I received some of the nicest emails of my online career today, all from folks who appreciated their viewing of the Pink House movie, and weirdly, I'm feeling much better about the whole experience. That doesn't erase the fact that I puked on Broome Street on the way home last night, and woke up with a hangover commensurate with my age, but it was good to get nice and drunk on a Monday night. Just like college! Flaming Dr. Peppers at Ham's! Whooooo-hooooo!
Salem had a few hours to kill before flying back to Atlanta, so we acted like total gossipy girls and went to North 5th Ave. to screw around at Gucci, Prada, Hugo Boss and Dunhill. Now, I've never been inside the Manhattan Dunhill store before, but it is a beautiful and sad throwback to a time when men were so manly that they were almost feminine. Something about the footwear, the driving goggles, the natty suits - it's all rather gay, in a British not-gay sort of way.
Upstairs is a walk-in humidor, where they keep scores of different kinds of cigars at exactly 70% humidity and try to come as close as possible to a Cuban cigar, which means tiptoeing around the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I wish I had a taste for cigars (or that they didn't make me barf) but the whole Dunhill vibe makes you long for the life of a rich, white, British man with a motorcycle sidecar. The display tables are all covered in stitched leather, and there's even a cigar-smoking room with every sort of liquor and newspaper, pristine like the Ambassador Suite at a 5-star hotel - now closed-off and unusable because of Bloomberg's smoking ban.
There's also something a little cold and distant about Dunhill, as if all of the accoutrements were devices designed to promote sex with pliant, rich American women - but there would be no follow-up call, no provocations of love after that road trip into the Surrey countryside - you would be away on business, and pretty soon, she would understand that you would always be away on business.
After that, Salem and I trucked over to Barney's. Being an utter tyro at this whole shopping thing, I thought Barney's was a discount clothes store. I dunno, something about the name. It just seemed like someone named Barney wouldn't be selling $400 shirts. Oh, but they were.
The place was abuzz with the filming of "Sex and the City," which took over the women's section (so we couldn't get a gift for Elizabeth). Even freakier, we bumped, literally, into Kate Hudson and Chris Robinson as they got off the elevator. Kate looked about 14 months pregnant, and Chris looked exactly the same as 1994, when Greg Humphreys and I spent the day smoking something wonderful with him backstage at a rock show in Charlotte. Those guys always had the best stuff, which is probably so obvious that I needn't even say it.
Yay for shopping in New York! I'm too poor to buy any of it!
Posted by at October 14, 2003 11:54 PM