A couple of days after the aforementioned Loko disaster I was still recovering. My body, my head, my soul was wounded and heavy. But one must muster and sally forth, especially upon invite to Astoria. The 'chic' part of Queens, we were drawn to Astoria by the mythical legend of the "Pickle-back". Long ago when Timon went up to Bronxville for a dinner with some colleagues from his composing work. A dude called Curtis extolled the virtues of the pickle-back and insisted we join him one evening so after work we headed to some tiny bar that boasted deep fried pickle poppers and the infamous shot. I must mention - there is a total pickle obsession in this country. Anyone who has visited us so far will know (Ian, Alice, Lauren, Lucy) that pickles come as a free side dish to most diner/restaurant meals. And I know I don't eat them so I don't know who is.
The night was chilled and we ended up on a large table with one of Curtis' friends who was planning a trip to outback Oz later this year. He asked us a million questions and his biggest fear (crocodiles) was confirmed when that recent pic of a guy feeding a mammoth croc off the side of a boat appeared on someone's IPhone. I was still majorly fatigued from a solid week of antibiotics and tonsilitis recovery so was fairly sober when the time came. One straight whiskey shot followed by a host of what can only be described as fetid, warm, spicy pickle juice. Never again.
I think I uttered those words after our next blog-worthy experience on Thursday night. I had thought it would be a nice idea to go to the midnight screening of Harry Potter 7 pt 2. Little did I realise that there wasn't ONE midnight screening in NYC - there were approximately 25 screenings around midnight per cinema. I thought about a double feature of pt 1 and pt 2 but they were all sold out in the most convenient cinemas to us. So we finally got tickets to the 12.06am 2D session at AMC Times Square. Timon worked until 8 so we planned to collect the tickets from the cinema around 9pm and go for dinner on Restaurant Row. I jumped off the subway at 42nd Street around 9 and walked straight onto a massive, around the corner queue. There would definitely be no restaurant dinner for us tonight! Timon joined me not long after and we set up camp for the next 3 hours. We got gross food cart food ($5 for a terrible hotdog, damn you Times Square inflation!) and waited it out. Every so often a staff member would walk along and call out theatre numbers that were ready for 'inside queuing' and the outside queue would dissipate. It was someone's bright idea to announce our theatre number from the back of the queue which meant there was a major bums rush and all the people who had queued from 4pm got screwed. Being so early, we found very decent seats half way back and near the middle. We did Sudoku and read the paper until showtime, saving seats while the other bought candy etc etc. We tried unsuccessfully to nab some Harry Potter style Special Edition 3D glasses from another theatre but they were all guarded by weary floor staff. By this time the excitement of seeing the film had severely waned and I was pretty grouchy. This was partly resolved by seeing the first teaser trailer for The Dark Knight Rises. HP7pt2 was a decent film although about halfway through most of the audience started sobbing, LOUDLY, and didn't stop for the rest of the film. It started off being a sweet sadness shared by us and then got a little funny and finally was just really, really annoying. The icing on this tiring and stressful evening was the terrifying bottle-neck death march out of the cinema when the film was over. Sure the AMC managers had staggered the sessions to enable easier entrance to the cinema but I'm not sure they thought about finishing 25 sold out films within 5 minutes of each other and the chaos that would ensure. There were hundreds of us filing out with only a single spaced escalator as an exit!
All said and done, New York does not do a midnight session like IMAX Melbourne.
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