Here are H and me at Marie's Crisis (show tunes piano bar in Greenwich Village), about 23 hours into his birthday and an hour away from mine. I'm getting a little long in the tooth (ouch, that reminded me of last week's root canal) for two big nights in a row, but what can we do? We did have two very special evenings.

Harold knows I can't eat crab, so I took him to City Crab for his birthday dinner because he'd never have taken me, and we had big shrimp cocktail, big seared tuna, clam chowder, and a bottle of wine. On the way to Marie's, we stopped in a bodega at the corner so I could buy my birthday treat, a whooppie pie. The bodega guy asked for a dollar-fifty and my phone number, and just as I was trying to figure out what had been said (right in front of Harold, but in fairness, we were in Greenwich Village, on our way to a piano bar), a prostitute came in and said hi to both of us. So it was a very magical night. Since I wanted H to have a perfect birthday, I even hung in for Joe's pizza at 2am.

Last night, H took me to Faustino, a "new Italian" restaurant owned by a real chef, you know, one who's on TV, Scott Conant. (He's the judge on "Chopped" who bags anyone who puts raw red onions on his plate.) I had a delicious meal, stewed eggplant with pork (kind of the fatty pork taste you get in pork and beans) and roasted black bass with purple artichokes and fava beans with mint. Harold had the biggest platter of duck breast I've ever seen, as he said, "the Jayne Mansfield of ducks". Everything he gave me had to do with "us": my first Bar Mitzvah card, a CD and DVD of late great singer Nancy Lamott, and Jonathan Schwartz's memoirs. Then we went to the secret lounge at Crifdogs, where we had weirdo cocktails and tater tots. It's probably been a decade since my last tot and I really enjoyed them, and after the first couple of sips of fire water, I grew to like my coffee concentrate and cherry Black Jack.

Two happy New York birthdays on which we tried not to dwell on the opening of Auschwitz (June 14) and the fire aboard the General Slocum ferry (June 15)!