More 2004...

I hope you're not getting tired of my look back at the year. Here's a photo from a July trip to New York, for a family gathering upstate and then a quick swing through NYC. This is a picture of one of my very talented brothers, during an exciting evening spent hanging out in Times Square. Our bartender that night was a talkative guy who was afraid he would get fired before the election because of his ourspoken views about the war. He was, briefly, pretty pissed off that evening because he'd been stiffed by some very healthy-looking kids who spent quite a while sitting at the bar -- they were very rah-rah Iraq war, but when the bartender (who was a Desert Storm vet) asked them why they weren't over there fighting, the kids got kind of cranky. There was also a lot of excitement outside the window that evening as a drama unfolded after a bomb scare at the local subway stop. More ambulances, fire trucks and police cars than I've ever seen outside of a Blues Brothers movie converged on the street outside. We ended up having to take an alternate route back to lower Manhattan, as the subway line we'd taken up to Times Square was still shut down when we headed home for the night. In this shot, my brother is checking New York One (local 24-hour news) on the TV for the lowdown about the police drama outside. I'm not sure what kind of drink this was -- some sort of martini, I think -- but its color and the light pleased me. My brother, G-Dog, a very dear and clever cousin and I hatched up a great idea for a screenplay that night, but we still need to get most of it down on paper...