Manhattan Hillbilly

Walking Through The Slushy Muck

How do you make it from your apartment to office each day when you have to walk through mounds of slushy, dirty, mucky snow and slush?

For me, it's a simple matter of the shoe-switcheroo.

Lots of ladies in New York carry their office shoes in their purses, and wear sneakers (in the summer) and rainboots (in the winter) to and from work. For me, I wear boots to work and then keep my dress shoes in my desk. Easier for me as a guy, because black dress shoes pretty much go with anything. Good thing, since I don't want to carry a purse.

 

Halloween: When the going gets weird, New Yorkers turn pro

OK, forget the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Tree-lighting at Rockefeller Center? Don't go. The event you HAVE to attend once in your life is the Annual Halloween Parade through the Villages of New York.

If you think the average New Yorker on the street is weird, you won't believe what you see when they're actually trying to be weird.

The missues and I rushed back from droppin' one of the younguns at the airport and quickly hopped on the C train to get down to 4th Street and hopefully see the parade. The subway ride proved to be the best and most surreal moment of the evening. At every station we stopped at, more and more people with more and more crazy costumes blithely walked onto the subway. Guys in inmate uniforms. Zombies galore. Werewolves. Girls wearing low-cut Swiss Miss outfits. You name it. And right at the point where our train reached critical mass and was rocketing nonstop toward our final station, we looked over to our right and watched as a second train car of equally bizarre partiers raced us at 60 mph on a parallel track.

When we arrived at the station, it was a mob scene, with more than 3,000 people all trying to work their way off the platform, through a tunnel and up to the street. When we got to the street, the mob was 30-people deep from the sidewalk, ensuring we wouldn't be able to see anything. We spend the next 35 minutes pushing through crowds and working our way north up side streets, trying to find a decent vantage point. By the time we'd back0-and-forthed our way to 12th street, we decided the best way to see the parade was on TV, and headed back north.

But we'd gotten the flavor of it. And it was amazing. The crowd along the parade route were just as amazingly costumed as those who took the street. It's not really an organized parade, per se, just a collection of tens of thousands of crazy New Yorkers walking down Sixth Avenue in costume having a good time. Nothing debauched. Kids and adults having a really good time.

I took a few pictures, but candidly from my vantage point you don't really get the story. Here's a link to Gothamist's site where they've rolled up some great Flickr images of the event and another link to Google images. Enjoy!

Blushing bright enough to signal planes

Wow. Lewis Grizzard used to say "don't bend over in the vegetable garden, granny, those taters have eyes." He'd be blushing bright enough to signal airplanes if he saw this marketing stunt by downtown New York's Designual, a Spanish-style fashion store. Today Designual gave free clothes to the first 100 people in line outside it's SoHo shop. The two rules were: Each person only got to pick two articles of clothing, and they had to show up in their underwear. And they did:

 

Before you ladies get offended, there were guys in lines too, wearing everything from boxers to long underwear. You can check out the details at Racked. My favorite quote from those standing in line:

"At least seeing everyone already in their underwear thins the dating pool easier." 

How about a little tail?

 

What would the world be without PETA protesters? Yesterday the ladies are lined up across from Lincoln Center to protest Fashion Week here in New York. (AP photo) Don't forget to order your Anna Wintour voodoo doll!

Reminds me of an old joke my daddy used to tell:

A Irishman and his idiot friend go out hunting and stumble across a naked woman in the woods.

"Aye, lass," the Irishman leers and propositions the woman. "Are you game?"

The woman said yes, so the moron shot her.

Front-pocket wallets

Take a good look at my wallet. Looks like any other wallet, right? Wrong! It's a thinner wallet with a money clip attached to it (which I have since removed, since I now live in New York City and thus have no money). What's most important about it is that it's designed to fit in your front pocket rather than you back pocket.

One of the first tips I received from a native New Yorker was to stop keeping my billfold in my back pocket. Living in South, it was rare to even have a wallet (most of us bartered corn and tobacco crops for groceries, right?).  Those of us who did own a wallet just shoved it in our back pocket, most often not even bothering to button the flap on the pocket. You just shove it in there, head on your way, and forget about it until you sit down on this phone-book-thickness billfold. My old wallet had every possible card I owned inside -- credit cards, library cards, voter ID cards, hotel and rental car frequent-user cards -- you name it.

But up here, you have to pare down your card collection so you can shove your wafer-thin front-wallet into your front pocket. The reason, of course, is to discourage pickpockets, which I'm told are rife, especially in tourist-laden areas like Times Square, Herald Square and Battery Park.

Sadly, shoving all of my possessions into my front pockets has made for some awkward situations, and two incidents that give lie to the notion that New Yorkers are a thievin' lot. 

Because I had my billfold, a money clip, a set of keys and a cellphone all shoved into my two front pockets, things have on two occasions fallen out. The first came the day I took a cab to purchase an air conditioner for the apartment. My brand-new iPhone 4 apparently slipped out of my pocket as I was getting out of the cab. Fortunately, the misses kept calling the phone for me and convinced the cabbie to bring it back -- for a $20 reward. Less than three days later, my wallet fell out as I was paying for a meal at Big Nick's. Fifteen minutes later I realized I'd lost it and sprinted the six blocks back, to discover that it was still sitting on the ground under my table.

I've had no more incidents since these, because I've instituted a pocket-checking protocol every time I get up or leave a place, patting myself down back and forth, left and right to make sure I have all four items. Unfortunately, it makes me look like I'm genuflecting my genitals, but at least I still have my credit cards.

Fashion sense: Would you prefer black, black or black?

It's not hard to pick out the non-native New Yorkers on the streets: They wear an article of clothing with some color.

Walking around the city, if I'm not wearing basic blue jeans or bib overalls, I'm trying to fit in by sporting khaki shorts and a colored shirt.

Trust me. I'm not fitting in.

There's only one color in most New Yorker's closet. It's black. Technically, black is an amalgamation of every color.

Black clothing is everywhere. Black t-shirts. Black jeans. Black leather jackets. Black pork-pie hats and beanies. Women wear black pullovers. Their handbags are black. Their sunglasses are black. For many of them, their fingernails and eye shadow are black.

If you're a goth, this is your town.

I've talked to several people on the street trying to understand why basic black is their uniform de jour. The answers I've received:

• I wear it because everyone else does.
• Everything in New York you touch is dirty, and when you brush up against a dirty pole in the subway car or a dirty lamppost, it doesn't show.
• It's usually cold here, so black absorbs more sunlight and makes you warmer.
• It's harder to see you at night.
• You don't stand out so much wearing black.
• It's slimming, and we New Yorkers are all weight conscious.

I don't know which, if any, of these are the real reason. But the fact that you stand out in this city if you -- well, choose not to wear black and not stand out -- has created a cultural dilemma for me.

I don't like black. I'll occasionally wear a black t-shirt and light blue jeans, but that's as close as I get. I don't own a black turtleneck. I've never owned a leather jacket in my life. I don't have a black sweatshirt, hat or coat. I sure don't have any black blue jeans. Isn't "black blue jeans" an oxymoron anyway, like "jumbo shrimp" and "military intelligence?"

In the corporate world, when you walk among the tall towers of lower Manhattan, the men do offer a variation on the stereotypical black three-button suit:

Sometimes they wear a black suit with dark, dark blue pinstripes.

So once I've spent a few weeks on the streets of New York standing out in my khakis and bright orange (Tennessee Volunteer) or red (University of Georgia) golf shirt, I'm going to have to decide whether I'll succumb to, well ... the dark side.

For now, I think I'll just compromise and wear dark socks with my khaki shorts. That should look good.

The hillbilly-ing of New York is under way!

Even prior to my arrival next month, it appears that my hillfolk brethren are winning the culture war.

You want proof? Think Fess Parker getting hammered. Apparently coonskin caps and shine are becoming the hottest trends in the Big Apple!