I moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan in 1999. In large part, Amanda is one of the reasons I'm here. What more or less brought me to Brooklyn, and what taught me that Brooklyn isn't "Injun territory", as so many Manhattanites believe the boros to be, is a Brooklyn Heights restaurant I became a part of in 1993 called La Bouillabaisse.
I met Amanda in 1990 at a small birthday party for me at the Oyster Bar. She was a friend of my sister's and was living in Stratford, CT, where she and her boyfriend sold exotic birds. She was a lively, beautiful and worldy woman but what really attracted me to her was her stinging British wit and that she could appreciate my sarcasm without wincing. We became fast friends.
In her teens and early 20s, Amanda had toured the world as a singer and dancer (the second title always surprised me because she was the clumsiest person I knew). She was trying to lay the groundwork for a relocation to NYC to do her music. Since I'm a former professional bass player, we connected on that vector as well. She always saw me as a musician who would eventually learn the error of my ways and return to playing where I belonged.
I was living in a large loft at Broadway and Bleecker and I had a spare bedroom so I offered it to her. There were no ulterior relationship motivations behind the offer. She was simply more fun to be around than the diminishing number of women I was seeing. In fact, Amanda's sister had then recently died of cancer and after my relationship with my blood sister turned sour we mutually adopted each other.
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