"The District Sleeps Alone..." - Postal Service

Friday night my friends Rohna, Sara, and I went to District- a really cool NY-style wine bar that my intern/assistant Blake (yes, the one I was talking about at the end of The Blake Paradox) had been raving about for months. I hadn’t expected what I found. I was thinking chichi, mellow, wine bar with expensive drinks and rich men buying rounds at their tables kinda deal. No. This was entirely different.

Blake said it’s the kind of place he’d take a date. Would I take a date there? No. Besides the fact that I usually want to be able to hear my dates, it’s also too crowded for anything but single people who want to bump into that hot guy who’s drink is totally going to spill as he tries to squeeze past you. And I’m not really the bar date type, anyway, unless there’s some familiarity with the other person. And the guys I date are usually not rich (this fact NEVER changes), but rather, most likely starving artists. Really.

But. I was there with my single girlfriends, and we were totally that threesome who took advantage of all the bumping, squeezing past, drink spilling. It probably also owed to the fact that we were the only women-of-color (ok, that’s a bit too PC for me) at the bar, that we got more attention than we wanted. One guy, pretending to be the owner (there’s one of them at every bar), thought he was so cool he could grab my hand and pull it to his chest even as I stood, deeply engrossed in my conversation with some other guy. (His other hand always seemed to graze my back as he smiled and slloooowwwlllyyyyy walked away, facing me, crashing into everyone behind him).

The guy I actually ended up talking with the rest of the right was one of the guys whose couch we took over when we first walked in. He and his friend scooted over to the chairs, to make room for us. He had a British accent and Sara thought he was cute. I thought he looked older. But he was staring at me while I twirled my legs, made space for the plate of roasted almonds on my knee by lifting up my whitewhite skirt, giggled, and sipped at my wine with my redred lips. He was also the guy who volunteered to babysit our coats when my friends and I decided we weren’t going to meet anyone sitting down and so went off to flirt with other guys. When I came back to check on our coats, an hour later, I stayed for the scintillating conversation.

On the other side of the room, my friends were having their own fun little time, acquiring free drink upon free drink. By the end of the night, Sara had consumed seven drinks! And that is probably a big part of the reason we lost her. (One other, insignificant detail being that there was this suited, fedora-ed, african american guy who’s ear she’d been nibbling on... but that’s a very insigificant detail). We did eventually find her, but it was… uhhh… a little too late.

Overall, it was a very unexpected, surprisingly fun evening. A little too much excitement than we’d planned, but we’d definitely go back.

Oh, and the guys were definitely not starving artists, because I didn’t pay for one drink. Does that mean that there was no one in that room I would have made out with? Hmmm...