I had a fun time last night, celebrating my 55th birthday. My writer-bodybuilder-streetfighter buddy Rexx and I first had a beer at a new restaurant called the Hawaiian Tropic Zone, which opened recently in Times Square at 49th and Seventh Avenue. All the waitresses walk around in little sarongs and bikini tops, and they have periodic beauty contests where the patrons get to vote on their favorite waitress as the girls parade on a high runway behind the bar.

There were a lot of cute girls there and the atmosphere was relaxed and low-key. There's a large bar downstairs underneath huge video screens, and a smaller one upstairs, and the waitresses just walk around doing their thing (which is serving food and drink while looking as comely as possible). The place was packed with lots of guys in suits after their days' work, so it definitely had a boy's club ambiance--but a cheery and respectful one.

I think the Hawaiian Tropic Zone will do well here in New York. Apparently, it's already a success in other cities. It only goes to show that gals don't always have to take off their tops to please guys entertainment-wise. As a fan of old movies, I've known this fact for a long time, but the modern world, long infatuated with the explicitness of movies, porn, and music videos, seems to be rediscovering it. As Rexx noted as we drank our beers, it was nice to watch all these pretty women circulating without our being asked to pay for a lapdance every five minutes.

One waitress was incredibly tall--at least six-one or two, but she could have been six-seven or eight if she'd been wearing six or seven inch heels instead of modest one-and-a-half inch ones. Bring on the Amazon, I say! Go for it, girl! She had a sweet face with a kind of vulnerable look about her, which made her bikini-clad height even more interesting in contrast.

I wonder what it would be like to have a girlfriend who was six-feet-seven...

After the Hawaiian Tropic Zone we went over to the East Side to a sake bar and Japanese restaurant called Sakagura. It is located in the basement of an office building near Grand Central, giving it a kind of "underground lair" feeling, and it's well-known to connoisseurs of sake. Our cute and friendly waitress/wine expert gave us samples of different types of sake until we settled on our favorites, and we washed down the excellent food (a beef stew, chicken with sea salt and pepper, udon noodles, and miso soup with mushrooms) with a plum wine. Daisuki-dayo! (I like it very much!)

On the way back from the restaurant we stopped off at an another bar for one more drink, although this time I went easy with ginger ale. Since I'll probably have a few drinks tonight when I go out for Italian food with my Kafkaesque-looking writer-artist friend ZP, I decided to pass on more booze. Three drinks is about my limit if I don't want to feel hungover the next day. And to think I used to drink an entire bottle of wine BEFORE I went out disco-dancing back in the late 70s, early 80s...these are the ravages of age, friends!

A most pleasant evening. It was lightly raining as Rexx and I parted in Times Square again, but the warmth of the sake lingered as I walked home through wet streets streaked with neon reflections. Now if only the beautiful Japanese adult video star Sakura Sakurada had been waiting at my door when I got home, to say she wanted to give Sir Cranky a soapy birthday rubdown...or a spanking!

Maybe I have to be 56 to be eligible for that...

So I turned 55 at 10:30 a.m. this morning, Eastern time. But I started off my birthday celebration last night with a visit to the Starshine Burlesque in New York's East Village. Several performers in the lineup were new to me, and I especially enjoyed Amber Ray's number. Apropos of Halloween, she came out in a Bride of Frankenstein wig (with the classic white lightning bolts along the sides) and a tight black and white polka-dot dress which looked as if it were made out of latex or rubber. She also wore black and white polka-dot pantyhose. She was voluptuous in the Jayne Mansfield mode--yummy! She sang a song called "What Lola Wants, Lola Gets" while she stripped. She had a great voice and a sultry look; her act was both sexy and funny, and I wished she'd done an encore!

I got happy b-day phone calls this morning from my mother, sisters, and friends. My old high school friend Alice, with whom I went to the senior prom, called to say hello; she turns 55 on Halloween, when I will call her in turn. I talked to my uncle and aunt in New Jersey yesterday. My writer buddy Moe and his writer-editor wife Betty gave me a photo-crammed book about the history of Amazonian women in the cinema--something right up my psychological alley! And tonight I'll be hanging out with my writer-bodybuilder-streetfighter friend Rexx. We're going to drink sake and eat sushi and scope out the beautiful waitresses at a well-known Japanese restaurant. Tomorrow, my writer-artist friend ZP (he who looks like a tall Kafka) and I will scope out the beautiful Italian waitresses at a place in the East Village. And a couple more celebratory meals are in the offing. Not a bad way to start my midlife crisis!

Many thanks to everybody on the 'Stream who left me birthday wishes!

Daily life in 2006 with its petty annoyances is sometimes very boring. I am constantly amazed at the puttering slowness with which I write out checks for my various bills, taking up a good hour of my day; and then just a little while ago I had the exasperating experience of trying to screw an arcane brand of light bulbs into my eight-socket bathroom fixture--when half the bulbs I buy don’t seem to have the threads properly aligned. Listening to the squeaking of the sockets as I was trying to screw in the bulbs made me nuts, and I also felt like a slob as my shirt came out of the waist of my jeans, which meanwhile were sliding down my ass as I kept reaching up to insert the bulbs. Finally, I was delighted to realize that at least two of the new bulbs are defective and have to be exchanged.

Whew. I think Sir Cranky will have to unwind at dinnertime with a large tumbler of Jameson, and an episode of The Adventures of Sir Galahad, a 1949 serial starring George “Superman” Reeves...

Life might have been tougher back in the days of King Arthur, but at least wenches were plentiful at the local grog bar and all you had to do to get light was put a friggin’ torch on the castle wall!

I'm feeling extremely peevish and juvenile this afternoon, so let me share a little ditty I learned when I was but a mere slip of a lad:

In days of old,
when knights were bold,
and toilets weren't invented,

They stopped on the road,
and dropped their load,
and walked away contented.

Toilet humor.

Obviously, my long-delayed midlife crisis is beginning...

Bring on the wenches, innkeeper!!

My birthday is on Friday, and I'm going to be 55. What makes that seem particularly unreal is that in the last few years, the older I've gotten, the more my psyche has resisted the reality of it. I spend my leisure time watching old films that take me back in time to the 50s, when I was a child, or even earlier to the 40s, an era for which I feel a real emotional affinity. I read novels from the 40s and 50s and collect magazines and pinups from the 40s, 50s, and early 60s (which were really the end of the 50s).

One thing I've always liked about stripclubs is that their atmosphere is, despite the contemporaneous trappings, very retro, like a paperback cover from the 50s with sultry dames luring guys to paradise or doom.

There are a lot of things I obviously like about the modern world--for instance, the technological advances that make it possible for me to write something called a "blog" so easily; and the medical science that has done great things in my kid sister Jenny's battle against cancer. She is doing remarkably well, knock wood. I also like the convenience of ATM machines and cellphones. But I can't say that I much like flying these days, or the poisonous sycophancy of the celebrity culture, or the ever-widening division between the haves and have-nots in this country, and the cynically Orwellian doublespeak we live with in our political discourse. I particularly find it detestable how politicians are afraid to say what they feel without apologizing for it five minutes later; or how politicians who take foolish stands refuse to admit that they have made mistakes.

I know that the 40s and 50s had terrible problems--horrible stuff; I can still remember a high school girlfriend's mother crying in 1969 about her older brother, who was shot down in his plane over the Pacific during World War 2. But at least when you got on the subway then the women were wearing gloves and dresses and high heels and nice hats and so there were some nice visuals to keep your mind off the fact that life can pretty much suck. And for the ladies' delight, guys were dressed in snappy suits with great hats and top coats. I'm tired of modern young women looking like young men, and I'm sick of their sullen pretensions that they have balls, and that their balls are bigger than men's.

I had a nice dinner with my writer friend Moe last night, and he told me he saw a sticker on a lamp post that said, "Women are the new men." An ominous sign of our times.

When I get particularly sick of modern life I watch musicals with Betty Grable and wonder if "the girl next door" will ever be in fashion again. I know that's not "reality"--but what IS real about Betty Grable is the warm feeling she created, the sense of hope, the sense that life can be okay and is not just about narcissism.

So I'm almost 55 and I'm crankier than ever.

Why do I feel so sleepy this afternoon? Perhaps because it's chilly outside and the sky is gray and overcast, setting off my desire to hibernate. I'm working at home today, doing my freelance stuff, and I've kept the heat on in my apartment and maybe that's making me yawn too.

I just closed my eyes for a few minutes and dozed off long enough to have a fragment of a dream. A giant cocker spaniel, walking on two legs, got into a limousine with two other show dogs. The cocker spaniel looked feminine, but started talking with a masculine voice to the other two dogs, who were female. Come to think of it, the cocker spaniel had a five o'clock shadow, too.

Sorry, I don't remember what the spaniel said.

Can you imagine what I would be like if I took drugs? This I got just from a sip of coffee from the Greek diner...