Weekend In Pictures

View from the balcony of Al's beach house. It was insanely windy and a touch too chilly to swim, although Freck did jump in for a few minutes alone while Joe and Hunter and I sat on the beach and watched. The water looked far too choppy and rip-currenty to let him swim without us at least huddled on the shore and hoping we don't have a reason to flounder in and save him.

Mike and Hunter out on the balcony the first night. We were about to go hiking down to the Black Pelican for dinner but they stopped serving at 10pm, so we braved the beach brambles crossing over to Sunburn's across the dune for quesadillas and karaoke. Hunter was screaming in the darkness thinking something was attacking her ankles, and wound up covered in beach burrs, which Freck and I proceeded to clean her like three chimpanzees in Sunburn's parking lot. Oh, and Mike sang "Dinah-Moe Hum" again. But this time the Irish kids weren't there in their full fawning glory.

A rather unfortunately blurry picture of Mike, Joe and Hunter, as my camera doesn't take good night pictures for some reason. Oh, at karaoke Joe and Al were going to sing Neil Diamond's "Coming To America" and it wound up selecting "Play Me" instead, which Joe had never heard and Al was too drunk to do anything else but repeat "You are the sun/I am the moon/you are the words/I am the tune/PLAAAAAY MEEEEEE" over and over again with a lot of dewey eyes and dramatic gestures and a final rock star throw down of the microphone, which greatly pissed off the karaoke lady as you might imagine. But "Play Me" became the theme of that weekend, and none of us could get that chorus (or Al's rendition of it) out of our heads for the next three days.

Freck's simply gorgeous classic 1970 Chevy Monte Carlo that he drove down from New York to hang with us that night. Appears even more a classic next to Mike's shabby (but endearing) little wagon. The better to carry his drums from gig to gig, my dear.

Al tried to convince Hunter to stretch out alluringly over the hood, Tawny Kitaen-style. But you can tell by the look in his eye that Mike would have rather secretly posed across the hood himself.

Hunter takes a shot of us surrounding the classic. Meanwhile, Mike photographs Hunter photographing us.

Sunday morning football with Barco and playing a game of "iPod charades". Here Barco is trying to get us to guess the name Paul Oakenfold (or more like trying to get Hunter to guess, since she was the only one of us who didn't know who the artist was). By the way, if you have ever seen the character of Dick from the movie version if High Fidelity, that is the image and essence of our good friend Barco right there. It was really nice to see him again, though. He lives in Nags Head all year but he only got to hang for a few hours Sunday morning before he headed off to work.

Oh, and of course we end off with Al trying to charade the Benny Goodman Sextet by simulating a sex act with his hand. Well, what else would you have done?