What a story!!!
Looking forward to your review!!!
Have a blast!!!
I did have a blast!
However, I am going to have to disappoint you on the review. I just don't have the words. I still get teary eyed and breathless every time I think about it. As I posted on my FB and blog, the best I can come up with is this:
"It was like joking around with your best friend then they stab you in the heart several dozen times and take you to heaven.
It's crude, and still doesn't cover, it but that's all I've got."
The rest of the trip was absolutely insane! Part of the time, I was hanging out with some friends in Jersey. They are the types who are constantly saying, "I don't know what do you want to do?" and I didn't have time for that so I took charge.
Since this was the first time I had ever been to NJ, I decided to drag them to every pop culture location that I had longed to see for a huge chunk of my life. We went to Asbury Park, and the Stone Pony, of course, Red Bank, Atlantic City, and all sorts of other bars and hang outs where I drank every drop of whiskey in the whole freaking state!
Back in Manhattan, I got to see, and briefly hang out with, some of my favorite comedians. I stumbled into my old haunts from my Sandy deployment, and had way too much fun flirting with the new bartenders and regaling them with stories from the last time I was in NY. This was when it hit me; the realization of how far I had come since 2012.
The last time I was in NY I had deployed because it was the only way I could keep body and soul together. I was unemployed and homeless and deploying meant that I would at least have a cot in a staff shelter and free food from our Emergency Response Vehicle. But I lucked out and, because I was supervising casework instead of working in the field, I got to stay in a hotel and work out of the Manhattan chapter office with a mission card to cover meals and incidentals. The juxtaposition between where I was staying and the reason I was staying there still freaks me out.
This time I was there because I had the incredible luck, and the money, to get a ticket to a show put on by one of my heroes. I have a job where I get a better than decent salary and paid time off which allows me to run off to New York just because. And not only that, I have enough "fun money" to buy gifts for my friends back home, eat at actual restaurants instead of whatever cheap shit I could find at the nearest bodega. All just because I can.
If that ain't the deadass, most amazing shit ever I don't know what is.