Jeff is a winning date for a Friday night, because he only takes me to the best places, like the restrooms at the Mandarin Oriental—where they have Molton Brown hand lotions and fancy thick paper towels nestled in a basket by the sink—and opening night at the Kiehl’s on Columbus—where the nice Kiehl’s girl will give me a bunch of sample sachets full of the promise of rejuvenated, luminous skin—and the luxe Loews theatre on Broadway and Sixty-eighth, which is decorated in gold and crimson and elephants, and has a heavy aureate ruched curtain over the screen like extravagance and a mezzanine like we are in an old-timey cinema. (The gold elephants were a little misleading, actually, ’cause I kept expecting cute Thai waiters to come round offering us green curries or red curries on a silver platter, and the boys never showed, and hungry we had to stay.) It was almost like when Annie goes to the movies, except without the dancing girls.

We raced up the stairs to the mezzanine and sat down in the front row so we could put our feet up on the banister and Jeff took a giant bite out of his bar of Lindt. I said, “I hope there are good trailers,” and, after the insufferably long Magic Johnson HIV medication ad, there were great trailers, and man oh man I cannot wait for “Alfie.” We watched “I heart Huckabees”—is everything connected? Is nothing connected? I don’t know, I’m still figuring it out. But Lily Tomlin is some kind of amazing, and the scene in which Isabelle Huppert is trailing Lily Tomlin down the street is genius, and all the bits of Jason Schwartzman cycling made me want to hop on a bike illico. Illico!, j’ai dit.