Onwards to New York City

Part three of my trans-pond trip.

Thursday 24th March

Despite heavy snow all night it can't have been too cold since the van required no extrication. I contemplated grabbing some kip before heading back to Providence, but despite having brought a sleeping bag with me for that very purpose, I decided that the van was too cold and cramped and in a mere 45 minutes I could be tucked up on the Jabberwock’s couch. It wasn’t a mere 45 minutes. I managed to get stuck in rush hour traffic getting into Providence and the sheer effort of keeping my eyes open made the journey feel twice as long.

By the time I’d hung around waiting for the cleaner to let me in, the Gargoyles were re-surfacing. I declined their offer of breakfast and slumped into the couch. They returned from breakfast far too soon after having left for my liking and in a manner not conducive to my remaining asleep, so I got up and joined them for a tour round campus. As interesting as it was to learn all about meal plans and security at Brown, it was probably more relevant to the prospective students and their parents than it was to a hungry, sleep-deprived degenerate.

Once I’d got some food inside me, I began to feel a little more human and was able to hold some kind of a conversation with some Brown fiends that I’d arranged to meet for coffee.

I was looking forward to our gig in the evening. We were expecting a decent audience and the Jabberwocks had organised an after-party. I managed to get some more sleep in the afternoon so I was feeling pretty perky come 9pm. It was a joint venture with the Jabberwocks and another visiting group from Stanford. The Jabberwocks obviously had quite a following and the lecture theatre where we performed was bulging at its seams. Clearly, however, the audience had not come to hear sexy jazz arrangements. The Jabberwocks fed them pumped-up pop numbers (tight and entertaining, but nothing spectaular), which they lapped up.

We were rubbish. The acoustics were crappy and the lecture theatre was fully lit so we could see how uninterested the audience were, which hardly inspired us to deliver our best performance. Still at least we weren’t as shite as the Stanford group!

We partied until the booze ran out, and soon got over it.

Friday 25th March

Our next stop was at with Redhot and Blue at Yale. New Haven was a hole and Yale was just the craziest farce of a place that I have ever seen. One Goyle accurately described it as a Disneyland Oxford. It wasn’t just that the whole place was mock Gothic and built in the 1930s. It was some of the ridiculous lengths that’s they’d gone to in order to increase it’s authenticity.

Once of their bell towers had at one point been the tallest stone only structure in the world (bigger than The Pyramids). They decided that in order to make it look aged they would poor a big vat of acid all over it. Apparently it was reasonably successful, however they also succeeded in undermining the foundations such that they had to be reinforced with steel thus promoting The Pyramids back to their rightful places as the tallest stone only structure. Ha!

It doesn’t stop there. Check this beautiful building out:




This is their Gymnasium (the second biggest in the world). It was never a place of worship. Their library, similarly, was also built to look like a converted church complete with alter-rail, which had only ever functioned as the place to return borrowed books, never to administer any sacraments.

Crazy f*ckers.

Thankfully we only spent one night at Yale or I might just have gone out of my head. The time we did spend there, however, was very enjoyable. We had a hardcore rehearsal in order to sort out the problems from our gig the night before at Brown. Everyone was really up for nailing a good performance the rehearsal was really productive and the gig that evening went awesomely (is that a word?).

We partied hard with the Redhot and Blue kids, and then got the hell out of Yale as fast as we could the following morning. Our next stop was with the Princeton Tigertones:

Saturday 26th March

Because of our haste to get out of Yale we arrived mid afternoon at Princeton and the Tigertones were still somewhere in upstate New York doing a gig. We found somewhere to dump our luggage and spent the afternoon checking out Princeton, which mostly involved drinking and eating. By the time the Tigertones returned at around 10pm a number of us had found a party and were ensconced in a Trans-Atlantic Beer Pong Battle.

Two consecutive night of partying was too much for most of the Gargoyles so only the hardiest of us ventured out with the hardiest Tones to hit up various Parties that were going on at the Eating Clubs of Princeton (don’t ask).

Sunday 27th March – Easter Day

In our mission for breakfast we battled through the throngs of preppy Easter families that seemed to have taken over Princeton. We eventually found a pancake house that didn’t look too full of chino but still had a line forming outside it. It was worth the wait, however, and twelve hungry Gargoyles tucked into piles of pancakes, eggs and a variety of other brekfast goodies. Apparently it’s the saturated fats in a greasy breakfast that are so good for curing a hangover. They race around mopping up the free radicals that come from the breakdown of methanol. Something like that, anyway.

Most of the rest of the day was spent recuperating. I taught a number of ill-educated Goyles how to play poker and then left them to it after my top-pair, top-licker was sunk by a backdoor flush. Look I’m not bitter, ok. We wandered round campus a little before rehearsing for the evening concert.

We performed under the Princeton Arch, which has really quite good acoustic and can also fit a decent sized audience underneath. We delivered another top-notch performance, which was just as well because the Tigertones were freaking amazing.

But enough talk of a cappella, you want to hear more poker stories, right?

Monday 28th March

We bid farewell to the Tigertones and headed back North up the New Jersey Turnpike. We also had to say goodbye to our trusty vans at this point. We dropped them off at Newark Airport and put our trust in public transport. We managed to commandeer (well ok, we paid for it) a shuttle to take us all the way to Columbia. There was really only one problem. It was raining like a bitch and if you’ve ever seen a bitch rain then you’ll know just how serious the situation was. This might not have been such a problem in itself if I’d have managed to get in touch with our contact at Columbia’s Uptown Vocal. I only managed to get hold of both of his answer machines. So I left a group of somewhat bedraggled Gargoyles huddled under a bus stand while I went in search of somewhere to leave our luggage.

Luggage was eventually deposited, lunch was eaten and Uptown Vocal were met. The rain continued unabated and the rest of the afternoon was something of a washout. Some braver souls wandered off for coffee, but having not been able to check email for almost a week, I had some plans that needed making:

Poker with asphnxma was a distinct possibility and there were plans already afoot to meet with one or more ITHers.

Our gig with Uptown Vocal was the same night. It was a fairly low-key affair in one of their commons rooms, but there was a decent turn out and we went down really well. We went out for food and drink with them afterwards and there was a party of sorts going on back in their accommodation, but things had finally caught up with me and I figured that I’d need some rest before ‘doing’ NYC and before the relatively imminent poker marathon that awaited me in Atlantic City.

Tuesday 29th March

A heavy schedule of sightseeing had been planned for today. I’d done a lot of "the sights" when I’d spent two days in NYC with Miss Pink 18 months earlier, but I was happy to do them again since I figured there’d be time to hang out and get some shopping done the following day.

We decided that it was a bit cloudy to try the Empire State Building so in the following order we did Busking in Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge, Ground Zero, Lunch, Staten Island Ferry (with busking). Incredibly, we bumped into half of the Oxford University Athletic Team in the ferry terminal including one guy who I knew from Univ. Small world, huh?

We headed, next, up to Broadway since some Goyles wanted to try and see a show. I was in the middle of making poker plans for the evening so I split, which was probably just as well since it looked as though it was going to take them for ever to decide what they wanted to see.

I hadn’t managed to get in touch with asphnxma, but I had managed to contact Wynton from ITH. He’d pointed me in the direction of the New York Players Club and he was going to do his best to make it along too, but it was rather going to depend on wife and kid commitments…

With any luck I’ll have the next instalment up later today.