Last night in NYC & the city had me fully feeling myself.

Valerie June, Louis Mendes, Joe Hammond, Tiffany & Co., Selena Nelson, Spike Lee.

By this point, you couldn’t tell NYC Joy nothinggg.

And she had a thought.

That first night, no one expected Valerie June to exit into the main hotel.

On my last night, I could use that knowledge to squeeze one more drop of magic from the Big Apple.

Worst case scenario, I was all dressed up for a Saturday evening in NYC. Oh, no.

So I called a car to take me back to Café Carlyle where this all began.

For the next 15 or 20 minutes, I slunk around their lobby trying not to be weird. Temperatures were in the 30s most of my time in NYC, and I’m too old to choose cute over comfortable, so to hotel guests and passersby, I was just some creep in a coat.

Just as I was reaching peak levels of awkwardness, the café door swung open and Valerie June rushed out in a wave of pink tulle…

Until her dress snagged on someone/something along the way, jerking her back like a pull-string doll.

It was the most adorably ordinary thing I may have ever seen.

And snapped me back to the reality that I was WOEFULLY unprepared.

Another fan nearby clutched a VJ album and book with a blue Sharpie.

I’d shown up with absolutely nothing but a story about how I’d seen her in Austin just the week before and my NY-given swag.

You ever looked back on a moment and realized that your brain was the real MVP, working faster than you were actually processing thought?

Did I have any writing utensil? No.

Did I have a single scrap of paper? Of course not.

Would it be silly for her to sign a key card from a totally different hotel? Absolutely.

But Valerie June’s setlist had included one of my favorites, “Workin’ Woman Blues.”

And what I DID have was a $20 bill. And somebody else’s Sharpie.

“Can I ask you to sign something too… And can it be a twenty-dollar bill?”

With an infectious giggle that rippled through her curled locs and pink tulle dress, VJ remarked that nobody had ever asked her that before.

After the way NYC met me, it made my heart happy to leave behind a lasting impression of my own.

[Ed. Note: This post is part of a one-time February 2024 mini-series that took me to NYC where I was treated to an abundance of Blackstories first-hand. In place of my usual February content, I chose to share my own real-time (-ish) lived experience to honor the vibrant people New York put in my path.]