Here's the blog entry I composed over this eventful weekend...

[Friday evening] Greetings from 36,000 feet. Marjorie and I are on our way to New York City. We thought it best not to announce to the world via our blog that our house would be unoccupied for the weekend, so this will be posted when we get back.

Marjorie and I both just asked for seltzer water from the flight attendant; they gave her club soda, and me a Perrier. I guess I just exude class.

Quite a weekend ahead of us. Especially tonight -- our friend Mike scored us tickets tonight to see DAVID BOWIE in a 300-seat venue!!!! It should be amazing. Especially since we're likely going to be in the front row. I hope my brother, who's been a huge fan of Bowie's since I can remember, will still speak to me afterwards...

Sunday we're going to meet with Kate and Marc in person, whom we met on-line via BlogSpot. They're the couple that seem to be living parallel lives with us, having gotten married this year and almost moving to Singapore.

Monday we're going to visit Ground Zero. We actually might be able to see it from up here in a half an hour or so. Just the hole in the skyline will be troubling enough to look at.

This is our third time to NYC together, and our sixteenth plane trip overall. Not bad for a little over four years.

[Monday night] It's now Monday night, and we're sitting in Newark airport waiting for the flight home. Quite a weekend.

After arriving and checking in on Saturday, we met up with Mike and cabbed to Brooklyn to have pizza at Grimaldi's, which is a favorite of Marjorie's and is right around the corner from where Bowie was going to play. The pizza was good enough that we ordered a second one halfway through and gorged ourselves.

The venue was a little bigger than I expected -- there were about 1000 people there. We wedged our way up front and ended up right in front of the speakers on stage right. Bowie started with a ponderous piece, from the new album I think, and I was worried that we would experience a repeat of the Beck experience we had last month, where he would play all new, unfamiliar stuff, and we'd be left scratching our heads. But for the second song he launched into an explosive cover of the Pixie's "Cactus", and I was hooked. He mixed old and new all night, and played the old stuff without any of the sighing complacency that some artists take on when forced to trot out popular favorites. From this category we heard "Life on Mars", "Let's Dance", "Rebel Rebel", "Fame", "Ashes to Ashes", and "China Girl". He played for a good two and half hours, and was obviously enjoying himself, as were we all.

Our position in front of the speakers left my ears ringing pretty bad, but luckily that passed within a day. We were even close enough to see his different-colored eyes!

After the show we tried for twenty minutes to hail a cab in the rain. Finally a very nice couple from Boston picked us up and drove us into town.

We were still abuzz from the concert, so we walked around a while and ended up in a Japanese restaurant. We had a few mixed drinks (made with saki -- very strange) and some sushi. Sitting there, I commented to Marjorie: "Will you still love me if I turn 56 and I'm not as sexy as Bowie?" She smirked and responded: "You're not that sexy now."

Sunday we met with Marjorie's good friend Karen and her husband Tom. We lunched at the Waterhouse on the East River (no bodies floated by while we watched) and just walked around the city most of the day. It was good to see them again.

That night we met with fellow bloggers Kate and Marc at Von, a beer-and-wine place on Bleecker Street. We chatted there for a while and moved on to an Indian restaurant on 6th Street. [Now writing from home.] A fine night of food and conversation with a super-nice couple. We went to sleep happy and content.

As Marjorie noted, we went by Ground Zero on Monday... The scale of the tragedy is almost impossible to get your head around. We had been to the lower floor the WTC two years hence trying to buy show tickets. Now it's all just a big hole in the sky that makes you ache to stand near.