People sometimes say "Only in New York" when they mean something very weird happened. But the weekend I just had, though not weird, could not have happened in many places.

My basketball coach, for a real job, coaches the women's team at John Jay. So Saturday noon, after my trip to the river to do the weekly haiku, JL and I went up to the Doghouse (they're the Bloodhounds, see, Criminal Justice?) to watch them play. They won, but in a heartstopper. The bad guys were down by one with the ball and fifteen seconds left. If they'd made a shot, the Bloodhounds would've been toast. But they missed! So we ambled out of there with our pulses still pounding, and strolled across Central Park, past a lot of sleeping ducks, to the Asia Society, where we examined some gorgeous ceramics, bronzes, and wood carvings from the permanent collection. The hushed, slightly nose-in-the-air Asia Society galleries are as opposite to a college gym as you can imagine. Then back across the park to a warming Chinese dinner of leeks and jumbo shrimp, and then to the Walter Kerr theater to see Chazz Palminteri's monologue version of A Bronx Tale. Absolutely a knockout. The lights come up, he's on stage with his back to the audience, snapping his fingers to a doo-wop song. He turns around with a big smile, says, "I grew up right on this corner," and the whole audience is eating out of his hand for the next hour and a half.

Then on Sunday, morning basketball, which turned out to be a bummer because the gym was locked and we couldn't get in. Happens occasionally, when we and the school we rent from get our signals crossed (the super thought it was a holiday, but it wasn't like that on our permit) but it was sort of okay because we had a kind of Q-&-A clinic on the sidewalk. After which I tooled down to Chinatown for the New Year's parade. Happy Year of the Rat, by the way. Then coffee with some friends back in my neighborhood, and then a concert of the New York Qin Society. What's a Qin? A medieval Chinese silk-stringed instrument. It's a muted, meditative instrument, as different from the environment of a parade as the galleries are from the Doghouse.

And I reiterate, there aren't a lot of places you could go from one of those environments to another to another over the course of a weekend. Almost only in New York.