You Get What You Need

It's a real treat for Dave and me when my mother takes Annie for an overnight visit. We can stay out all night, we have the apartment to ourselves, we feel like kids whose parents have gone away for the weekend. So this past Saturday we dropped Annie off and away we went.

We wanted to go to one of our favorite restaurants, Josephina's, but the movie theatre was a bit far from there so we settled for Pieter's on Columbus Avenue. It was okay Italian food and we left in high enough spirits. We were in the mood for something simple so we went to see the movie, "Friends with Money," but half-hour into it I started feeling sick. It wasn’t the food or the wine, it wasn't even the cinematography style I so detest. You know, the hand-held camera swinging all around the place, trying to make things feel “real?” I won’t say the movie was a piece of crap; I just hated it. Each character upper middle class, unappealing and unhappy, living in muddy and muted marriages, all created in cinema with the intention of being clever, edgy and entertaining. Now, I have never had a problem with walking out of a movie. I value my time intensely and would rather sit on a street corner reading an Archie comic than sit through some pretentious piece of crap film (oops, did I say that?). But David, on the other hand, will not leave a theatre for anything. A true movie buff, he lives and breathes film. For him, seeing a bad film is a learning experience. For me, it’s an assault on my psyche. But I would never ask him to leave with me; it's perfectly fine for me to go for a walk or sit in the lobby and organize my wallet. So I told David I would meet up with him later. But he, for the first time in the 17 years I've known him, got up and left with me. He didn’t hate the movie like I did, but he didn’t like it. And there was something so lovely and unexpected about him getting up so easily that I was overcome with appreciation.

So there we were on our Saturday night of freedom. The meal was so-so and the movie was bad. But the night was the kind of New York City spring night that should be talked about, sung about, at least written about on a blog. The air was fresh, the breeze was warm, and David and I had nothing to do and nowhere to be. I had my camera in my bag so as we walked through the city, we talked and I took pictures.

When we eventually got home it was quiet and we lay in bed and talked some more. It turned out not to be the night we had planned, but it was just the night we needed.

I'll post the pictures later today.