She Bangs The Drums

When I lived in England for one year, I somehow managed to make only one non-American friend. (What can I say? The British are a fish-cold crowd.) This particular friend, Lucy Brown, from Scotland, is one of the few people I know who lives at a pace I cannot keep up with: She can drink me under the table ten times over, she smokes more than I can, she curses more ferociously, she gets crushes more easily, she stays out later, she sleeps harder, she generates ideas faster, and she makes it all look so painless.

And just last week, I received an e-mail from Lucy, informing me that she will be in New York for the summer, taking a course at Columbia. I'm excited to see my old pal, but also a bit nervous as I'm not so young anymore and this means that I will not catch a single piece of sleep for the entire summer. As she so aptly wrote in her e-mail, "We're going to eat apples in Central Park together and tear that city apart!"

I can't wait.