Song in your heart sort of night

We have snow again in NYC which is a wonderful blessing in many ways. People are reveling in their days off from work, using it as an excuse to stay in and skip the gym, posting pics of the white powder blanketing tree lined streets all over the island of Manhattan and the outer burroughs.


My delightful partner in (Improv) crime sent me the pic below of the walkway from her home in Flushing to the nearest LIRR stop - fearful that she'd get snowed in here in the city after our 3-6pm class yesterday afternoon, she sent me texts questioning which type of boot this specific blizzard called for: Ugg vs Hunter, and I assured her the movie-set looking flakes were turning to slush when they hit the pavement around midday, so I was relatively sure she'd be fine getting back across the bridge, but that she was obviously welcome to crash on our futon here in Manhattan Valley and to go water-proof if possible.
I'm considering the snow a blessing because it's brought the temperature down.


This weekend and Monday it was freeze-your-face-off cold, and the wind was whipping through the streets with a vengeance.


I braved the brutality of it Monday night though and have been meaning to mention here how I rediscovered what a good friend NYC is to me in doing so.


You know the saying "a friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten it?"


I spent two hours navigating the subway system Monday night: taking the 1 to the B to the F and back, because I'd told a friend who was in from Boston that I'd meet her at the Rockwood to see a producer we work with who's in a band play a 50 minute set. And I floated through the duration of my trip diagonally across the city because along every leg - literally EVERY leg - of it, there were musicians providing me with a soundtrack for my life.


Started with a fiddler playing "Irish Washwoman" at 110th, continued with a woman who brought a portable karaoke machine on the 1 to accompany her Donna Summer's routine, carried on with a pair of young boys, improvising R&B for the final stretch on the F.


And then, seriously, as if the 3-fer weren't sort of strange enough to hit in itself, there was a trumpeter who was playing at the 2nd Ave stop when I got down there and then 55 minutes later when I went to head back uptown after seeing the producer's band.


Song in your heart sort of night. So much easier to stand the cold when music's warming you from the inside out.