Sun and the City

Saturday’s trip to the beach got me enthusiastic about the sun again, so yesterday I decided to go to Central Park and lie out on a towel for the afternoon. First I went to the Strand — this huge secondhand bookstore — in search of Terrence McNally’s play set on Fire Island, Lips Together, Teeth Apart. And wouldn’t you know it? They had a copy of only one McNally play, and it was exactly the one I was looking for. Bought it for six bucks. Then I bought a container of fruit and sat in Union Square and ate it, staring the whole time at some guy’s shirtless muscular back. After that I took the subway up to the park and lay out on an area of grass behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sunning myself, looking at all the runners running and bladers blading, listening to snippets of Gen-X/thirtysomething midtown yuppie conversation coming from the blankets around me. When I was tired of lying in the sun, I walked through the park, from the East Side to the West Side and over to the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Square. Beautiful weather, a healthy lunch, a relaxing afternoon, sights and sounds and people everywhere. It was a great day to be out and about in Manhattan.

Later in the evening I settled down for a postprandial nap, and I’d just begun to doze when the phone rang. It was Tall Red-Haired Guy, inviting me over to his place (a 10-minute walk away) to watch “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under” on HBO. It had been a year since I’d seen the former, and I’d never seen the latter. Thumbs up to them both. And you know, “Sex and the City” just seems like such a summer show — lighthearted, fun, sexy — just as “The Sopranos” seems like such a winter show — heavy, kind of dark, a little depressing sometimes. Or maybe after a couple of years I’ve just become conditioned that way.

After watching TV, well — I guess you could say that Tall Red-Haired Guy and I had a little “sex and the city” of our own.

Like you couldn’t see that one coming.

What a body, what a body, what a body. But really, the nice thing about him is that we can actually have a conversation afterwards. And he has these cute intellectual tortoise-shell glasses. We talked politics. He even offered me food, but it was almost midnight and I wasn’t hungry. Still, we sat around talking for a little while, and then I headed home.

Not a bad way to end an eventful weekend.