Weekends

The weekend is our time (15 Minutes, that is) at the Crimson. Especially Saturday, when there's no paper the next day...exit the frenetic news hounds, enter the smooth mag reviewers and feature writers. Unfortunately (for the mag, but fortunately for our souls), we gave up all that this weekend in favor of a road trip to Atlantic City, where things are as miserable as ever and old ladies, mesmerized by the blinking slot machines pump in quarters at 4 and 5 a.m. like it's midday and time for a tuna sandwich. Meanwhile, outside Bally's Grand Hotel and Casino the prostitutes parade up and down Pacific Avenue and drug dealers lounge in the shadow of the giant hotel. It was a relatively short hop from there to Princeton, New Jersey, where we arrived just in time to miss the muddy Harvard-Princeton football game. We stayed long enough to catch an overdose of Princetonian white picket fences and rabid Ivy League alums sporting fedoras, blue sportcoats with PRINCETON TIGER pins and drooling orange and black. If Atlantic City is one big dirty underbelly, then Princeton can safely be called the upper crust. Anyway, two versions of Americana over the space of two rainy New Jersey days. You can't beat that.