I had a great New Years Eve celebration. My friend and drum mentor Amir Naoum needed somebody to fill in for him this past weekend at a Greek Restaurant on the upper east side so he threw the work my way. I saw New Years in at Trata Estiatoria on 2nd Ave and 70th playing with the Mylos All Star Band. If you've never been to a traditional Greek celebration then I suggest that you go sometime. It is no surprise to me that these wonderful people are the root of modern Western civilization and they stopped short of the nasty decadence that we seem to have added to it. Somehow we all got it wrong and got "off track" somewhere. The Greeks really know how to party. Everybody has fun. All people dance and dance and dance..... on chairs, on the floor, on tables, with handkerchiefs, throwing dollar bills all over the place. There was plenty of distilled spirits, yet not a one of them was sloppy drunk. This was like the kind of party you have dreams about, and OMG was the food ever wonderful. I got paid very well and I really feel like I came out ahead. These are some of the warmest and nice people that I've ever had the pleasure of working with and half the time I couldn't understand a word of what was being said (I don't speak a word of Greek), but they had no difficulty communicating their genuine joy of life. By the end of the night, there was a blanket of dollar bills in front of the band on the dance floor. By the time we counted it all, it was over $800 and after we tipped the wait staff, we each went home with over $150 in tips plus our very generous fee for the evening. We started playing at 9:45 pm and we didn't stop until 4:30 am. No break, and it flew by.
I hope that Amir continues to get higher paying gigs and needs me to sit in for him more often because I had an absolute blast.