NYC layover / Mellis Engagement Party

So I came back to NYC for a 4-day layover from Hawaii to do a bunch of actor photoshoots (7 total!) and to attend Melanie and Willis's engagement party at the Standard Beer Garden.

Melanie's friends all just happen to have awesome hair and GIANT engagement rings...



But Mel's ring kind of just makes everyone else's look silly.



Good work Willis! Hook me up with some of these sure-to-be-fabulous weddings!



Yum lots of beers and sausages.



And sister-in-law Megoon just got a promotion at Comedy Central. She's now a boss!



Congratulations Goon!

OK I have to finish packing. Off to Singapore in the morning!

Standard Beer / PPL / MAO Wedding

Kristen had like 20 friends meeting up at the Standard Beer Garden the other night so we went there for some drinks.




Tim stopped by because he lives two blocks away from there now.



Speaking of high school friends, I met up with Patrick, who we last saw in Hong Kong over New Years, and who has been around the city for the summer.





We went to the club at the Trump Soho which is truly awful never ever go there.





Oh and the highlight of the weekend was shooting a wedding up in Greenwich that MAO hooked me up with.

This gig meant a lot to me because remember like five years ago when I had a quarterlife crisis and didn't know what I was doing with my life?

Well Anne helped inspire me to become a photographer and served as my muse and some of the first pretty pretty pictures I ever took were of her as I began to build my portfolio.

And then from that there was our whole Hong Kong Adventure where I hooked her up with the Starz Agency and thus began the brief but lucrative (and possibly ongoing) modeling career.

And now here she is hooking me up with photo gigs because I'm now, like, a real professional photographer y'all!

Anyway, the wedding was super fun. And the pictures turned out beautiful even PRE-photoshop (as you'll see below).







Thank you Anne for the wedding gig, for inspiring me endlessly, for being a great friend, and a for being a true beauty inside and out. Oh and for being a totally nutso vampire-loving goofball weirdo.

Love love love.

Phil is one of the luckiest.

The Standard (again), Kampuchea, and Los Feliz!

Melanie (Megoon's superfun future sister-in-law) and I have been making plans to spend time together and bond before Meghan's wedding (Saturday) and our busy schedules just haven't allowed it. I'm in Norway. She's in Vegas. I'm in Dallas. She's in Miami. I'm in LA. She's in Indiana.

Basically, we're crazy.

Well finally a week before the big day, things worked out and we happened to be in the same neighborhood at the same time. She texted me while I was at Splash Happy Hour saying she was at the Standard Beer Garden. Yay!

I had just been there the night before but it is a lovely place and I was happy to walk two blocks to meet up with my favorite Blake Lively clone.



We had a random "celebrity" sighting. The husband of one of the Real Housewives of New York supposedly (I don't watch the show)...



Beers beers beers. It's been a good week.




Afterwards we headed off to our respective homes to regroup and chow down.

I met up with Tim and Tom and Mags for some yummy Cambodian-ish food at Kampuchea in the LES.







(It's really really good.)

Then we decided to stay LES because Noops had informed us of some epic DJ playing at Los Feliz just a few blocks away. Love it when I'm stumbling distance from my home!






So Melanie looks like Blake Lively and Blake Lively looks like Ke$ha and therefore Melanie looks like Ke$ha so when we're on a dancefloor and I see her walk into the room I can't help but imagine her singing, "Now the party don't start til' I walk in!!!"
(Don'tSTOPmakeitPOPDJblowmyspeakersUPTONIGHTi'mmaFIGHTtilweseethesunLIGHT)



So fun!



Everyone took turns buying shotz.







And it was one epic song after the next.



Amazing night!

The Standard Beer Garden

I've heard wonderful things about the Standard Hotel's Beer Garden. Never been. But everyone loves it.

So Kristen organized an after-work happy hour last Thursday as it was supposed to be a beauuuuutiful late afternoon.

And it was.



And everyone else had the same idea too.

The line to get in went on for miles.



After about 20 minutes or so we finally did get in.



Ze place vas cvowded.




And though the line had deterred all our other little friends...Zameer and Noops live about a block away and arrived as soon as the pandemonium died down.

Soon everyone became new best friends and ate pretzels and drinked beers.






We LOVES the beer garden.



We also loves Kristen's cubicle-mate John.