Adrienne is visiting me for the holiday weekend. We've already done quite a bit and are having many laughs, as usual.

Adrienne met me at my office in the late morning and I promptly sent her shopping as I still had more to do. When she returned we left together and went for lunch at a great little Cuban place called Café Habana. We had their delicious corn on the cob which makes my mouth water just writing this. It's grilled corn with thick butter, grated cheese, and chili powder. While waiting for the table the following sentence came out of Adrienne's mouth: "I don't think you can wear flip flops if you have a fake leg."

We went home to drop Adge's stuff at my place and dress for the evening. We headed out to Il Laboratorio del Gelato (which I wrote about previously). I had chocolate, white chocolate, and lavender honey. I didn't care much for the white chocolate (it had lots of tiny chunks of white chocolate in it which I found distracting). Adrienne had chocolate and raspberry. The raspberry was so rich and sweet and delicious!

We walked to the train and headed up to Columbus Circle where we checked out the new fancy shopping mall at the Time Warner Center. We literally stopped dead in our tracks when we saw chocolate covered strawberries in the window of Godiva. Eating these is a traditional part of all of Adrienne's visits here, so we were delighted to find a new Godiva to give our custom to. We each tried on about 20 pairs of $200 sunglasses at some crazy store where the sales clerk kept describing me as "a German tourist" or a "Japanese teen" with each subsequent pair I put on. Needless to say, we didn't make a purchase.

Benjamin was kind enough to arrange free tickets for the ballet for us. We sat in Row O kind of far off to the left, but we fixed that after the first intermission by moving to the middle of Row M. We saw four ballets: Robbins' Fancy Free, in which Benjamin was dancing the lead. It's a sailors-on-leave-in-New-York story--a precursor to Robbins' full-fledged Broadway show "On The Town." Next up were two short ballets: Peter Martins' Calcium Light Night, and Richard Tanner's Sonatas and Interludes. Calcium Light Night is a good ballet for one boy and one girl, mostly doing solos. Like a lot of Martins' ballets it's quick-footed and flings its attitude around the stage in abrupt shifts of movement. The music is a mixed bag of short orchestral pieces by Charles Ives, which I was very happy to hear on the heels of the Philharmonic concert I just went to. Sonatas and Interludes is not popular among my friends, and Adrienne sided with them in disliking it, but I think it's got something to it, and I love John Cage's music of the same name. Like the Martins' it's danced by a single couple, and Maria Kowroski was terrific in it (her partner less so). The evening ended with Balanchine's wonderful Stars and Stripes, set (not surprisingly) to Sousa marches. The two principal roles were danced by guest artists from the Dance Theatre of Harlem. They were unimpressive at best, but this ballet is so robust and entertaining that we loved it anyway.

Adrienne and I headed downtown to dine at Landmarc, only to find they were closed for the holiday weekend. Thanks a lot, man. So we took a cab to the lower east side to dine at a place I've wanted to go for a while: Schiller's. It's a smaller, hipper little sister to Pastis and Balthazar. It was great. We both had fish and chips. I started with a small plate of beets (which were delicious), while Adrienne had a small salad. We ate a very rich chocolate creme pie and a huge, pure, and simple creme brulee for dessert, then a slow walk home.

Today we're gonna bum around and go to a movie later on with Damion. We're going to meet Paula for breakfast now.