Hooray! Nick and I will be going to New York this Saturday for a week-long, belated honeymoon. I am terribly excited. I just know that from the moment I step off the plane, I'll have to fight to keep from belting out "New York, New York, it's a wonderful town" like some barrel-chested, tap-dancing sailor on shore leave. Indeed, I'll be looking for the ghost of Gene Kelly, and for Lauren Bacall in a fabulous dress. If anything remains of Dylan's New York, or that of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, I want to find that, too. I wonder how much of my knowledge of New York is fiction and how much is fact? Will we see Snake Plissken or Akim or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man? Will we see De Niro drive by in a taxi?

We're both toting our laptops, and Nick's already printed out a map of all the places near our Manhattan hotel that have wireless access. From the service range, it appears we could just sit out on the sidewalk practically anywhere and be online. (The promised land!) I'm hoping to keep the blog going, and it will probably take the form of a travel diary/picaresque account of two hapless Midwesterners fumbling about in the big city. Remember on Tom and Jerry, when Jerry's hillbilly cousin came to visit him? That's kind of what I'm envisioning—minus the hobo handkerchief tied to a stick.

Our current destinations include the Museum of Modern Art in Queens, Central Park, the Village, Soho, Chinatown, Footlight Records, and maybe the Empire State Building (if it's nighttime and the lines aren't too long). I plan to drag Nick to the CBGB club, one of the places where punk first broke out in America (the Ramones and other punk icons played there), and Sunday night we'll be attending an improv show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. We'll also be doing a sweep of the major capitalist hot spots, including Barneys, Macy's, and Saks Fifth Avenue. If anyone—New York native or tourist alike—has any further suggestions, please drop me a line. We'd be grateful for the benefit of your experience.

What will we find when we get there? Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, and volcanoes? The dead rising from the grave? Cats and dogs living together?

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