Holiday 1999

[Hi, not feeling terribly inspired today, but in keeping with the "flashback" theme of this diary, how would you like to see the holiday letter John and I sent out around Christmas 1999? I knew you would...]

Happy Holidays from John and Bill!

Yes, yes, we spent years hating these holiday form letters too. However, in this day and age of lost address books, sporadic e-mail, and time-eating busy-ness, we thought the many people who we ADORE but don’t get to update with our every vital activity might enjoy knowing about the mad, mad, mad, mad year of Bill and John.

We started the New Year right, tipsy and belligerent with our friends Leah and Nicole at Leah’s place in Phoenix. Nicole was out visiting from Rochester (where John, Leah, and most of the rest of the cool people in San Francisco seem to be from), and didn’t know John and I would arrive to surprise her. We have the photo of her flabbergasted reaction if anyone wants copies. We spent a couple of days in Arizona, driving up to oh-so-spiritual Sedona and oh-so-funky Jerome. We liked that northern Arizona is a completely different world from the sterile shopping malls of Phoenix (though we still managed to stop at an outlet mall just outside Sedona).

Another rain-filled winter finally gave way to spring, and a visit from John’s sister Martha (from Denver) and her good friend Larissa (from, at that point, Westchester County, N.Y.). Martha got to indulge her clothes fetish at San Francisco’s many stores, and we had a great time introducing both of them to Bill’s family and the wineries in Sonoma. Around that same time, Bill’s ex-roommate Max and his partner in crime Jodi came up from Santa Barbara, and the three of them descended on the Russian River resort area and another Santa Barbara-era friend, Steve, and his very significant other Dan.

April 1st is the national holiday known as John’s birthday, and he shares it with his cousin-in-law, the glamorous Lori, and almost shares it with Bill’s mom, the majestic Carol (April 3rd). We decided to combine all three with a huge blowout at one of our favorite “occasion” restaurants, the chaotic but tasty Italian joint Buca di Beppo. We crowded about twenty people around a huge round table with a lazy Susan in the center of which is a ceramic bust of the Pope. Luckily for him, His Holiness is encased in a Plexiglas protective shield, because Bill’s delicate flower of a grandmother and our shy friend Tom decided at some point to start throwing cutlery at him. It was that kind of dinner…

1999 was the year that Bill turned 30, and he did it with dignity, with a party at apartment 308, dinner with the family in Sonoma, and a big ol’ bleach job on his hair. Yes, it looked good, but the hair got thinner and thinner as summer wore on (yes, it was the bleach’s fault), so he’s not sure if he’ll do it again. Something’s gotta be done about all that gray, though…

June was vacation month, and John and Bill flew to New York. The idea was to stay a couple of nights in Manhattan, drive up to visit John’s parents in Lake George (a resort area north of Albany), drive over to Rochester to visit John’s old stomping grounds, then circle back to New York City. Bill had never been to the Big Apple, and thought the city was great: easy to navigate, beautiful to look at, and cleaner than expected (whatever you think of Giuliani’s methods…). We met up with one of John’s old friends from Rochester, Chelsea, and her girlfriend Marie-Rose, had Brazilian cocktails and tapas midtown, and wandered around the East Village, where John lived for a month or two as a clubkid many moons ago.

Bill was happy to meet John’s parents, who held a barbecue at their house in the woods. John’s sister, Rebecca, and brother, Sam (with his family) also came. We drove around the Lake George area, and saw the resort where John waited tables one summer. We spent the night at the Mortons’, then drove northeast for our first detour: to visit Rebecca in Lake Placid. It was cool seeing all the Olympic facilities, and they even had a perpetual patch of artificial snow set up in front of one of the buildings. We traveled through some gorgeous, extremely green country in remote upstate New York, through the Adirondacks and Finger Lakes regions, and ended up in Rochester on Lake Ontario.

In Rochester, we enjoyed the hospitality of John’s friend Laurel, who just bought a beautiful old home with three bedrooms and a mortgage payment to make us sticker-shocked Californians weep. We met up with Nicole, Julie (and her baby Cameron), Kevin, Laurel’s parents, and bumped into a few others from John’s past (which didn’t seem as shady as told to Bill when seen up close). We went to lots of John’s old haunts (Mediterranean food at Aladdin’s, wings at Zeb’s, CD shopping at every store in Monroe County, lunch at Fruit & Salad, the amazing Wegmans supermarket, drinks at Muthers, Waterworks, and the Avenue Pub) and saw some of the places where he lived. John’s sister Loretta threw a barbecue, where Bill got to meet John’s other sister Doris and her family. Bill feels a sense of accomplishment at finally having met the whole Morton clan. Bill insisted on an educational field trip to Seneca Falls, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton, et al., declared Women’s Rights in the 1840’s. (Oh, OK, so we stopped at the outlet mall off I-90 on the way back to Rochester, too)

We also took a day trip to Toronto via Niagara Falls. John had a few record stores to check out there, too, and we enjoyed the scene along Yonge Street (dirtier and funkier than New York or San Francisco, which surprised us). The next day was the road trip back to the New York City area; we stayed one night at Larissa’s in the odd little town of Mamaroneck, then the last two nights at the Marriott in midtown where we’d begun. Chelsea and Marie-Rose met up with us again, and we took in the gay pride parade in all its hot, humid glory in Greenwich Village. The very last day we strolled through Central Park, navigated the subway like locals, and felt terribly sophisticated. We want to go back in spring before it gets hot, or even around Christmastime.

We didn’t get to rest much before a couple of July events took us out of the city. Bill’s parents hosted “A Grand Aioli,” purported to be a Provencal-themed outdoor party, on the 4th of July (the French flag flew for Bastille Day as well), and Max invited us south to see the reunited Go-Go’s in concert at the open-air Santa Barbara Bowl. Bill had to laugh at the irony: he’s afraid to admit that the first concert he ever saw was the Go-Go’s lead singer, Belinda Carlisle (back when she had a solo career in the U.S.), at that very same venue in 1988. Also in July, our friend Patrick’s dad, stepmom and sister came up from Arizona; Patrick’s dad had a singing gig at a pub in Sonoma, coincidentally, and we had them over for a couple nights of homemade sangria, the game Taboo, and Bill’s first attempt at salt potatoes (apparently an upstate N.Y. favorite).

The rest of the year was concentrated in San Francisco, for the most part. Bill got a new position, working for the same property management company, but off the Bank of America portfolio. He’s the Tenant Services Representative at a mixed-use, high-rise building in the newly bustling South of Market Street area. He works with his friend from the BofA days, Violet, and they spend most of their time pretending to be at a cocktail party where the details of work are just momentary interruptions. John has worked every conceivable job at the Marriott’s front desk, and has been very busy lately taking every work-related class he can squeeze into his schedule. We hosted our first Thanksgiving this year, with 13 people somehow crammed in (and the turkey was great, thank you very much).

Leah moved to San Francisco in August, and promptly got a job at the ad agency where our roommate Sean and our friends Gary and Bob already worked. She loves being in the city, even squeezed into a studio one block off Union Square with Patrick. Our apartment is always filled with these friends, and we have lots of overnight guests (Deb and Janetta came out from New York; Max and Cody, and Mike and Melissa, from Santa Barbara; Moira from Australia; Kristin from L.A.) who find our location sooooo convenient. We like it too, though; we got to see Robbie Williams, the Go-Go’s (again), Barenaked Ladies, Aimee Mann, Sandra Bernhard, Margaret Cho, Rita Moreno, and “Cabaret” this year. We’d like to take even further advantage of all the theatres, museums, stores, restaurants and other cultural opportunities this unique city offers. We hope you’ll come visit us, too, and that your holidays and New Year (won’t say the M-word) are filled with happiness and love.

[A little too perky for my tastes today, but full of information for those of you who just can't get enough Huntington in your lives.]

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