Brooklyn is beddah. Like buddah. Fans of Hopfblog might remember that last year, Liz Maestri, Sarah Godfrey, and I went to the Greenwich Village parade, which while pretty cool, was crowded and long. This is the Park Slope parade, which starts off with EMTs giving out candy from the backs of ambulances. The big tradition is that the parade is led by a headless horseman, and he was so headless, and so on horseback, but I couldn't get good pictures tonight for some reason. Anyway, the parade started on 12th Street (I live on 15th) at 6:30. I got there at about 6:15 and stood on the street, with no one in front of me, until the parade started precisely on time. Then I realized that there weren't that many people crowding the sidewalks because everyone walks in the parade. I stood there for nine minutes, which is how long it took the whole thing to pass, and then came home. That's my kind of parade, especially because I realized that people in costumes kind of scare me.

I gave platelets today and my phlebotomist, Kellie, said she was thinking of dressing up as me for Halloween, by pulling her bangs back, wearing jeans, tennis shoes, glasses, and a hoodie, but she wasn't sure I'd get it. I said I wouldn't have, unless she'd shoved a bunch of padding in her clothes, which would have been kind of mean. She's not at all mean, though, she had presents for me: a CD of teasers for The Really Big Pirate Show (see thereallybigpirateshow.com), the musical she and her husband wrote and are trying to get on Broadway, and the last of her herb garden, a bag each of basil and thyme. I froze five packs of basil, and with the other one, I made a salad for dinner that's the ingredients of that sandwich I liked: cucumbers, tomatoes, basil and a thinned-out mayo dressing, and it was yummy. If you don't know what I'm going to do with the thyme tomorrow, you haven't been paying attention.

This has happened a couple of times in this, the city of immigrants--I tell someone my name and they kind of consider me German. It's been at least a hundred years since anyone I'm descended from thought of themselves as German. My Grandma Thora was born in Sweden, but she was adamant that she not be called Swedish, she was an American, dammit, and even Swedish-American an insult.

Anyway, the gentleman who asked me who my German relatives were today lived there as a child, when his father was stationed there with the Red Army. (I didn't ask if dad was rewarded for his service with a stint in the gulag as so many soldiers were.) He liked Germany, but it was complicated, and he was happy to get back to "simple Russia". Flash forward and somehow he has come to live in very un-simple Brooklyn. That's a heck of a life.

Miss Liz had a meat jonz last night, so we went to Schnack, a hipster burger joint, in Red Hook (or was it Carroll Gardens?). I had some good onion rings and a lame salad, and she had their specialty, tiny oblong hamburgers, and fries. While deciding what to order, I asked the waiter if the "double" was two patties or twice the size of the mini 1.5 oz patty. "I'm not sure, I don't eat meat," he said. "You're saying you've never looked directly at the food you sell here?" I said. Peeps, I'd like to hear the string of expletives that would explode from every one of Chef Ramsay's orifici if an employee of his said that! (A helpful diner a couple of tables away waved her burger at us and told Liz that was the double.)

Then we got serious and went up to Union Smith for libations.

On the bus yesterday, I saw a woman holding a brochure that said, "Don't Let BV Slow You Down". What's BV? Bronchial Virus? Bovine Vigilantes? No, the subtitle was "What you need to know about bacterial vaginosis". I'm not going to google that or anything, but I am going to say ma'am, you probably should slow down.

Here are two of my ex-receptionists from City Paper, celebrating the 30th birthday of a third, last Saturday in Brooklyn. (It really is the center of the universe, people, get on up here.) And, apparently, Batman.

I haven't been to a Broadway show in a while, but I wanted to see Kevin Kline in something, so I went to Cyrano de Bergerac yesterday, and it was better than I expected. He is really good, and Jennifer Garner earned her laughs. The play's kind of a downer, compared to "Roxanne", which being such a lowbrow, was my background. Oh, but one pet peeve, though, according to the text, Roxanne and Cyrano were children together, but Kline is 25 years older than Garner. In this case, he is too old for the role, rather than her being too young, but since it takes you out of the play, they should have dealt with it. It's like the opening narration of the movie "The Assassination of Jesse James . . . " There's a voice over giving fun facts about James, including that he had granu-something of the eyelid which caused him to blink a lot. You know producer Brad Pitt is not paying actor Brad Pitt to blink like a psycho, and he doesn't, so why not drop that line?

If I'm a little quiet on the blog, it's because I bought seasons 2 and 5 of "Upstairs Downstairs" on ebay, and I can't quit watching, oh, Mr. 'Udson!

I don't even want a Nobel Prize now. Regardless of how you feel about Al Gore, how has the cause of peace been advanced?

Another near-perfect night in the Ap Friday. I don't think I've been to the symphony since I was a teenager, but I really enjoyed this multi media thing at Lincoln Center. Well, first I enjoyed a glass of champagne by the fountain (where Nicholas Cage met Cher in "Moonstruck" and where several gentlemen were obviously awaiting their Chers the other day) on a perfect New York evening as I appreciated for the millionth time how lucky I am to be here. The first half of the show was a clip from the movie "The Music Lovers" and some actors talking about Tchaikovsky's life and reading excerpts from his letters, and then some analysis of the themes in the 6th Symphony, which was finished nine days before Tchaikovsky died.

Then after the intermission, they played the whole symphony, better known as Pathetique. I had a record of it back in the day and it's emotional and overwrought, just like I was, so it was easy for me to enjoy. The man next to me said, "I always buy a seat toward the stage because I like to follow along with the score," and sure enough, he had a pocket sized copy. Cough*nerd!*cough. But I wasn't tricked into applauding the two seeming climaxes like the rubes down below, because I just waited for him to close the book.

After the show, I walked down to Times Square just to see the colorful blur like the gawky tourist I am at heart. Then I bought a bag of cheddar/chipotle popcorn for the subway ride home.

I'd say that evening was in the top 2% of my life. (Think about it--there should be 7 days per year that make it into the top 2%, but there are some years that have a lot and some that have none, so I'm sticking by my math.)

I saw the National Theater of Greece's Elektra last night at City Center, from the exact same seat I saw Gypsy. It is a fine, yet reasonable, seat. The show was terrific (in Greek, with surtitles), but Maestri is right--as we have childrens' theaters, we need elders' theaters. They can't sit still for two hours, nor can they quit their choking. So each seat is outfitted with a phlegm bucket, a catheter, and lozenges. Also, people in the row behind my seat, shut up. Seriously, all the coming and going and coughing did distract me from what was a very interesting show--mostly the hysterical Elektra surrounded by her chorus, via J. Crew. There was a great prosthetic on Clytemnestra at the end, too, that the cast dipped blood out of. The Greeks: Exorcising your pity and fear for three millennia.

Elevator G at Methodist Hospital where I drop off my platelets is a Sabbath elevator. From 4pm Friday through 9pm Saturday, it stops at every floor, going up and down continuously. Like in the Torah.

Liz had tickets to the Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan last week, so we went to dinner and then the show. It's hard to believe dancers have the same muscles and tendons I do. There wasn't much music per se in this performance, it was a lot of very slow controlled movement to a faint rhythm or wind blowing sounds, for example. I feel like I'm lurching around like Frankenstein.

At dinner, Liz was admiring the excellent hair color job I got in Minnesota. "It's kind of reddish gold," she said, "and with your blue blouse and glasses, your eyes really pop, and, well, all in all, you really look like a member of the master race." See? Now that's all I was going for, I never liked the fakey bleachy look.

John Miras and I had a lovely afternoon together Sunday, starting with brunch at a little Mediterranean place around the corner with garden seating. He seems to be digging his assistant district attorney job, and it's everything he ever dreamed of: the juvies, the hookers (one woman was picked up turning a trick on the way to the courthouse), the kids who shove sausages down their pants and make a run for it. He says that almost invariably when defendants are offered a choice between two days of community service or ten days in jail, they choose jail. It was unseasonably warm, so we walked down to the library, then sat on a bench in Prospect Park for a while just visiting. Such a nice boy.

I did not, however, care for the movie portion of our afternoon, "Eastern Promises". The "Russians" sounded like a bunch of Count Choculas.

And here's the one thing I got a laugh out of--you can apparently shoot paint pellets at people running around in freak costumes. From this we can now pinpoint the outer extremity of political correctness at King's Highway.

Going to the beach shouldn't make you sad. This is the sad Cyclone at misty cool Coney Island. Here's some sad food. I took the bus out because I wanted to see parts of Brooklyn I haven't seen before, and Brooklyn's really huge. There's one block on Coney Island Blvd. where everything changes from being Kosher and in Hebrew to restaurants like the Rasputin. And that long-ago planned trip to Russia? I feel like I've been to a retirement community on the Caspian Sea now. The less sad sights are at the top: the hot dog record board, and Nathan's. (Only 272 more days until the next hot dog eating contest.)

Headline of the NY Post story about the Federline boys having to go live with their dad: Un-Fitney. Awesome!

Some observations from my travels yesterday:

Check out the new Brawny paper towel man. His teeth are whitened and he's got product in his hair. What kind of metrosexual lumberjack camp is he in?

And I was accidentally exposed to the show I thoroughly hate, "The View" (versus shows I love to hate, like "Seventh Heaven" and "Sex and the City"). Whoopi "Girl, Please" Goldberg was arguing with Elisabeth "Republican Whipping Girl" Hasselbeck about, well, who knows, but here's Whoopi: "I don't like your war, but I am forced to pay for it. So fine, I'll pay for your war that I don't like, but you have to pay for abortions that you don't like, and we can all get along." It was like they were reading the constitution aloud. And then, a chat with America Ferrera! This show is like if you were at a new job and the whole department was going out to lunch so you had to go because you're new, and you got stuck at the end of a table with the dumbest bunch of women who think they're hilarious and sophisticated, but they're really just the gals who do payroll that they can't figure out how to fire.

I've just written a fan letter to Kate Fodor, who wrote the play I almost died trying to see.

It was a year ago today that I loaded up the mini-van and drove up here from Virginia. Man, I was a mess, after the trauma of leaving the City Paper, but I'm sure glad I came.

Here's a thoughtful critique of Reba McIntyre's new "Duets" album from an amazon reader:

It's lame brained hillbillies like Reba that supported Bush and subsequently created the mess we are in. Let them know there are consequences and DO NOT BUY THIS CD.

But does it have a good beat? Is it easy to dance to? What? No one alive today remembers "American Bandstand"? I don't believe it.