An actor friend from New York was in town Monday night, so another theatre friend and I joined her for drinks. I proposed the Dresden Room, a favorite old haunt of mine, because it’s classic Hollywood, because neither of them had been there before, and because I thought the one friend might enjoy saying she’d had a drink where they shot so much of “Swingers” and so many other movies. Plus, I just like the joint. I only wish Marty and Elayne had been on that night, but they don’t play Mondays. (The guys who do Monday nights were pretty good, but completely lacked the wonderful kitsch and showmanship brought to the Dresden Room by Marty and Elayne for 31 years now).

Anyway, we had some drinks and a very nice time. My friend who’s local I get to see all the time, but the other one I get to see only once a year. Thoroughly enjoying myself, when the tab came, I decided just to pick it up. The drinks, plus tax and tip, ran $53.

Late this afternoon I had a drinks meeting at a lounge in Burbank. This was a business meeting, and also a friend meeting (as in, my one companion said, “Why do we always have to wait for business to socialize?” Precisely.). I ordered some appetizers, and then we ordered more appetizers, and we each had some drinks, all of it, it turned out, at happy hour prices. And it was a pretty happy hour — the end of a day successful in many ways (a good prognosis for my friend in the hospital who got released; a good bill of health on my dog, recovering from surgery; financially a good day; and more) that I was now celebrating while having this meeting, in preparation for something I’m starting in two weeks. That project is through my company, so I rightly figured I’d be picking up the tab. When I turned away, it turned out that one of my companions had already asked for the check and slipped the server his credit card. So he picked it all up. I watched as he signed it. The total: $53.

While I don’t believe in karma per se, I do believe that when you do something nice for no good reason, the next time someone does something nice for you, you tend to notice it better. And, hey, the coincidence of the dollar amount was certainly eye-catching.

Here’s something nice I’m going to do for you. Here’s Marty and Elayne. Next time you’re in town, you should check them out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 4th, 2013 at 12:14 am and is filed under Music, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.