Summer Highland Falls

Recently New York has started to feel a lot more like summer. In all of Billy’s songs that are related to, or inspired by New York, Joel never once explains how this change of seasons brings out the bizarre. Of course, it could just be that I’m walking around more and therefore I see the more oddities…

I digress. Here are the following strangest things that I’ve seen these past two weeks:

1. I was sitting next to an orthodox Jewish woman, who was only a couple of years older than me, while waiting for the subway. She dressed in a skirt down to her ankles, a black blouse that didn’t show her wrists or neck, and a scarf completely covering her hair even though it was 85 degrees outside. She also had a really big bag from a nearby clothing store. This in itself was not strange. What was strange was what I saw when she was digging through her bag and looking at her purchases. She pulled out and examined a few pairs of lacy black thongs that belonged in a Victoria Secret catalog.

(source)

The train came before I go the chance to tell her that this shiske approved of her selection.

2. Next I saw a white hipster, who looked to be college aged and could easily appear on this website, in a taxi cab near Union Square. This is normal, except for the fact that he was the one driving. It got better: his passengers were an older Chinese couple. I kid you not; I saw this on the corner of 14^th street and 3^rd avenue. I had to rub my eyes and blink twice to make sure I was seeing it all correctly.

The only thing better would have been if the hipster cabby was driving around a Middle Eastern couple.

I just added that to the list of things I want to see before I die. It’s somewhere on the list behind Billy’s and my wedding day but before seeing an actual mutant turtle in a New York City sewer.

3. I was sitting in a Chipotle after rehearsal one day, minding my own business, when I witnessed the last behavior. I was biting into my burrito and generally loving life when I saw a couple who were holding hands walk into the store. They went straight to the bathroom, without buying any food. Did I mention that they went into the same woman’s bathroom? How about the fact that one of the members of the couple was certainly a man and it was a single occupant restroom? I looked around the packed shop to see if anybody else saw what I saw.

Sure enough, I locked eyes with a three other costumers who were all experiencing different levels of shock. After a few minutes of staring in bafflement, I went back to my 800 calories of goodness. The couple came out about five minutes later. They didn’t appear to be affected in anyway possible. They showed no sign of embarrassment or guilt and they both looked as composed as when they entered.

The woman sitting next to me turned to me and asked, “Did you see that?!”

“Yep”

“New York!”

New York indeed.