New York's newest piano bar chanteuse

Well, it's official. I'm now going to play piano and sing in a piano bar in Greenwich Village on Wednesday nights. So kudos to Mr. David Shenton, my "in" with the piano bar crowd. I'll try not to let you down, David. Now I just need to, um, learn 4 hours of music, and a few showtunes and/or Billy Joel songs. I find the image of me singing Billy Joel songs to a NYC cabaret crowd extremely amusing. Although once I did do a very morbid version of the song "Pressure." Anyway, this is kind of a hoot, we'll see how it goes. Hopefully they won't fire me when I don't know how to play "A Moment Like This" on command. But at least I now have a chance to get a lot of playing and improvising done, which is something I could really benefit from. The proprietors seem really nice, and the supervisor lady is a trained musician, and seems like a great gal. She said she might sing some arias once in a while. I asked her if I could do Radiohead covers, and she said, "It's your night! Play whatever you want!" so I feel somewhat better. Anyway, if anyone is hangin' on 7th Ave. and Christopher on Wednesday nights, stop by Gianna's (next to the Duplex), grab a drink and here me croon out a diddy or two. Oh, and if you're looking for somewhere special to hang with your significant other on Valentine's day, apparently i've got that shift too. I have to think of some amusing love songs to play, if anyone has some suggestions!

Ok, aside from that shameless plug, tomorrow is Mr. Aaron Jerome's 30th b-day, and tonight we're having a special celebration for our special housemate, involving lots of mexican food, party items, and an excellent movie about Trolls, along with special guest Heather Dexter, who took the Chinatown Express all the way from Boston to be here. Word!

And a post from Maria wouldn't be complete without at least SOME mention of some service person screaming at her about something. Well, we finally got our boiler doors replaced just in time to have the Verizon guy come over and yell at me about our phone wiring. After spending days trying to explain the SAME SITUATION to a variety of customer service folk, he informs me that none of them know what they're talking about, and proceeds to stomp around the house (this is 8:30 am by the way), tell me he doesn't know where the phone line is actually connected to our house, and I need to go buy a grounded phone box and pay to have all the jacks in the house rewired/reinstalled. Obviously that's the answer! You have a 150 year old house, it's not like it's NEVER HAD PHONE SERVICE BEFORE!! FIGURE IT OUT, verizon man! ANyway, so after he finished telling me how dumb I was for not knowing where everything was connected, and me trying to get him to go away because I was too tired to deal with him, Moray says "Isn't Verizon responsible for everything outside the house?" and the guy says "..... yeah. ....... Let me have one more look."

anyway, now we finally have phone service. Thank you, husband!

ciao all,

Maria