IT'S JUST ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE

"I just don't feel like I get as drunk as other people," I boasted to my friend last night. It was girls' night. We were sitting in a back "garden" (alley) of our first destination, sipping our first glass of wine, waiting for the other two to arrive.

Two hours later found me traipsing down Sackett Street, singing all the hits from My Fair Lady at full voice:

ARE THERE LILAC TREES IN THE HEART OF TOWN?

I asked an indifferent Monday night borough neighborhood.

CAN YOU SEE A LARK IN ANY OTHER PART OF TOWN?

Here I went for a highly inelegant tour j'ete.

DOES ENCHANTMENT SOAR OUT OF EV'RY DOOR?
NO IT'S JUST ON THE STREET WHERE YOU...

I never finished the phrase, to everyone's great relief, though my performance's abrupt termination had nothing to do with any concern for my friends' suffering ear drums, something they must have realized when they saw me running down the street squealing. Swept up as I'd been with the romance of this Musical Theater Classic, I'd leaned into a window dreamily as I belted. The window into which I'd leaned was on the first floor of a brownstone. Why I assumed the apartment would be unoccupied, I couldn't now guess, but it wasn't. Maybe a foot in front of the window, a man sat in an easy chair, quietly watching television.

I am sure that it was the volume of my interpretation of the Lerner and Loewe ballad rather than its musicality that caused the poor relaxing man-at-home to look up towards his window, and I wonder what he thought when a woman in a hat and poncho screamed in his face and ran down the street.

Don't get as drunk as other people, I says. Total. Lie.