NY Diary - It's Party Time, Dear Winners!

Guide to New York by night, to use when your modelling job permits it...

You can stuff your luggage with your coolest items, such as your giant eyeglasses collection, the sexiest T-shirts you've got and 10 pairs of colorful sneakers.

You will probably need the help of someone to sit on it to get it shut. In any case, the must-have accessory for your stay in New York is not yet part of your luggage; it will only be given to you on the plane.

Make sure you pay attention when the hostess gives out the sleeping masks!

You will soon discover that your survival in the City is tightly linked to that simple but very precious object.

Learn from Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's who, if it hadn't been for the cat, would have slept all day in the dark of her fancy sleeping mask and only have woken up late at night, to throw herself into some crazy party again.

New York party girls stay out till dawn and the fizzy atmosphere so cleverly captured by Capote, it's still right out there to enjoy in the New York nights.

Be ready to swop day with night, because the New York nights are uncontrollable, spreading in an explosive chain of events.

If you go out in the right mood, you can start with a feijoada with friends at Esperanto on Avenue C and find yourself at dawn in a loft in Tribeca listening to a stranger with hair like Bob Dylan who, standing on a glass table, delivers a mumbled reading of the Metamorphosis by Kafka.

Yawning, you listen to the vicissitudes of Gregor Samsa, and try to go back over the night to understand how you got there.

During the Brazilian dinner, friends of some friends invited you to Speak Easy.

Speak Easy is impossible to find if you don't know it: you ring the buzzer of an anonymous door on Avenue C, you go up the stairs till an enormous bouncer recognizes one of you and opens the gate. More stairs and, finally, you find yourself in the secret room, where some couples are dancing a sensual salsa and other people are chatting at the small, hand-built bar.

Soon you find a partner to dance with, who invites you to another party of friends of friends. So you move on to Nublu, not far away, where they play good live music.

Then you want to dance again and you go to SOB's, but on the way you want to sing too, so you break your journey in Sing Sing Karaoke at St. Marks. Meanwhile you make new connections and your group changes continuously. When people begin to turn chairs up-side-down on tables in the nightclubs, it's the right time to move on to private apartments. Some new friends must have proposed continuing the night in the pseudo-Dylan's apartment in Tribeca.

You wait till the beetle in the story is dead before leaving because you don't want to offend the devoted reader and, when you get home, the sun has risen. But, no worries, get the sleeping mask out and have sweet dreams; the next night awaits you.

 

Nick Landucci