When I get together with my college friends for a weekend in New York each winter, we spend quite a bit of time figuring out where to stay, eat, and play. Forty years ago, when we were all living together in a big house in Chicago, we were more impulsive, but some decisions (such as where to go for dinner) always required a long conversation.

This year I tried to head off some of these decisions at the pass. So a month before our planned trip, I found a hotel for a good rate, floated the idea, received general approval, reserved three rooms, and stopped looking. We agreed on theater tickets for Saturday. I started looking for things to do down in Soho and the Village, since the hotel was downtown.

Then last week, three days before we were all to meet in New York, I started getting a lot of e-mails about bedbugs. One of my friends had checked out our hotel in the bedbug registry and found a listing.

Oy. I have never checked these listings myself. I figure if there has been a report, the hotel has subsequently hired an exterminator, and then some untold number of people have stayed there since then without incident. But I certainly did not want to be responsible for guaranteeing the state of the bedding at the hotel I had chosen, so I sat back and watched as the flurry of e-mails began to focus on other choices.

I canceled the original reservation only after we had settled on a new hotel, the Hotel Beacon on Broadway at 75th Street. Back to the drawing board; I started looking for restaurants and entertainment on the upper west side. It's good for me to remind myself that no collective decision is ever final. I guess I'm just a slow learner.

I'll be interested in hearing how deserts (as in sand, cacti, etc.) can factor in to a trip to NYC...

The deserts will have to wait for Saturday.

I drove down from Boston Friday afternoon and checked into the hotel. I really liked this hotel; we all did. We had two suites. My suite had a great view looking East toward Central Park and beyond. There was a kitchenette and table in each suite. When my friend Carol arrived, we walked across the street to the terrific Fairway market for fruit and cheese, and we bought a bottle of wine at the liquor store on the corner for a little happy hour before dinner. The rest of our friends had all arrived by 6:00, and we spent the time catching up and making plans.

Dinner Friday was at Ouest, on Broadway near 84th Street. http://ouestny.com/ I loved my meal here. I started with grilled octopus & glazed Berkshire pork belly with white beans, arugula & tomato, which was wonderful. Other people ordered mixed greens, which were beautiful salads. My friend Ellen ordered a beet salad that she did not care for. When the waiter noticed she hadn't eaten it, he offered to bring her something else and replaced it with the mixed greens. Very nice. While I had heard the short ribs are legendary, and I love short ribs, they came with accompaniments that I don't like (beets and horseradish), so I looked elsewhere. I was very happy with my choice of pan roasted California squab with duck liver risotto. We did not try any of the desserts.

After dinner we headed down to 41st Street for dueling pianos at Tobacco Road, a bar across the street from the Port Authority. Ellen had gotten an offer for tickets through a discount service. None of us had ever been to such an event before and didn't really know what to expect, although we thought it might be fun. We got there early and had seats right up front, although some among us were questioning whether it might have been better to sit toward the back so we could make an inconspicuous exit if we wanted or needed to leave early.

Last year I went to a drag show for the first time with my daughter in Key West. What I learned on that occasion was that you have to have plenty of dollar bills at a drag show. So for those who have not ever been to see dueling pianos, I have the same advice. Bring cash. The idea is that you write your requests for songs and submit them along with cash to the piano players. They then play and sing the songs. The more cash accompanies the request, the sooner they play the song. The two guys playing piano claimed to know five thousand songs, and I believe it. They played with tremendous energy and skill.

People in the bar were of all ages. There was a large party accompanying a girl celebrating her twenty-first birthday. They brought their own birthday cake and had the pianists sing Happy Birthday. So the girl got up on the stage and was a very good sport while one of the pianists sang an increasingly crude birthday song about her. Downing shots was a large part of the celebration. A couple closer to our own age got up and danced together on the stage when the guy requested a love song for his wife.

We stayed until just before midnight and were among the first people to leave. They had not gotten to the one song we had requested, as we had only sent up a dollar bill with the request. There was a group sitting next to us who kept requesting songs with twenties and jumping the line, so it must have been pretty late when they got to the one dollar pile.

Our post-performance conversation made us sound like anthropologists analyzing an alien culture, tinged with a bit of wonder about whether our own children lived in this alien culture. And indeed, when one of our group told her family about the evening, her son's response was, "You don't get out much".

Good start! So glad you enjoyed Ouest.

Usually at restaurants like Ouest, unless the ingredients are part of the entree, they will make substitutions.

I am hoping to read about desserts instead of deserts, but I guess I'll keep reading to find out...

Saturday morning the rest of the group went to the Dead Sea scrolls exhibit at Discovery Times Square. http://www.discoverytsx.com/exhibiti...ad-sea-scrolls I had seen this in December and recommended it highly. There are fascinating artifacts from Biblical and post-Biblical times, along with interesting commentary on the audioguide. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a sampling of the fragments of documents preserved for thousands of years in the desert caves of Qumran. The fragments are changed every two weeks to preserve them from deterioration under the lights of the exhibit.

I spent the morning in the neighborhood of the hotel, lunched on the remains of the happy hour provisions from the night before, supplemented by a container of blackberries I bought for a dollar from a guy selling them off a truck on Broadway, and joined the group at the Booth Theatre on 45th Street for the matinee of Other Desert Cities. I really enjoyed this play about the road taken, the road not taken, and the consequences of the choices people make. Four of the actors were extremely familiar to me from television series I had followed for years, and I thought they all did an excellent job.

Following the play we made our way through an unpleasantly crowded Times Square to the subway, headed back up to the hotel and then to an early dinner around the corner at 'Cesca, on 75th Street at Amsterdam Avenue. http://cescanyc.com/ I absolutely loved the menu here, and now I want to go back and try everything I didn't have. What I did have was excellent, starting with octopus carpaccio and olive tapenade (very different from the octopus at Ouest Friday night) and then roast duckling with green beans and date butter. I order a lot of duck in restaurants, and this was one of the best renditions I have encountered. Once again, there were no takers for dessert.

After dinner we went to a performance by the Lar Lubovitch dance company at the Manhattan Movement and Arts Center at 248 W. 60th St. between Amsterdam and West End Avenues. The building is a dance school. There is a performance space which appears to be the dance studio with temporary bleacher seating. It is a very intimate venue; we sat in the fist row to maximize legroom and felt like it was a private performance.

The group performed two works: Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat, and a new work by composer Yevgeniy Sharlat. An excellent ensemble of musicians conducted by Ransom Wilson played the chamber music to which the company danced. There were three actors narrating the Stravinsky, including Marni Nixon, whose name was familiar to me as the singing voice in the movies West Side Story, The King and I, and My Fair Lady.

The dancing was spectacular. We all loved this performance. And we all felt much more in our element than we had at the dueling pianos. But I started to feel like it was running a little long. Maybe it was the day that was running a little long.

Back in the hotel we passed around a (very good) chocolate chip cookie that Ellen had bought at a bakery earlier (or perhaps that was the night before, it's a little fuzzy ((the memory, not the cookie))). That was as much dessert as we got to on this trip.

Sunday morning we gathered for breakfast at Viand, a casual restaurant next to the hotel, and tried to figure out when we could do this again. There was some higher mathematics going on as the expenses were worked out, but I don't drink coffee so I left this to the more alert members of the party.

We dispersed in our various different directions by train, bus, and automobile, and I felt, and feel again now as I write, a wave of gratitude that these people are in my life. May there be many more endless discussions about where to go to dinner in our future.

What a wonderful way to spend a NYC weekend with your lifelong friends! Thanks for sharing, Nikki.