Celia and Gris

Finally, the crazy pictures of Celia and me walking around Times Square wearing eye patches have arrived. But first let me give you some background on how she and I always end up doing ridiculous things when we're together.

Celia is a friend from high school, and pretty much the only friend from Santa Fe that I keep in touch with these days. I feel like it may be hard for some of you readers who know me here in Richmond to imagine me acting in silly ways with her, but it's true. We speak in a funny dialect that involves saying "yah" or "cha" a lot. She calls me Gris, which is Gray in Spanish. She makes up songs about me wearing Swedish socks or being in the ghetto. In high school we would switch one of our shoes and walk around all day like that. Or we would put chapstick on each other. Once I got a crazy hair cut (not much unlike the one I recently got) so she started calling me Hiawatha, and then she made me a headband out of pipe cleaners that I wore in English class. At an amusement park in Denver we wore Spongebob Square Pants temporary tattoos. We also snuck around the school parking lot leaving secret messages on cars while humming the James Bond theme.

Over the Memorial Day weekend I visited her in New York. On my last night there we planned to wander around the East Village. We honestly don't know when or why we started talking about it, but we thought it would be fun to look like pirates and search for sailors, since it was Fleet Week. Most people would laugh and say "yeah, that would be funny," but we actually went looking for eye patches. Celia happened to know from past experience that Walgreens carries them (KMart, we found, does not). Donning our patches we headed to Times Square where we knew we could find sailors at midnight, and sure enough...



We also happened upon this place, and got two men pushing baby carriages at 12:30 am to take our picture.



Good times.