Yippie Museum Cafe, NYC

There were more musicians and staffers here than paying customers until we walked in. The five of us balanced out the paying/nonpaying ratio when we say our asses down, but it went back down again when two of us didn't order anything. The emphasis was on coffees, and at 75 cents apiece, I wasn't sure if I could afford one. In my pocket I seized a grubby handful of folded up ones, but inside the pocket they stayed. A leather couch vacated, and I made my home on the top left corner of it, straddling the side with my left leg underneath a tall tabletop. A tall slender woman in a sundress filmed the jazz musicians from the second set forward. No need to capture the first, I guess. The only stray noise in the place was from the quarter tip left atop a table. The rest of the noise came from the instruments tapping along together in harmonious cacophony. "It's like a flow of consciousness," the drummer told me while on a break. As he said this, his high seemed to wear off and he became serious, looking me straight in the eye and gesturing. I pictured a seesaw with a moving fulcrum and the sides all trying to find the happy medium. The balance would always be there. I never did get to ask the drummer if he knew what I was talking about. Here he is talking about months spent abroad and old contacts from the field of jazz befriending him on Facebook, and here I am getting off on his beats and originally thinking he was counting to 64 during the last piece.

Seinfeld restaurant?

Washington Square Park, NYC