The Drop NYC, "a double call to urban inhabitants to interact with and contemplate the city as well as their relationship to the greater environment through the arts." If that sounds vague, it's because the event itself was a little vague. Taking place under the High Line, the remains of some elevated train tracks that were recently revamped into an elevated park, The Drop NYC consisted of some guys selling crepes (left: mmm, delicious crepes), a DJ, some other guys selling cheap beer, two mannequins, and the Voice table.

And for three hours, nothing much happened. It rained a lot. We had to move our table three times due to flooding. I had an awesome banana-Nutella-whipped cream crepe. And it dawned on me, around 2 PM or so, that this was the first time I'd attended anything in New York that reminded me of a Hawaii event: hardly anyone was there, nobody seemed to know what the hell was going on, everything got started two hours late, there was reggae music and stoner food, and the venue was dark, wet, dirty, and reminded me very strongly of someone's car port.

Yes. I was home.

Things began to unfold from there. Three big canvases were set up for public painting. The mannequins started to sport some pretty cool evening gowns made out of trash. The mouth-breather with Velcro shoes who'd been hanging around the Voice table for FOUR HOURS trying to work up the nerve to ask either my Voice partner or myself out for coffee finally wandered off. And I spotted some graffiti of what appears to be two cats doing it.

So, to recap, I have found my way home again, and home is apparently in a creepy alleyway underneath the train tracks. Aloha.