last night was the conclusion of the bryant park summer movie festival brought to you by the good folks at HBO and some other people too probably. no one cared who.

what people did care about, rather, was that the featured film was jaws, which of course meant that everyone was psyched to see some merrymakers meet the business end of a 25 foot digestive tract with teeth.

the film was set to begin at around 7:30, but by the time my place-holder got there (thank you stacy) at 5:04 the closest 4'x4' plot of grass was about 100 yards away from the 40 foot tall screen. the only way that last sentence could have had more numbers in it would be if my friend's name were mike thirteen, which, now that i think about it, would be a kick-ass name for a private detective just trying to make a quick dime, chase a few skirts, and leave a good looking corpse.

but back to the scene. the refreshments that evening were being provided by your own damn self, so i decided that, keeping in the spirit of the event, an industrial-sized can of fosters lager would be an appropriate tipple. actually, i'm not sure why i connect fosters with blood-thirsty great whites, but it probably has something to do with greg norman. i also picked up a shiraz and a cabernet for my afore-mentioned place holder stacey and the lovely ms. lisa babcock, just in case the one or both of them wanted to get drunk and make out during the slow parts. sadly, they did not. or if they did, they should have said something.

so before the movie starts, they play an old loony toon, which makes perfect sense to show right before jaws... if you're living on the third moon of planet Insano. with the children in the audience happy but only a few short minutes from developing a crippling fear of the ocean, i too was feeling at peace until i realized that the popcorn i had purchased from the deli had clearly been there since the early days of vaudeville. luckily, the shiraz was nearby to wash the taste of death out of my gullet. unluckily, the shiraz was the consistency of a milkshake from all the sulfites and other imperfections within. i wanted another fosters, but doing so would require either a clumsy walk across a sea of mini-picnics or a battle of wills with the two unhappiest police officers in manhattan on the fire lane.

i almost forgot to mention the fire lane.

these two cops must have been caught shitting on top of the police chief's buick because they had been assigned to maintain an imaginary "fire escape path" about 10 feet behind us. as [roughly] 2,000 people were jockeying for blanket-location superiority, these two cops were yelling at every man, woman, child, or occasional squirrel that dared breech the forbidden escape path. each cop vehemently insisted that you trample over your neighbors rather than use the much more convenient walkway, which they marked off with green stakes, string, and a sign saying "keep off fire path." finally, in a moment of great determination/abject hilarity, about 100 people collectively said "fuck this noise" and just took over the whole fire path. i have no proof, but i believe the two cops spent the rest of the night trying to casually light people on fire.

so the movie starts in earnest, and people are rooting for the shark, and it sinks in that i'm less than two blocks from times square and drinking swill wine whilst watching richard dreyfuss perform an impromptu autopsy on a half-eaten naked chick. at this point, new york city registers about a 8.9 Kelvin out of 10 on my All-Things Awesome scale.

people cheer loudly for "we're gonna need a bigger boat." even my lesser-known favorite line, "i don't have any spit," gets a few spirited hurrahs from up front. we're pushing 9.2 by now. after the show, there's a mass exodus to the nearest subway and we're all looking forward to going home and sleeping off the evening's concessions.

as i'm riding the trusty N line towards astoria, an announcement comes on and garbles something about a stalled train and then service between 42nd and 59th/lex, which doesn't make any sense because at the time i am on a train that is performing just that service. the announcer keeps on saying something from time to time, but in the tradition of ny subway communications, the person speaking has apparently dunked their head in oatmeal before taking the mic, so everyone looks around at each other puzzledly, and someone will go, "did he just say that service to grand central is assumed frayed?," and the other person will respond, "i heard him say grizzly bear... did anyone else hear him say 'grizzly bear?'"

[aside: as you may know, i'm a big believer in the powers of dreams, but you can learn a lot about somebody by what they think they hear during a really distorted announcement; it's an under-rated window into one's subconscious. so how 'bout it, psychology?]

so when the train pulls into lexington, the last stop before the tunnel to astoria, a proper announcement comes over the station's public address and tells us that anyone trying to get to astoria never should have gotten on this train. this would have been nice to know before we boarded five stops ago. we should have taken the 7 train to queensborough from grand central. in order to get to grand central, we will have to change to the 4/5/6, then proceed to change to the 7, which will only take me to queensborough, at which point i will change back to the N to take me back home.

in a dignified show of displeasure, i give the finger to the public address system.

it is now 10:30, and i figure that by the time i circumnavigate my way through the nyc subway system at the suggestion of some anonymous MTA representative, i could exit the subway, catch the end of the mets game at the nearest watering hole, and grab a slice of chicken pizza.

cut to 1:30am. i am back down on the N train platform listening to the same exact p.a. announcement. i recognize one of the guys on the platform from when i was down there at 10:30. he's been waiting for three hours, and, here's my favorite part, he's still looking down the tunnel for approaching trains. check him out. the guy with the backpack:

new yorkers always do this for some reason, and when they see the lights of an incoming car, they say either "there it is" or "here it comes" out loud, whether or not they are with someone. by the time my N train arrives at 1:41, new york registers a 8.9 on a scale of fifty thousand.

long story short: jaws was pretty good.