Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

The entrance to Barney’s Warehouse Sale nestles next to D’Agastino’s, the overpriced yet still vaguely ghetto grocery store across 17th street. I went in because Tom said there were a lot of shoes. Unfortunately they were not my kind of shoes-- mostly slinky strappy numbers providing inadequate toe protection for my calamity-ridden lifestyle. I like to think of my footwear as a weapon. It should hurt if I kick you. I was rolling toward the exit when a warehouse-themed cardboard box came out of nowhere. For a tense moment, I thought I was going to plunge headfirst into a tangled snakepit of price-slashed but still $400 belts. I skirted the box like a retarded ballerina balanced only on one toe. Already shaken by the almost-catastrophe, I finished my pirouette nose-to-nose with an impeccably coiffed Chelsea boy trying on a silken peach-colored space suit. My eyebrows ratcheted into my hairline in a very non-NYC-acceptable manner. This did not go unnoticed. “So is that a yes?” he said. I

Momster: “Your dad doesn’t like this movie. He thinks it’s a chick flick. What’s the male equivalent of a chick flick?” Tom: “Hmmm. I don’t know.” Momster: “Maybe a dick flick. Tom: “I don't know, but I'd think that’s another genre entirely.”

Family Favorites! Duels Scaramouche Princess Bride (“Aha, I find I am left handed”) Roxanne with the tennis racket That movie where Burt Lancaster is an acrobat and has this partner who is a dwarf My Personal Favorite Naked Fight Scene Eastern Promises wherein Viggo Mortenson rumbles all steamy, tattooed and buck naked in a Turksish Bath. Holy replay.

Dirty Dozen Guns of Navarone Stalag 17 Great Escape Bridge over River Kwai Also applauds MAD magazine version featuring Sesua HayaKawa as the bucket, and Alec Guiness as the General The Desert Rats - Plot Synopsis: Rommel chases a small group of Americans (just a regiment) and surrounds them at a mission. The Americans hold out and the Germans run out of water. Really the Americans are out of water too, but to demoralize the thirsty Germans, the Americans go on top of the mission pretending to take baths and fake sudsing themselves up. Finally the Germans get fed up and lob a bomb into the mission. Ironically, the bomb blasts out a well inside the mission walls and the water started gushing up. So then the Americans capture a Sherman tank and defeat the Germans. They march out 500 german prisoners with their arms crossed over their heads. I never saw Kelly’s Heros so it can’t be one of my top three. I do know they go to steal some gold and it has something to do with Donald Sutherla

"Steve McQueen was in Papillon." "La papillon means butterfly in Spanish." "Isn’t la papillon French?" "Oh yeah, it’s French. Look up French for butterfly on your iPhone." "Steve McQueen was locked up. Maybe with Dustin Hoffman. They both were locked up." "See if Peekaboo is in there. In that IBMd. It's a movie from 1951 about a guy who was always getting put in jail, but he could make himself invisible and escape." "Papillon was on this island and its the guy who shot Lincoln." "John Wilkes Booth?" "No, the doctor, he was sent to that island." "Why would they send Lincoln’s doctor to a french prison?" "Do you know Steve McQueen’s real first name?" "Gerard?" "No, Terrance." "See, Steve McQueen was in Papillon." "And Dustin Hoffman played a creepy little guy, as usual." "Dustin Hoffman played an Indian Chief." "The India

I haven't drunk gin since that one unfortunate incident in eighth grade at somebody's parents' Halloween party. We, the minors, sat in a gazebo in the backyard and polished off a whole bottle of Tangeray which one us, a more proactive and early-blooming dipsomaniac, had swiped from the self-serve bar inside. I haven't drunk Chabli, from a box or otherwise, since that series of encounters spanning a summer and autumn in a year before any of us figured out how to drive. I only know the timeframe because one of the few things I do recollect is traveling on foot. This series of encounters culminates in a three-part grand finale beginning in the quarry (that rocky hotbed of underage anarchy); pit-stopping under the big tree in the cemetery; and finishing up in the front yard of my house where my mother found us all passed out in the grass some hours later.