In New York City, it is overcast and raining. Not just a sprinkle but the bone-chilling, clothes-drenching kind of day that can make a person melancholy. That is fitting for the anniversary of September 11, 2001.
I got my son off to school this morning. 6am-9am are not my “prime time” hours. Let’s just say that for the first two mornings, I returned to the house after drop-off, to sleep a little, shower and get to the office. Given the cost of the various taxis, this is not a sustainable practice even for the “AM challenged” like me. Luckily, his other mom comes home tonight from a business trip. She likes mornings, G-d bless her.
But today I was meeting a friend at a coffee shop at 8:30am, so I had to be showered and dressed BEFORE drop-off. This required success-oriented self-coaching last night. Today I could not hit the snooze button. I had to be fully groomed and ready with breakfast, packed lunch and washed, dressed and fed child. After a successful drop-off (phew) off I went in the whipping wind and drastically cooler temperatures to meet my friend.
Neither of us had been to this coffee shop, which turned out to be a 1950s style, singing coffee shop. The servers (the genderless version of waitress or waiter because “waitron” sounds like a machine) sing. At 8:30AM. Think about that. Most people don’t want to hear another’s voice until the crack of 10:15AM, but these servers are belting out songs at 8:30AM.
Some servers/singers are good, some not so much. The guy who sang Paul Simon’s “Call me, Al” should have had the microphone ripped out of his hands. At the risk of being redundant, it is 8:30am, and he is crooning in full voice WITH microphone in a cavernous space where there are few customers. My friend and I, as 40-and-overs, asked another server to turn down the volume of anything, the senseless movie playing in the background, the background music or the singer. The response was, “well, we are singing servers.” How nice for you, really; how unlucky for us. This is when I wished I had a hearing aid to turn off.
My friend and I called on our powers of concentration and focused. We giggled about things, talk business some, and talk family (the latter is always bittersweet). At one point, all the noise — oops, I mean music and singing — stopped and I realized was yelling over the din. So, I guess I did get the experience of what it must be like to have a hearing aid.
Apparently, one goes to the place for the entertainment and not for the food. Which makes a person wonder how this place survives the recession.
But it was a great place to have coffee because it created a bloggable moment. And the guy who sang, “Call me, Al” really should look for another line of work.