It is, of course, Work Hell this week. I don't know if you're observing it where you work, but we are here.

At any rate, I took a couple of hours this evening to sneak away from the celebration and meet a science fiction friend and colleague and his girlfriend for drinks at a brand-new multilevel sports bar called Tonic East. To think that this is the pinnacle of our technological prowess as a society. But I digress.

We had a lovely time in the roof garden, though the bit where we managed to snag a table was more carport than open-air seating. Coming back here to the office afterward—full of Newcastle Brown Ale, which I will probably have to stop drinking now that they're mounting such an aggressive and ubiquitous ad campaign in our fair city—I strolled uptown on Madison Avenue, only to pass a gaggle young young lasses loitering together in a knot on the sidewalk. Surreptitiously eyeing them and their long (as they are referred to in bad fiction) coltish legs, I thought to myself, "This looks like a chapter meeting of the Future Streetwalkers of America."

Then my eye chanced to fall upon the brass placard affixed to the front of the building before which the delicate things were congregating.

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF DRAMATIC ARTS"Ah," thought I, and, "ha."

And now, back to the grindstone, so I can get home at what in these benighted circumstances must do as a reasonable hour.