Still, It's Friday Night.

What do you call the night?

It's not what hour it is that matters. The night is what ever you came out on, not what you go home to.

I overheard a 2 a.m. discussion of this and, when asked, that was my opinion. The original two debaters were impaired enough to consider it wisdom, or, at any rate, to consider it - and with more solemnity than it deserved.

Still, it's Friday night to me when it's two on Saturday morning by clock and calendar.

It's still Friday night because you have to watch your self walking by O'Cal's at a quarter or so to Last Call. An unguided and quite blind young lady may lurch forth from the doorway. Her perhaps pretty face may come within an inch or two of yours and, hair obscured, you may never get a good enough look at her to tell for sure.

"Y'godda come right, sweetie! Hang right! Hang to yer right!" her girl friend will tell her, reaching out to turn her round toward Meigs.

They'll go off like that with Girlfriend wrestling to get her arm under her charge's shoulders and Girlfriend's boyfriend, once he has had a drag in the open air, grabbing hold of the Blind Girl's nape with his free hand to help hold her up.

"Walk! Y're gona have to pretend like y're walking!" And she will, too - if flat of foot and puppet fashion.

It may be January with snow on the ground and ice in the air but, still, it's Friday night and the cops pull a cruiser across the two south lanes of the Avenue at Meigs in the fashion of last summer and cruisers park, too, at various favored gathering spots. They aren't as many and they aren't all that pro-active - leaving the cold to limit how long the kids who pull into the Exxon to climb out of their rides and "'Ey, yo!" one another congregate there.

It's January, by the calendar, and you're not long out on the street before your feet ache from contact with the iron pavement and your fingers ache in your best leather gloves. Still, dude, its Friday night and latter day masses are huddled together in line along side the front door down at Gitsis waiting to get inside and GarbagePlate. When the Line Up gets a little boisterous and RPD pull up a blue and white or two to parallel park with their overheads slow flashing, somehow, you still not ready to go in and call it a night.

It's still Friday night.

And twenty-four hours from now, when we do all this again, it'll still be Saturday night - what ever it maybe by clock and calendar.