Last Saturday, while I was visiting my friend in New York, she suggested that we go to a drag show in Time Square. Truth be told, I wasn’t all that interested, but I figured it would be good fun nonetheless.
“Why not?” I shrugged.
“Something different,” she agreed. “Worst case scenario, it’s terrible and we go have drinks at the Olive Garden.”
Anyone who caught a glimpse of the news out of NYC this past weekend knows that a Darden Restaurant Group martini was not the sort of mildly amusing and barely inconvenient rock bottom she was alluding to. In fact, “worst case scenario” was a 30-block, multi-million dollar power outage, which she and I found ourselves smack dab in the middle of, riding high with a pack of drag queens.
“Does anyone have a battery-operated portable speaker?” one of the performers asked the few members of the audience who had been allowed inside the venue when the lights were still on.
I cocked my head to one side.
“That’s what we did last night,” she told me, matter-of-factly. “The power went out in Fire Island and someone had a speaker and we still did the show.”
I nodded my head slowly and then clutched my friend’s hand. Let’s get out of here, I mouthed. No disrespect intended, but any woman who encounters two power outages in as many days in the great state of New York is not someone I care to be around.
After all, I’m Miss Murphy. Need I remind you? I had already had my fair share of bad luck that weekend, having managed to spill myself onto a train platform, oversized suitcase in hand, on Friday and then get the very same oversized suitcase stuck on an escalator the following afternoon. In other words, I was already pushing it—and that was way before the entirety of Hell’s Kitchen plunged into darkness.
Sadly, the show did not go on, which seemed to have more to do with local ordinances than a lack of effort from the performers. Back on the street, my friend and I made the most of the chaos, which is to say we took a front row seat and watched the most basic of tourists and long-time New Yorkers finally acknowledge to one another how wild the city is.
Even though the outage only affected 30 city blocks, the subways weren’t running and the traffic lights weren’t operating—which left us with few options other than to walk back to my friend’s apartment in the West Village.
“It’s not that far,” she chirped. “Worst case scenario, we stop off at a bar or two and get a few drinks along the way.”
It should come as little surprise that this is exactly what we did. Once we hit 37th Street and were back in the land of light, we found a pub with air conditioning and basked in the glow of several flat screen TVs. Two drinks later, after retelling our story to a stranger across the bar, I made my way to the restroom. It was then and there—pants-less in a strange place with no natural light source—when the lights went out again. Evidently the blackout had spread… at the exact same moment I was sitting down to pee, because of course it did!
“Worst case scenario!” I shouted to my friend as I flung open the door. “That was the worst case scenario.”
If the initial outage seemed like something of a novelty with orchestras and Broadway actors offering impromptu performances in the middle of 7thavenue, then the second one was like a three-day visitor. Turn the lights off in the late afternoon in Time Square and it’s a photo opp. Do it after 9 by Penn Station and you’re asking for a police report.
“IT IS FUCKING DARK OUT HERE,” a woman shouted into her cell phone as she narrowly dodged a bus. “ALL THE LIGHTS ARE OFF IN… WHERE AM I???? The Villiage???? The Village.”
(We were not in The Village.)
I rolled my eyes. Usually when one sense is diminished, the others are heightened, but apparently not in New York. Take away traffic lights and crosswalk signs and we don’t rise to the occasion, we try to shout over it.
“You know,” my friend said, pausing to let a stream of taxi cabs cruise through an intersection at max speed. “I’m not surprised about any of this. Mercury is in retrograde.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I admitted.
“Well it means that everything is going haywire, especially technological things,” she said.
I shrugged and did a quick 360. In my nearly ten years of living in the city, I had never seen it so dark—and I have never been nearly hit by as many cyclists.
“That checks out,” I said.
“I’ve been getting really into horoscopes,” my friend explained. “And crystals. I’m reading this book and they were talking about them and it said, ‘Worst case scenario, they don’t work and you have some pretty rocks sitting around your house.’”
“OK, I really want you to stop saying that,” I replied. “Every time you say ‘worst case scenario,’ something insane happens and I can’t take it anymore.” I looked both ways at the corner, half expecting an escaped elephant from the Bronx Zoo to come bounding down 32nd St.
“I didn’t say it that time,” she argued. “It was in the book.”
“Humor me,” I said. “What book?”
“Witchcraft for the Weekend!” she answered.
I stifled a laugh, mostly out of respect, then gave up. Because this woman is my dear friend and it’s been so long since I’ve been able to laugh with one of them on my home turf. Surely, she will know the difference between laughing with her and laughing at her. She absolutely knows her audience – that I am a writer with a humor blog in need of a good story with amazing details. She did this for me: The drag showcase. The double outage. The bathroom humor. The mere mention of Wicca. She made it the worst case scenario just for me… and there was no one I’d rather walk through it with.
Happy (early) birthday to my partner in crime! May Mercury give you a break… but not literally, of course.
Hahaha – love this! I wish I had known you were in NYC! It would have been fun to get a drink!
Wait – I thought you were based way way up in New England. You’re within day trip range of the city? I totally would have invited you to come along, or made a point of figuring out a time to meet. Next time :(