First Night 2005

New Year's Eve: a success. Went to First Night from roughly 1pm to 10:45pm, ignoring all the music and dance performances almost completely in favor of the storytelling (we saw Brother Blue and Judith Black and later Jay O'Callahan, all of whom were wonderful) and puppetry and acrobatics and comedy and juggling. We plunked ourselves down right in the front row for Jay O'Callahan (whom I've dug since my days DJ'ing Alphabet Soup on wbrs); and when he closed by leading the audience in an unexpected, simple, but spirited chorus of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", I closed my eyes and held Tiger Boy's hand and sang, and my heart was so full that I could barely speak, still, when Jay came down off the stage and gave us a big friendly hello on his way past. I hoped Jay would understand. I imagine that, looking at us, he did.

We went back to Cambridge after that, to a dessert party being held by one of Tiger Boy's MIT grad-student friends -- which turned out to be a pleasant but *very* small party, only five or six of us, and I got an amusing demonstration of grad-student small talk: "So, what lab are you in? So, what's your research topic?" But we toasted the New Year with port and chocolate fondue, which can't be bad, and got home (to my house) around 2am.

And then I got up and went to shul. The end.