aging; aging gracefully; seniors

Yikes! That Water’s FREEZING!

/ wrinklesmeanwisdom / 1 Comment

Coldwatercartoon

So it’s February now in NYC.  And the thermometer recently was in the teens with a wind chill in the minus single digits.  You go into a restaurant for a cup of coffee to warm up and visit the bathroom first.  You’re still pretty frozen when you get to the sink to wash your hands.  You turn on both the hot and cold water faucets but only ice cold water comes out.

The restaurant isn’t a dive but like many owners of commercial properties in the city, I  guess economies in operating their space comes with cutbacks to hot water in the taps.  I don’t mind it in the summer months, but in the dead of winter, that cold water to wash your ice cold hands is pretty nasty.

I encountered the very same situation this morning in a ladies room on the third floor of Bloomingdales on 59th and Lex.  Today, the temperatures are in the 20’s and my hands had already warmed up from taking 2 escalators up from the entrance, so the situation was a bit more tolerable, albeit still mighty unpleasant.

 

Theatergoers from Hell

/ wrinklesmeanwisdom / 1 Comment

Theatercartoon*

Most people who attend the theater in New York City are pretty well behaved.  They turn off cell phones, unwrap their candies and stop talking when the house lights dim and the curtain goes up.  Every play that I’ve been to since cell phones were invented a few decades ago has a pretty standard advisory for audience members to do just that.  Sometimes the advisory even includes an “or else”, strengthened by the threat of one or all of the cast members coming into audience to find malefactors.  So far, no play has threatened dismemberment.

However, once in a while you find yourself in a seat near a chucklehead who’s been living in a cave for the past 45 years.  I had two chuckleheads to a high exponent seated next to me recently at a matinee.

In the middle of the first act, when it was clear their attention was flagging, the man pulled out his cellphone, turned it on, and reported, in what I would consider a loud whisper, an incoming text to the woman to his right.  She then responded back in another loud whisper.

After a few initial seconds of code red anger on my part, I turned to them and said, “PLEASE…TURN….OFF…YOUR… PHONE!!!!!!!”  He looked startled but he did.  They left at intermission.