the jimmy buffet band!

In town for the weekend, my parents had very important questions for me:

1) Why did you cut off all your hair?
and
2) Where do you want to register?

The second, I guess, assumes that either my hair will grow sufficiently or that somehow I can still scrape enough femininty together to be a bride even with what my father called a "garcon-ish" do.

Best I can tell, I want to register on Amazon.com where adults invested in my future happiness can feel free to buy me Criterion collection DVDs. And maybe one of those portable DVD players -- those always seemed cool. It's such a funny custom, registering, at this point. Do I need silver? A china pattern? Mr. Ben and I live in a SQUARE. No kidding. There is no room for extra pillows, let alone single use kitchen appliances.

Taking this into account, my family also wants to know when Mr. Ben and I are going to inquire about maybe moving into a bigger apartment in the building. Just to have a place to fit all the stuff.

Can I register for restaurant coupons? Not to Denny's; to one of Morimoto's places or Bobby Flay's. Or maybe that amazing sushi place in the Time Warner Center, where you sit at the counter and eat out of the hands of -- and at the whim of -- the chef. That would be the best wedding present ever. Are you taking notes?

My family wasn't in town merely to twist my head about the wedding. They know that I'm headed down to DC the last weekend in October and they will have about 48 hours to keep me tied to a chair, force feeding me samples from the caterer while parading potential corsages past me. What they were actually here to do was take a really interesting car tour of Old Brooklyn, one that could have been subtitled, "Maybe we should roll up the windows and lock the doors."

The idea was to take my 93.5 year old grandma back to her old stomping grounds, the neighborhoods she grew up in. The primary hood, where she was born and lived until she was twelve, is now more commonly known as Bed-Stuy. Needless to say, it's a pretty different place than she remembered. For me, it was fascinating to drive around Brooklyn, since I haven't, really -- and I got to ask lots of history questions of our well-informed, hard-boiled, hardcore-New-York guide.

Also this weekend, Mr. Ben and I went with a couple friends to see 49 Up, the latest installment in a British documentary phenomenon. In 1964, a director chose, virtually at random, a cross-section of seven year olds kids. Apted was then the director's intern, but he quickly took over the franchise: every seven years since, Apted checked up on them, interviewing them about their mundane lives. Some subjects are embarrassed, some proud, some understandably resentful but unwilling to extricate their lives from Apted's project. It's fascinating viewing.