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You can go topless any day of the week. Yes, ladies, you too: It’s been city law since 1992. Chances are, however, outside of the occasional random celebrity photo — looking at you, Scout Willis, and your 2014 LES #FreetheNipple campaign — you more often than not see folks opting for shirts.
As a reminder of everyone’s right to eschew the top layer when the mood strikes, GoTopless Day returns, along with its annual parade. That’s actually parades, plural, as they’re scheduled around the globe, but your local option is Sunday in midtown. It’s generally on the lighter side — feel free to break out those “equali-titty” and “breast of friends” signs — but it isn’t exhibitionism for exhibitionism’s sake.
“It’s not about showing off our boobs,” organizer Kasyo Perrier says. “It’s about freedom, and encouraging women to feel safe in their bodies.”
It’s a right to bare … more than arms.
Move over, kombucha. Later days, kale. We have a new ingestible obsession: CBD oil.
While it has yet to pop up on the menu of your corner Starbucks, the (generally) THC-free hemp extract is easier to find than ever, including in the form of cocktails.
Like its trendy forebears, CBD oil is infused with claims of health benefits (many of which still need to undergo scientific scrutiny). Still, even if you’re skeptical of some of the professed positives, plenty of folks find it to be a calming, stress-relieving additive. And the World Health Organization says cheers to its safety.
New Astoria bar Adriaen Block has a menu of CBD cocktails, with cheeky names such as the Rolled Fashioned and Stoney Negroni; midtown Ace Hotel’s lobby bar features drinks, too. Order your diner coffee with CBD-sporting sweetener (Bubby’s), or grab a post-spa hibiscus milkshake (Chillhouse). For those munchies all humans get merely by existing, all of the above have belly-minded options, brownies included.
Walk into the newly opened West Village Comics and know one thing: What you’re seeing is just a “quarter of a quarter” of a single storage unit. And owner Kurt Bollers has multiple storage spaces filled with the comic books he’s collected since he was a 6-year-old boy in Guyana.
“They made me want to learn to read, because I would look at the pictures and make up words,” Bollers recalls. “By the time I was in eighth grade, I had a college reading level because comics really pushed me to read a lot.”
Education awaits comic lovers stepping into a store filled with graphic novels on through valuable, graded titles that start at $100. More casual fans can thumb through less exclusive books housed in boxes along the back of the space.
Regardless of price, Bollers, now 55, may have quantity, but he aims for quality.
“You’re not getting a beat-up copy. It doesn’t work like that,” Bollers says. “I like repeat customers.”
While the twice-yearly NYC Restaurant Week is inclusive, it might as well incorporate Manhattan into the moniker for the slim representation of the outer boroughs. The recently wrapped version saw just 10 Brooklyn spots involved, but there’s a solution: neighborhood-centric dining events.
The winners are foodies. Meal deals are always welcomed, and drilled down versions like the inaugural Dine in Park Slope serve up excuses to dig into areas that might be on the periphery of your usual place setting.
The Park Slope offering, which runs through Aug. 30, doesn’t bother with hard borders, including some Flatbush restaurants in its roster of more than 40 participants. The deals vary by business, so that while Italian spot Sotto Voce is going the $25 prix fixe route, more informal Kos Kaffe is giving a 20 percent discount on sandwiches and salads. The range of cuisines is vast — Mexican to Asian fusion, Mediterranean to American-style cafe fare.
Maybe it’s the “Nanette” factor. With the fervor surrounding Hannah Gadby’s Netflix special — she may have redefined stand-up or pushed us into a post-comedy world, depending upon your critical proclivities — there’s a new bar for the stand-up special.
Brooklyn comedian Drew Michael enters this climate with his own set of broken rules. His eponymous HBO special, which debuts Saturday, is free of some pretty key conventions — notably, an audience.
Michael (with director Jerrod Carmichael) employs a mix of direct address and shots of him wandering around a dimly lit soundstage — and occasionally strolling out of the frame — in a confessional-style routine. Without an audience, without that live laughtrack, viewers curled up on their couches decide what’s worth a guffaw, what mandates a groan or “he said what?“
“We kind of did our job, like we put it out there, now it’s up to you to react to it in any way you see fit. You know what I mean? It really is like, we made this thing and now the other end of the conversation hasn’t happened yet. And so that happens the moment you watch it,” Michael says.