Monday, February 4, 2008

Are you talkin' to me, Michael Imperioli?

I started my weekend off Friday night with the "Sopranos" party at Forum.

The special guest for the evening was Emmy award-winning "Sopranos" actor Michael Imperioli. He played Chrissy on the hit HBO show. (Steve Schirripa was scheduled to attend but couldn't make it because of an illness.)

Imperioli arrived to the party around midnight and hung out in the VIP areas of the club with local A-listers, including NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin, before leaving in a stretch limo for the afterparty.

Imperioli looked virtually unrecognizable with a shaggy haircut, big sunglasses (yes, inside and at night) and a scarf. He looked like someone who would haughtily say "I am an ac-tor" with a British accent. He told me he was headed to New Zealand to work on a project with Peter Jackson. I couldn't help snapping a pic.



Saturday night got off to an early start with the Box Car Bar Crawl, which started with shots at 6 p.m. Had a blast riding the Lynx train with fellow crawlers (about 20 of us in all).

We started at RiRa uptown, then headed south, making stops at Morehead Street Tavern, Tyber Creek Pub and Tutto Mondo. A small group of us made an unscheduled detour to Dilworth Billiards as well and I fell in love with the place, especially the courtyard. It's the kind of place that regulars have been going to for 20+ years and you don't have to shout over the music to be heard. Things finally wrapped up around 2 a.m.

My only quibble about the twice-monthly crawl: When people start drinking so early, it gets disorganized and disjointed very quickly, and we were left behind at a couple of places.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

How can we get the city/county/state whoever to allow bars to open past 2 am - maybe like 4am? That would be so much better.