Because a girl cannot live on Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen alone, last night, my sister and I went out to see Ben Kweller perform. It’s sort of a sisterly tradition that we see Ben Kweller together whenever we can, and the fact that he was opening for Bare Naked Ladies last night didn’t deter us. To be fair, we did stay for part of their set, but it just wasn’t our thing. We’d gotten nosebleed tickets because we had a feeling we’d be peacing out early. We had a lot of fun, though—listened to one of our favorite artists play the hell of a half-empty Radio City Music Hall and enjoyed some $4.50 bottled water and $10 white wine that came with an insanely bright blue straw/flashlight thing.

A note on the audience: I wish I had a more polite way of putting this, so I’ll try…I would love to be able to see, like, an average BMI of audience members. Please, can some venue start doing this as an experiment? We all love to stereotype anyway, so why not provide some scientific data to back that s**t up? Walking around in the lobby, I felt like half the people there had to be at least in the 30-plus (obese) category.

Before the show, we’d walked around and had dinner at Terrazza Toscana on 9th Avenue at 50th Street. It was a really enjoyable meal—the atmosphere on the roofdeck was great and the food was very clean and fresh and lovely. For appetizers, we split grilled calamari and a roasted beet salad (unpictured). For dinner, Jules ordered a red snapper dish and I went for the sea bass with grilled veggies in a rosemary-basil-white wine sauce. We enjoyed some prosecco with our meal as well. I will definitely be going back here. I’ll admit I find it hard to get truly good Italian food (much less Tuscan food) in NYC, but this place was great. There was so much on the menu I wanted to try.

Rather than have dessert there, we wandered over to the Times Square Tasti D-Lite and each got a small cup—I think mine was Rice Pudding flavored, which tasted weirdly like the real thing. Sometimes a little chemically-enhanced frozen yogurt hits the spot.

After the show, we had some time to kill so we walked over to the Galaxy Diner for some coffee. This is one of my favorite diners in the area—the food’s decent and it’s always comfortable. Gotta love the celestial ‘scape on the ceiling, too!