29th Nov 2002
Thanksgiving, Lenox Lounge, Letterman Girl
Thanksgiving was fun at the Bruner/Haspel residence. Seven Hungarians, one Italian and two Americans, including myself. Dinner was quite the success (thank you very much). Then about 11:30pm, another five or six Hungarian filmmakers dropped by to drink the last of my beer. Somewhere around 1am, I let them talk me into going out to a Harlem jazz club. Originally we were aiming for Showmans on 125th St., which I’ve never visited, even tho it’s just a few blocks from my place. We got there to find it closed and pushed on to Lenox Lounge, which is perhaps a mile east of my place, quite the stroll given the sub-freezing temperatures here in NY of late.
The scene inside Lenox Lounge was worth the walk. 2am after Thanksgiving and the place had about 20 people in the front bar section, the jazz in the back room already finished for the night. Needless to say, the crowd is almost all black, tho giving no sense that this crowd of Eastern Euro trash was the least bit unwelcome. It’s a cool ambiance: art deco decor, great juke box, uninhibited slow bumping and grinding, zero pretentions.
Soon after we settled in, a beautiful woman came over from the bar to chat with us. She happily informs us she is an actress and model, the first African American woman to be “one of the David Letterman girls,” she mentioned among a list of her credits. When I said that I recognized her from the Letterman show, she acted like this was something on her resume she couldn’t really comprehend herself. “White people humor!” she snorted in amazement, as if I could relate. “We do this one routine, ‘Does It Float?’ where we drop something like a microwave into a big tank of water and Paul and Dave talk about whether or not it will float,” she explained, with an expression of utter disbelief.
Personally, I love the “Will It Float” segment. They had it on tonight’s Letterman. Always good for a laugh. (FYI, a bag of road salt sinks.) But what would I know, I’m just a silly white guy, and that kind of stuff is funny to us, apparently.
She was quite the character and said other even wackier stuff, but I’ll spare her the Google liability and leave it at that (thankfully for her sake I missed her name).
(Speaking of Letterman, Liza Minnelli was his guest tonight. Yes, she’s seen better days, but she sang a song off her new album, Liza’s Back (a follow-up to her prior smash album “Liza’s Front,” Dave quipped), titled “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?” and, boy, that lady can still sell a song.)
I passed on entertaining the Magyar movie makers again tonight at the Bulgarian Disco, but you may be able to read about it shortly here or here. Saving my strength for Saturday night’s vodka latke Chanukah party. Friend Kevin asks, “Doesn’t your crew ever get sick of each other?” Fair question, but thankfully not so far.
No tags for this post
Leave a Reply