Last week, to see me best best bro, Squid-boy tie the knot in NYC, my wife and I caught the “red-eye” out of SFO, La Guardia-bound.  En route, we molded our backs into the pretzel-shapes consistent with economy-class seats and settled in for a long flight to the East Coast.  In my best case scenario, I remember hoping I’d sleep through most of it thereby avoiding, at least spiritually, the click bang of the accordian bathroom doors and serial coughers  that always seemed to plague such journeys.

Instead, I woke up a hundred miles east of Cinncinati, anticipating perhaps the scheduled plane change in Ol’ Kan-tuck-ee that presaged the final leg of the trip into New York.  As we began losing altitude, my ears popped.  I opened my eyes, seeing several members of the all-female flight crew in the darkened cabin gathered around a passenger who was by then loudly accusing the passenger behind him of trying to steal his laptop.  In fact, there was no proof that this was the case but the guy was missing his checkbook. He kept getting louder and more accusatory until finally the stewardesses re-seated him in the first-class section of the plane.

Back where we were sitting, the supposed thief was a disheveled 20-something who’d boarded our flight late in SFO.  He was traveling with a girl, both of them showing lots of ink and her with a piercing that ran horizontally through the bridge of her nose.  She could have hung pair of Foster Grant clip-ons off it and maybe did during the day when she was outside in the sunlight.  But it wasn’t her, it was her boyfriend who’d arrived at 11 p.m. on a Saturday evening at the boarding gate in SFO wearing dark sunglasses.  Admittedly, if you were going to finger someone, it made sense you’d choose 20-something.  If nothing else, the frowsty odor of stale alcohol coming off him in waves marked him as  a likely trouble-maker.

During the boarding, I remember walking down the ramp that led from the gate to the plane, 20-something in a hurry, staggering a bit, and coming up suddenly behind me.  He bumped my backpack but said nothing as if oblivious to his surroundings.  And while we waited for the passengers in front of us to stow their bags in the overhead compartments, I heard him ask my wife whether there’d be booze on the plane.  He was drunk. In his  beat-down sandals, tattered cargo pants, black Metallica t-shirt and faded canvas rucksack that he kept banging into things, he came across as a pot-head recently returned from an extended dope-smoking trek through the Haight.  More than that, he was an idiot.  Thinking back on it, why would anyone be stupid enough to commit a theft in a speeding, sealed tube 33,000 feet above the Ohio Valley?  Whatever his motivations, 20-something and his girlfriend’s travel plans were cut short by the security personnel who were waiting for them to de-plane in Cinncinati.

For us though the trip began when we arrived in New York.  We’d lucked into a beautiful 80-degree morning, uncharacteristic for that time of the year but welcome nonetheless.  It had gotten so warm that when we joined the pre-wedding party at a Chinese restaurant on Mott Street, we wondered whether we’d brought enough shorts and t-shirts for the week.  Our plan was to head to the former site of my wife’s grandfather’s grocery store on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy and we did so despite the fact that the celebrants had by this time already stuffed themselves with won ton, spring rolls, and fried pork.  They were convinced of the plan’s good sense when we offered to treat them all to fresh canoli and glasses of chianti at a nearby Italian restaurant just a block away.

In Soho, we explored a variety of shops and small businesses including an Italian perfumery whose pedigree extended back to the 1200′s and whose 21st century sales girl kept me engaged in smalltalk while she helped my wife to purchase an early birthday present for herself.  We exited the shop with the $135 bottle of Acqua Di Colonia #1612 and walked back to another subway stop before returning to our hotel.  We continued to eat our way across the town, later taking the subway again to another excellent dinner at Trois Canards in Chelsea.

Since these articles are intended – at least tangentially – to spark the public’s interest in lyrics and melody, let me say for the record that my recent trip only reaffirmed the notion that New York remains a great place to hear live music.  The following comprises a list of five examples of the City’s musical prowess as experienced by yours truly:

1)  On the A train between mid-town Manhattan and 125th Street –  I listened to a four piece, all-male acapella group performing gospel-tinged arrangements for cash as the train travelled north to Ft. Tryon Park.  Note:  I tried to find these guys on Youtube so I could give you a name but came up empty-handed.

2)  At Guantanamera, the famed Cuban restaurant on 8th Avenue – On two consecutive nights, my wife and I ate late dinners here and caught shows by Pedrito Martinez.  Eric Clapton was said to have come in recently for the music or the food or maybe both.  When we were there, a harp player got up and jammed with the band.  By then though we were into our second mojito and never caught the cat’s name.  The music was great and the food better – so good in fact that we opted to return here the following night rather than chance another venue where the food and the tunes might not be as tasty.

3)  At the Lincoln Center – Because everything is EXPENSIVE in New York, we were looking out for ways to save money.  And let’s face it, entertainment cost a lot in the Big Apple.  When we planned this adventure, we’d vowed to go either to a Broadway show or to attend a performance of the symphony during our week in town.  We settled on a symphony rehearsal at the Lincoln Center.  For me, this was  a no-brainer… I could listen to world-class musicians perform Tchaikovsky and Mozart without having to step out of my cargo shorts and sneakers.  And yes, I wore a Moraggots t-shirt but no one seemed to notice.  The Mozart piano concerto beat Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony hands-down.  I’m not sure why they were even preparing this since the composer himself didn’t think much of it either.

4)  At the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park – Five post meridan, Wednesday, April 18th… Deja vu!  I see myself in this guy strumming away furiously on an acoustic guitar with nobody paying any particular attention to him.  All the street noise – grinding taxi motors, car honks, hawkers pitching their bicycle rentals, and cellphone conversations issuing from the mouths of an endless stream of pedestrians – and when you can make something out that he’s playing, IT’S GOOD.

5)  At MOMA –  After my brother’s nuptials, this was a primary reason to be in the City.  Like good culture vultures, we needed to devour Diego Rivera’s “portable murals,” so-called cement panels painted by him during a six-week creative stay in New York in the 1930s.  According to art historians, Rivera exercised poor-judgement when he opted to depict a partying Nelson Rockefeller in one such panel.  The Rockefellers – teetotalers to a one – didn’t like it.  They shut down the mural project and withdrew funding for Rivera’s efforts before too many people saw it.  After sating ourselves on this and an abundance of other artists’ works, we were headed back to the museum’s ground floor when we heard, then saw someone’s five-year-old prodigy riding the escalators in the opposite direction, ringing a small handbell like a Salvation Army Santa on meth.  Frankly, for the past several days, we’d been crammed in with more people than we’d be likely to see in a year in San Francisco.

So, was it music or a just passing footnote in a lengthy New York street symphony?  It could have been either.  You had to be there I guess.