Today is Tuesday, October 21, 2025. Yesterday Elliot and I celebrated his birthday by first having breakfast at Russ & Daughters, on Orchard Street. We left the borough around 11:15 a.m. and got to our destination pretty quickly. However, when we entered the well-known eatery, we had to wait for a table, which was to be expected. The host mentioned that it would be a half-hour- to 45-minute wait, but I got a text message from him saying our table was ready in just about 20 minutes. I was still drinking my first cup of coffee at Starbucks around the block when I received the text, so I took my freshly brewed cup of coffee with me back to the restaurant.

From ordering an appetizer of pickled herring trio, consisting of cream and onion, mustard and dill, and curry and apple on pumpernickel bread to having what is called “lower sunny side,” which consisted of sunny side-up eggs, Gaspe Nova smoked salmon, and potato latkes (for me) to a new fresh cup of coffee, you can say everything was fine with the world.

When I entered the place, I was asked by our cousin in Scottsdale, Arizona, to text her and I did. The nature of her request became immediately known to me when the bill was delivered and our sweet server mentioned that the tab was picked up by “Joan.” And I foolishly thought she wanted to text Elliot herself when the food was being brought to the table. How very generous of her, I thought.

Our next stop was Codex, the bookstore on Bleecker Street. I was given about a half hour to browse inside, and that’s what I exactly took. I intuitively knew that I shouldn’t make any more acquisition of books, and I didn’t.

Then the fun part of the afternoon came when Elliot and I walked toward Elliot’s old neighborhood in the Lower East Side, primarily on Avenue C, on East 2nd Street, where he grew up. We thus took a memory tour around the neighborhood, with Elliot accurately pointing out all of the former stores and establishments that existed more than 60 years ago. I have always found Elliot’s long-term memory to be so remarkable that it’s uncanny. Me, I can’t recall what I did yesterday.

We finished our tour near Tompkins Square Park, on East 10th Street. The community near the park oh-so-many years ago – basically at the turn of the century – was known as “Little Germany” for its preponderance of German immigrants. In 1904, a tragedy occurred on a pleasure boat called the PS General Slocum, where a fire on the boat took the lives of a thousand local citizens, and in the park, a memorial called the Slocum Disaster Memorial was erected in 1906 to commemorate the disaster. We passed the plaque set up to commemorate the event, and I took a picture of it.

Then it was off to the Cinema Village East, where we went to see One Battle After Another starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. We took in the 3:30 show and it appeared as if we had a special showing of the film all to ourselves: no one came into the theater to see the film.

This long film – about two hours and fifty minutes long – couldn’t come at a more better time in our nation’s dark history, especially with the madman in the White House right now, as it tells the story of stoned and paranoid ex-revolutionary Bob Ferguson who is coaxed out of his weed-induced stupor by an old nemesis, corrupt and relentless Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who kidnaps his 16-year-old daughter Willa (here played by newcomer Chase Infiniti). As Bob is forced back into action, he is aided by Willa’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) who cautions Bob to slow down and breathe. Because throughout much of the film, DiCaprio is on edge and totally freaked out as he tries to track down his daughter. There are quite a number of funny scenes along the way, in addition to careening cars crashing, bombs exploding, and several bank robberies. One amusing extended scenario pits DiCaprio losing his patience over not remembering a password in order to be able to locate his missing daughter. He screams into a pay phone until his eyes practically bulge out because he can’t recall his goddamn password during a life-or-death emergency. How many of us can identify with that in a less than urgent situation, where you can’t remember a password and as a result can’t continue with a transaction until you do?

The film achieves real-world topicality as it deals with an out-of-control military machine hell-bent on ridding the world of any resistance to its authority. Does that sound familiar? Bob’s girlfriend, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), is shown at the first quarter hour of the film in which she, along with Bob’s explosives assistance, blows up military installations holding immigrants being held against their will. There are even scenes with immigrants being housed in cells; does this sound familiar? Perfidia, who is Black, is the true revolutionary it seems and when she is either killed or disappears, that’s when Bob loses his mojo to continue the fight – until now.

Interspersed with all of the craziness here is a secret organization, along the lines of a white supremacist group, but with better funding here, that is fielded by out-and-out racists who begin the process of making Lockjaw a member of their awful secret society. It is then that Lockjaw discovers that Ferguson’s child, Willa, might have actually been his due to a covert assignation with her mother that he decides to take the child in order for this secret to not see the light of day.

Anderson pulls no stops in showing Ferguson’s relentless search for his daughter, throwing in several car chases along the way. Even though the film is long, there is no moment where the action drags.

Now that I’ve seen the film, which is based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, I’m determined to read that book after I finish The Power of the Dog for my gay men’s reading club selection this month.

Next stop was John’s of 12th Street, which is a neighborhood institution for over 100 years. Elliot, in fact, has memories of his parents taking him there when he was quite young. So we finished up our memory tour on Elliot’s birthday by my taking him to a restaurant that he recalled going there in his youth.

When we got to the restaurant, we saw a crowd waiting outside, so we thought we had to wait for a table like we did at Russ & Daughters, but we didn’t. We were brought to a round table by a maitre d’ right away.

I ordered pasta fagioli as my appetizer and, for my entree, ordered the chicken parmigiana with spaghetti. Elliot was content with just having spaghetti and meatballs. For dessert, our waiter placed a candle in the tartuffo we ordered and weakly sang, “Happy birthday.” Afterward, Elliot had a long chat with the manager of the restaurant while I waited patiently at the side.

Now Elliot was ready to call it a day, while I decided to spend some time at the Strand and Forbidden Planet, a comic book store next to the Strand. I could only go to the Strand since Forbidden Planet was closed by 8.

When I got home, I observed that I was out close to 11 hours. It was time to rest for the night.

Here is the memorial in Tompkins Square Park where the boat disaster took place in 1904.