Freebie Post #3: Oscar Night in NYC

Freebie Tip #2: Listen to your friends.

So, last week's event was a gift of the Village Voice. This week's event came my way without me having to look for it. Why? I have awesome friends who are broke like me and also wanna find cool stuff to do. And sometimes, these awesome broke friends have more time on their hands than me, and so they find things before I do.

Excellent! :)

In this case, kudos go to my friend K., who found a FREE Oscar viewing party at Comix on W.14th St.¹ I knew as soon as she told me that I was in like Flynn. And so, we made reservations and off we went!

I will emphasize here that Comix had no cover and no drink minimum for the event, so this was a truly free event. The only thing required was an RSVP in advance; a person could have walked in, sat, and watched the entire event for free. However, I knew I would likely be ordering both food and drink after the week I have had (midterms, anyone?), and I can quite confidently say that if I had not gone to this Comix event, I more than likely would have been at home in my pajamas ordering take-out costing about the same amount as I was going to spend on food at Comix. So, to eat and drink and be with friends and mildly entertaining strangers while watching the Oscars -- while perhaps not as comfortable as being in my pajamas -- was definitely an attraction for me. This was especially the case when I discovered that other events around town were charging anywhere from $8 to $225 for an Oscar-ish par-tay. (Sheesh! Sometimes New Yorkers take themselves too seriously... but I digress.)

Upon arriving, we were told we could not be seated unless half our party was there. Fine. This involved a bit of a(n impatient) wait and a change in our reservation, and finally, a table -- squeezed into the corner of the room. Apparently, when Comix says "arrive at 6:30," they mean "arrive at 6:15." The place was packed! We all fit (there were 6 of us), but we had to negotiate. The first seats we were shown to involved splitting up our party and it was not until one of us noticed a table in the corner where we could all sit together that we moved. Sloppy service on the part of the hostess meant this was more of a debacle than it needed to be.

But alas, we were finally seated, and to our delight we discovered free popcorn at each table! Mmm Mmm good! We gobbled that down while we ogled and commented on the red carpet dresses. The atmosphere was active, noisy, and generally convivial, helped in part by the "hosts" Danny Leary and Kambri Crews. I put that word in quotation marks because I'm not really 100% sure that they were true hosts. Rather, they played the role of being only marginally more entertaining than the advertisements on television, which was when they generally appeared on stage.

Kudos to Comix for the inventive names on the menu -- I particularly liked the Alec Baldwings and Calarmarlee Matlin -- and our party actually sampled both. While all food and drink we ordered were fine, nothing was great. And service left much to be desired. I think if Comix had had twice the number of servers working on Sunday night, they would have been better prepared, and may have had slightly less surly customers. We waited around 45 min for our food, which, while decent, was really nothing special. Not to mention that we got our pitcher of beer before we got glasses to drink it from. Classy.

Sadly, we arrived too late to partake in the contests of the evening, but we did find it rather special that Mo'nique's family was in the audience there with us at Comix, making her acceptance speech particularly memorable for all there. Actually, in general, I would say that being there with this giant group of people made the entire experience memorable for me² -- poor service aside. The reason? With so many people there, we really felt all the "ooooh"s and "ahhhhh"s of every moment (including the dresses on the red carpet), and the laughs at Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin seemed even bigger and funnier. One of my friends who joined us, E., put it best when he said,

I almost felt like I was there -- but I wasn't.

Yep, and that's what made it a memorable evening. Thanks to K., E., and other members of our party (you know who you are!) for a memorable and enjoyable Oscar night!

What This Is All About

This is my latest project. It was meant to begin about 2 or 3 weeks ago (too late for a New Year's Resolution, really, but some kind of hybrid was intended), but as is usual for me, has gotten off to a late start. I'm not fussing over the delay, however. Here's how the project was conceived:

Upon returning to NYC from my winter holiday, I was kind of regressing into FeelingSorryForMyself Mode ... the whole NotHavingAnyMoney thing really sucks when you are a broke grad student living in one of the world's coolest cities. I was getting kind of crusty about living in this amazing city while I am not working, with a disposable income. Sometimes I feel like I'm not able to take in the city in the same way, y'know?

And then, my Time Out NY mag arrived (I apparently am not broke enough to not have a $20 subscription). Bored and on the couch, I started flipping through and scanning the pages ... and on one page in particular -- I can't remember which one -- I realized that half the events listed were free. And I thought, "Why don't I go to these?"

My immediate answer to myself -- yes, I do engage in self-talk -- was, "Well, I have no idea what half of them are about, and I have no one to go with." The arrogant optimistic self retorted, "But what if I just went anyway and saw and experienced NYC that way? What if I made myself go?"

Negative Self replied, "Hmmm, well maybe. I'm gonna need something to make me go, a motivator of some kind."

And Arrogant Optimistic Self thus birthed: http://www.nycfree4me.com

So, my Selves have agreed to work together, and I am going to make both of them do something free at least once per week. That is the goal, anyway. If I can't find something remotely interesting that is free, I will find something for less than $5.

Actually, on that note, I am going to make up some rules -- that will be the next post. But, let's be clear: I am NOT going to sit in my tiny Manhattan apartment all effing year and watch the world go by just because I'm broke, dammit.

Let the freebies begin.