KIKI NYC

Breathe Through Your Nose

Breathing through your nose rocks. Mouth breathing sucks.
Learn how to breathe your way to health and happiness. In bed.

 

Be Smart

Just a few words. Chew well. Digest.

 

Pull Up to the Bumper Baby

My favorite car is yellow.
It has a meter up front next to the driver who fills the tank, changes the oil, and parks it. 

All I do is step to the edge of traffic and raise my hand like the pop-quiz whiz-kid who has all the answers.

My favortie car is a taxi.

For car owners, the car is king; it transcends ego. It is the uber-self. 

I get it. 

I descend from Chevy savvy people.

My first ride ever, home from the hospital, was a finned Impala the color of a shiny new penny. One cherry ride followed the next: a butter yellow Malibu, an emerald green Camaro convertible, a silver Monte Carlo with a royal red pinstripe. The Monte Carlo was a big-ass two-door sedan; each door swung as wide as an aiprlane's wing and looked to tip the chassis or launch it.

But like the self, a car requires care, fuel, fluids, filters, specialists.

Not so the taxi. If a taxi has a problem, it's not my problem. 

I don't have to think about a taxi.
Unless I want one and then I simply hail.

And I hail because my heels are high, my parcels prodigious or my watch is slow.

A taxi turns my tapered neon nail into a fairy wand and my word into abracadabra.

A taxi appears like a genie from a bottle. 

And a taxi, like the elephant-headed god, removes all obstacles. 

Once inside I'm as calm as a yogi in a cave.

Liberated from all suffering.

Transported and free.

All hail the king.

Amateurs Night

Valentine's Day is amateur's night.

The guy picks a restaurant he's never been to that costs more than he's ever spent.

He antagonizes over the menu like he's dead-man-walking to his last meal.

People that never dress, over dress.

One time use lilac bridesmaid shoes make a second go as night-out shoes.

She wants to look sophisticated; her dress is too tight, too short, too summery and she's wearing the wrong bra.

That dress? Is it even hers?

Don't try at romance.

Be romantic.
Do what you do well even better.

Tell her what you feel.

Give the best of what you got.

Every day.

 

Black Is

Black is the new black.

And blue is the same old blue jeans.

L train east, midnight EST.

As the Disco Ball Turns

Karneval at Zum Schneider is not to be missed.
Not this year.
Not ever.

 
Welcome to Disco 7C.

Huckapoo shirts, playboy bunny neck bling, and afro wigs in all colors of the rainbow nation are not required but highly represented.

Sylvester Disco Daddy and his glittery cast have transformed the sauerkraut und Dinkelacker hall into a sequin lined cave. Enter these hallowed halls and pray the Hustle, the Freak and the Rock.

The stage show delights and beguiles.

Why has a bare chested actor in bejeweled lederhosen donned a man sized beer mug costume? 
Why are the scantily clad singers pelting each other with pillowy beer steins to the funky beats of Kung Fu Fighting?

These questions will not be resolved by plot analysis.
But by drinking more beer.
And by dancing the night away.

Drink more beer!
Dance! Dance! Dance!

 
 

Free Love

The economy is frigid.

Colder than the blizzard.

Free is a new four-letter word.

Nearly my favorite.

Stay in.

The neighborhood that is.

Go local.

Walking is, after all, still free.

On a Sunday night drop-in at Otto's Shrunken Head.

Free live music. 

A long line-up of bands with short sets and big hair. 

All night in the back room of NYC's only Tiki lounge.

Every Sunday is lucky Sunday when Margaritas cost 3 bucks and are served in glasses that could float two scoops and root beer with a thick head of foam. 

Can a $3 jumbo cocktail tickle like the silken strands of muddled ginger in the Ginger Fig Martini at GPH’s Jade Bar? 
 

Heck no! 
 

But it doesn’t cost 19 loot-cakes either. 

Let’s face it, 3 bucks is nearly free. 

And if ginger is your poison, order the Scurvy Dog. It’ll immunize you from scurvy and from rabies. The drink includes a down payment on the Tiki mug. Keep it. It’s as good as free. 

Head to the back room for the live acts.

MC Frank Wood’s jokes are so old, he can’t give em away.

Which is less than free. 

Or is it more?

After Tyrone Noonan’s honeyed set, The Pirates of the Caribbean pinball game beckons; wherever I move in the room Johnny Depp’s pirate peepers lock on me like the Mona Lisa’s at Le Louvre. 

Drop in a few coins and this game flashes brighter than the floor under Tony Manero’s dancing shoes. 

At five games for 2 bucks it's practically free and all the easier to declare yourself a pinball wizardess.

Kiki sez, "I'm a pinball wizardess!"

"How much?" a patron asks the bartender.

"Free, Luv", she answers.

There was something called free love during the Summer of Love.

Free love is really a euphemism for something else. 

Love, seemingly free, accrues a cost. Most agree it's a worthwhile investment.
Like pirate's booty.

The end of love is called divorce. It is far from free. 

Costs a bloody king's ransom.

At night's end, Tiki tumbler in hand,

walk home.

Alone or in pairs.

Either way,
free.

The World's Oldest Living Playboy

The Sphinx is a big old flirt.

By big I mean the biggest monolith in the world. At a whopping 73.5 meters long, 6 wide and 20 tall, he's huge.

And by oldest I mean 5000 years old.

As for being a living playboy, well, when you meet him you'll agree, his language may be dead but he's awesome. A total hunk.

Our fling started with a nuzzle and a purr.

And ended with a kiss.

Sticky Fingers

Every Sunday after church my Dad'd stop at the newspaper store to pick up The Sunday Times.

I walked my Sunday-best into the shop and stood in my father's shadow just below the register, slid my sticky fingered hand into the candy bin and swiped a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.

The pink of it. The sweet stink of it.
The soft cornered tablet shape.
Crystal sugar that ground against teeth like sand and melted like icing in my throat.

And clinging to the wrapper, the inane pirate-patched Bazooka Joe tiny comic.
The chance to collect cool stuff.

Five minutes off my knees, papery host stuck on my tongue, the Holy Ghost tracking my every patent-leather step, and I stole gum my father would not have hesitated to buy for me.

The force was overwhelming.
The act was Irresistible.

Who knew sIn could taste so sweet?

Until the third fateful Sunday, I was accused.
My father defended his daughter's honor to the belligerent shopkeeper as I slyly dropped the sweaty wax papered treat back into the bin.

The holy ghost had a good laugh.

I never pinched candy again.
I earned allowance. I saved. I spent.

Down on Soho's Broome Street, grown-up girls with decorating daydreams can't resist swank SICIS where you can rifle through their mosaic tile bins and slip your fingers over chicklet shaped glass mosaics infused with real sliver, gold or platinum.
Drop an offered mermaid hued sample in your pocket, or lick the back like a postage stamp.
Does it taste like it popped out of a Pez dispenser?
Or dropped off the counter at Bulgari?

Go to SICIS to get inspired.
Or Daddy Hedgefund willing, to buy.

Me, I browse at SICIS.
I buy at Canal Street Plastics.

At Canal Plastics I gotta pay a buck-a-piece for my 2x2 fluorescent or mirrored plexi samples.

But I don't have to go down on bended knee for an act of confession.

Kiki at SICIS.

Girls School

Call me unconventional.
I loved school.
Especially Catholic School.
The More House School for Girls.
Girls only.
Plenty of girls.
Being girls.
Bright, brilliant, clever, ever-so-often naughty girls.

The More House School was uniform-free.
A style forum for 11 year olds just down the road from Beauchamp Place and around the corner from Harrods .

The curriculum included Latin, French, Spanish, history, maths, confession, ballroom dancing, fencing and Shakespeare.

In our Shakespeare theatricals girls played all the roles.
Rosalind, Viola, Julia and Portia were juiciest.
Roles that only boys had played we now  played; women disguised as men to teach justice, illuminate, and set the world right.
Disguise, doubled-up identities, corsets and capes.
We were intellectual superheroes.

Wondergirls.

In Girls School, we painted on swirly moustaches, swaggered with sabres and dropped our capes over puddles. 
We waltzed in petticoats, held séances in cloakrooms and cribbed cheat sheets in several languages.
We donned pirate gear and orchestrated elaborate treasure hunts up then down back and front staircases.
We wore our costume-shop dresses home with Biba platform shoes, hand-crocheted cloche hats and Gary Glitter nail lacquer.
Winter week-ends we hung out at Conran's or the Tate and summers we swam in the Serpentine.

What’s not to like?

At Moore House, our curriculum did not include petty, catty infighting over boys and popularity.
We were born-free.
Lived free.

A recent treasure hunt lead me to modern pirate's booty.
I started out reading Frances Cole Jones' The Wow Factor and soon discovered Brain Barter.

Brain Barter is like going back to Girls School.
Girls School with goblets of wine and platters of Brie.
Girls School relocated to fairy-lit Saks Fifth Avenue.

Girls School where we don’t have to draw on a moustache to be the smartest person in the room.
And then rub it off to be the sexiest.

Now aren't we clever girls!