Wednesday was Chinese New Year. I went to Chinatown with a couple of friends to watch the lion dancers, hear the drums, see all the little kids dressed up in traditional two-piece silk suits and little round hats. Street merchants had hanging paper lamps and banners and a new compressed-air confetti-shooter. It's a 2-foot tube and when you twist it, it blasts curls of multi-colored tissue paper twenty feet into the air; they float slowly down and it's very lovely against the blue sky. Various karate school and cultural groups were out with their big drums and lion costumes, chasing the evil spirits away, including a group whose lion (made up of two people, one the head and one the body) danced into the police station to scare the evil spirits out. Confetti and red fire-cracker wrapping paper covered the streets an inch or two deep. Very swell. On the way uptown, I walked through the east village and discovered some people still wearing bright costumes and gold, green and purple beads, drinking coffee on a stoop, trying to recover from a Mardi Gras party the night before. They seemed to fit right in, to me.