#48 "The Last Macy's Day Parade" December 14, 2011 in Color!

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I have always loved Thanksgiving and in New York, it is indeed a special day. When I was a kid, I would go to my grandparents house and we would have a bunch of people over for breakfast. The menu would be entirely made up of different types of pie. My grandfather liked mince meat and pecan pie. I liked apple and pumpkin. The house would be full of people and everyone would be milling around, eating pie, and watching the parade on TV. Eventually, I grew up and as a teenager, I may have slept through the parade every year, but gotten up for the pie. Then, when I moved to New York, I couldn't wait for Thanksgiving to actually see the parade in person. I know, it's pretty hokey and the crowds are insane, but this was a thing I had been seeing on TV my whole life, and now I finally lived in New York City and I could walk out my door and see the spectacle in person. I was also videotaping everything at the time, so giant balloons floating down Broadway was just the thing for me. I must say, the parade does not disappoint. It is an absolutely crazy experience in person. The fact that there are a million people watching it makes it all the more exciting (albeit slightly annoying at times). The marching bands culled from all over the country blaring their marches, the semi-famous and super famous people and their intricate floats; it's all an incredible display. Granted, it is all basically just a prelude to Black Friday these days, gearing all the consumers up to get great deals at midnight at Macy's. The original idea behind the parade was for all of the newly acclimated immigrants who worked at Macy's to celebrate their new American heritage. But even then, it was really just a publicity stunt for Macy's itself. Over the years, it has become the largest Thanksgiving parade in the nation, and is the one that is on television every Thanksgiving at 9 in the morning. When I first went to it, I was propelled by the sense of irony that I felt towards this event. I have always thought that the balloons are aesthetically pleasing objects and are more than the sum of their parts as most of them are giant advertisements for toys or other products. However, though pleasing to the eye, I thought the whole event was really the worst part of Capitalism, namely the commodification of something that should hold special significance to the country. Thanksgiving, after all, is a day to reflect on all of the good things that one has in life. That is a great reason to celebrate! You are not dead! You should be happy about that, at least. The Parade, I thought, took all of that and threw it out the window, replacing it with a three hour long advertisement for "The World's Largest Department Store" and the things in sold within it's avenue-long walls. But then I attended the event in person. It actually was a celebration of the good things in life! Fun times, music, dancing, people working together to create something for others, community; all of these things were represented and I was so excited about it. It was one of those times where you are so cynical about something, and it surprises you and turns your frown upside down and shows you that, although you might still be right about the broader social implications, at the heart of the event, it is still a parade and parades are supposed to be FUN! Now that I have attended the Parade numerous times over the past 10 years, my next goal for the Thanksgiving Day Parade is to be in it. I would like to hold one of the balloons and march down the street in a "Clifford the Big Red Dog" outfit on and be part of the action. I would like to be on one of the floats with Selena Gomez and throw out candy to all the kids who come in with their parents from Long Island and Westchester at six in the morning. Someday that's going to happen and I will wave to all of you watching on TV, eating your pie for breakfast.

#48 "The Last Macy's Day Parade" December 14, 2011

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This busy monstrosity was started by one of our customers. Not the drawing, but the character that it inspired. Can you guess which one? No, it's not the Satan-like character with the baby head, although we do have some customers who resemble that remark. It could almost be the guy next to him with the mustache. That guy kind of looks like my friend Brew Dude's dad, and we actually have a customer who looks exactly like Brew Dude's dad but he happens to be black. So, not his dad, but I do always text Brew Dude when his "black dad" comes in. I want them to meet someday and see if they are really related. So, anyway, the inspirational character is the woman on the left with the bandaged nose. That actual woman came into the restaurant sometime in the late autumn of 2011 and sat in my section and I drew her in between taking her order, giving her some drinks, and eventually the check. Since we are located in New York City, and Greenwich in general, we have a lot of wealthy customers coming in to eat and drink at the restaurant. A lot of these customers are getting on in age and have enough money to "fix" themselves with various forms of cosmetic surgery. This poor woman came into the restaurant not an hour out of getting a nose job, I am almost positive. Her face was all puffed up, her lips had been botoxed, she had two black eyes (since they have to break the nose to make the new one) and bandages upon bandages on her nose. You're probably thinking, maybe she just fell down and you are judging her to be a face altering, nose-job getting, vanity case. To that I say, you might not be wrong! She may have passed out on the subway platform onto the tracks and was rescued just in the nick of time by a handsome fire fighter who was off duty and leaped down onto the tracks to scoop her up and whisk her off to safety only to break her nose and black both of her eyes in the process on account of the fire fighter being so devastatingly handsome and strong. This could also have happened and I am a mean person for thinking otherwise, and then actually gone ahead and drawn her whilst also serving her food. However, this is New York City and we are living in the modern times. These are the times of constant video and camera surveillance from Big Brother and Little Brother alike. Everyone has an iPhone and they are constantly taking pictures of people and things out in the world that make it up on the internet without the subject ever knowing it. Everyday on the internet people are posting pictures of sleeping people on the subway and random fashion mistakes on the sidewalk. We have become a nation of paparazzi. In fact, there was that guy who live tweeted a breakup that he overheard on a rooftop in Brooklyn this week and it got picked up by news organizations all over the world! People have been calling New York the "naked city" for decades now because of the lack of privacy. Nowadays, with all this social technology, the lack of privacy has grown exponentially, but it has always been this way in New York. You can hear your neighbors above and below you. You can see into the windows of your neighbors across the street. You hear people telling other people all kinds of crazy things on cellphones on the street, and overhear people telling insane stories at obnoxious levels in restaurants. The City is basically like a Chat Roulette every five feet that you walk down the sidewalk. I say all of this just to justify drawing a picture of a person who came in to dine at the place where I work. It is not the first time I have done that and it certainly was not the last, and if I had never said anything about the subject, you would think that all the characters are being harnessed from my mentally insane imagination. However, art imitates life, and life imitates the internet these days, so I guess I'm going to be drawing a lot more zeros and ones. 

#40 "Motivationally Speaking" July 31, 2011

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When I first started working at the Cafe Loup in February of 2002, one could still smoke in restaurants and bars in New York. We had a smoking section up front and you could smoke at the bar as well. Some of the bar tenders smoked behind the bar and we as waiters could smoke at the bar, right at the end closest to the Waiters Station. It's funny to think that at one time, you could be waiting on someone not two feet away and take a cigerette break right in front of them. They wouldn't even mind, and in more than one case, someone would need something, notice you were smoking and give a gesture indicating that whatever they needed could wait until you were done with your smoke break. When smoking was going to be banned, all the smokers were in an outrage. We thought that we were going to lose a ton of business at the Loup. People were talking about how it would never catch on, that the smokers would win, that the ban would be overturned and the smoking sections would stay. Well, the ban came and went and I think the only customer who we actually lost was Dany Levy. Lloyd would lament the loss as, "She was using me for my smoking section." Ten years later, one forgets that you could smoke in restaurants; it seems insane that you were ever aloud to in the first place. I am a smoker of many years. I quit in December, but even as a smoker, I have a hard time imaging that past reality. I think of all the people who complain about the music being loud and all kinds of other insane complaints and I can't believe that these people ever went out to eat while smoking was allowed in restaurants. I guess people didn't know any better at the time and so it was a given, and it was part of going out. That is really the only explanation I can think of. That, or they were the people who initiated the ban. I personally like that this happened. I remember going out to bars back then and waking up nauseous at the smell of my clothes and hair. Everything always smelled like stale ash, and I was one of the people who was contributing to the problem and loving it.
So here we are ten years later and one can still smoke at the Cafe Loup, but you have to know when. It's one of our awesome little secrets that when it is found out by a non-regular, is news so good, it's as if we told them they won the lottery. These people get so excited, they wax nostalgic about how smoking and drinking go hand in hand and that's the way the world should be. They talk whimsically of dividing the country into two states, smoking and non-smoking. They look off into the distance of the back bar and talk about the old days, the good old days and the nights they can't remember anymore. Granted, this is a very secret and hard to come by secret for the customers of the Cafe Loup. We, as employees, were never banned from smoking inside the Loup. We have always been able to smoke there, and as long as Lloyd continues to smoke, we will always be able to smoke there. We can't take our smoke breaks at the bar during service anymore... well, actually, we can and do just that at certain times of the day. We smoke inside during service, and the customers are never aware of it. It's at times like this that one really thinks about the secret lives of New Yorkers. So much happens behind the scenes of every place in New York, one can hardly comprehend it. Smoking is just the tip of the iceberg.