You should have seen Kathleen’s face when, fifteen seconds after I said it, the guy the with musical zipper announced, “It’s Mozart!”

Rapping the opening bars of Eine kleine Nachtmusik convinced her.

I guess I had to have been there.

Armed with GooToDo.com, I have been tidying up many neglected corners of my life. None of them has embarrassed me as much as a small heap of programs, from six of last season’s concerts that I never got round to writing up. As I quite often can’t remember what I did two days ago, it’s no surprise that my musical recollections of these evenings were severely motheaten by the time I could no longer put off laying them to rest. There was nothing for it but to take the opportunity to poke fun at myself. That’s what, after all — when all else fails — I’m here for.

Like a lot of Upper East Siders who are members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I feel lucky to have such an amazing art collection at my doorstep. Every once in a while, though, it hits me, with a palooka punch, that I have an amazing art collection at my doorstep, one that I can walk into as often as I want to, at no additional charge; one that I’m familiar enough with that I can navigate through it without getting lost or wondering where the things that I like to look at are kept.

It isn’t Schadenfreude, exactly, but when I think that most visitors have to make the most of their time in the Museum, be it an entire day, before heading back to wherever — “wherever” being considerably farther away than a twenty-minute stroll — I’m humbled and elated at the same time. I’ve been told that I’m privileged since I was old enough to understand English, and exhorted to act worthily. But it becomes harder and harder to imagine going to the Museum as a duty.

I went on Friday morning, not because I was burning to see anything but because I had a bunch of errands on Madison Avenue, and because I like the Museum’s cafeteria. (I like all of the Museum’s eateries, but I especially appreciate the cafeteria, because it realizes the Platonic Idea of what we all had to put up with in school; as in heaven, the unpleasant bits have been swept away. The burgers and fries are tasty, not greasy, but still disreputable enough to relish.) I did have a few Museum-specific objectives. The Times had run a quiz of sorts, that morning, featuring animals in blown-up detail from various things in the Museum, and I wanted to see if I could find the greyhound — which I did, but not in the Robert Lehman collection, where I looked first, but in the Old Master galleries: St Dominic raising somebody from the dead, by Bartolomeo degli Erri. And then there was the question of the Rembrandtine mustache. A friend had written of seeing a man dressed in black who sported a “Rembrandtine mustache.” What might that be, I wondered. The answer was more elusive than degli Erri’s greyhound. The only mustache that looked “Rembrandtine” belonged to a face by Frans Hals.

I went to the Museum again this morning. This time, it was to make sure that Kathleen saw the three interesting shows currently on exhibit: Turner, pietre dure, and the great photography show, “Framing A Century.” The last was a big hit. Pietre dure didn’t do anything for Kathleen; although impressed by the technique of hardstone mosaic, she was not moved by any of the pieces. (But she did think that the lithothèque was cool [it truly is], and she liked the shells console.) She wasn’t in the mood for Turner, either. But she loved the photographs. She couldn’t get over how good the older prints look, even after a hundred and fifty years, and the rich intonation of their details. Looking at the photographs through Kathleen’s eyes, I couldn’t get over how good the prints look, either. And I noticed, for the first time, that Roger Fenton’s Roslin Chapel, South Porch (1856) — a picture I can’t get enough of — is not a small print.

Then we came home. We had had breakfast right before, and I made BLTs for lunch shortly after we got back. Kathleen smiled with the delight of feeling “virtuous: it’s early afternoon still and I’ve already done something important.”

If she could only go as often as I do, it wouldn’t seem so important. It might begin to feel as though we were living in a very large apartment.

Morning

¶ Dolce far Niente: Susan Dominus writes about the pleasures of temps perdu: At summer camp in Maine, she and her fellow campers could while away the hours between four and six in any way they chose. No longer.

(Have a great weekend, everyone!)

(more…)

Morning

¶ Research: Sarah Kershaw’s story about Mark Cellura, a retired Merrill Lynch executive, put a crimp in my morning. With the help of a genealogist, Mr Cellura made contact with the adoptive family of his twin brother, Michael, who died of AIDS in 1987.

In a slightly more cheerful piece, Janet Maslin writes about First Globals, the rising generation that probably can’t wait to see the last of the likes of me.

Noon

¶ Thought for Food: Commodities development specialist Peter Baker asks some apt questions about food production, hitherto unheeding if not quite heedless.

Night

¶ Boycott: Retards of the world, unite — lobby Congress! (more…)

Morning

¶ Fits: The interesting thing about Chris Irvine’s little story in the Telegraph is that it’s doubly true: the Chinese government will spy on Olympian cell-phone calls, and it will be furious that anybody accused it of doing so.

It’s a Remicade day — I’ll be to-ing and fro-ing from the Hospital for Special Surgery for my now quarterly infusion (down from six a year!). I won’t be getting much done on any other fronts, which is why I went to the movies last night and saw Brick Lane. Tune in tomorrow… Meanwhile, a great weekend to everyone! Hey! It’s August!

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When I was thinking about attending One Day University, Craig Wright’s lecture on Mozart was the big draw. You might think it perverse, but I was not out to learn more about the interesting life and ineffable work of the Austrian prodigy. Rather, I intended to use my own accumulated knowledge of the composer as a yardstick against which to measure what Professor Wright had to say to laymen. If I came away feeling that we “students” were being talked down to (however agreeably), I would know that ODU was not for me.

What I got instead was a new way of thinking about genius generally and Mozart’s genius in particular. I must make it clear at the outset that a lot of what Professor Wright had to say slipped into a mind that was prepared not only to hear it but to amplify it. Bach and Beethoven were not discussed — I don’t think that they were even mentioned — but I found myself contrasting their genius, as enlightened by Professor Wright’s template, with Mozart’s. Even before the lecture was over, I understood, as I have never understood before, why music-lovers who prize the “Three B’s” (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms) are either chilly about Mozart or convinced that it is Mozart who is chilly. (more…)

In twenty-three years of personal computing, I have never encountered a truly useful To-Do list facility. Every tool that I’ve picked up has quickly turned out to be ineffective for one reason or another, usually by failing to realize the dreams of hyperproductivity that automated To-Do lists by nature inspire. After all, if your To-do list can take care of itself, then why can’t it actually do the work that it outlines?

In twenty-three years &c — until today. Today, I read Chapter 5 of Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy , “Managing Todos.” Given my long experience with frustration, I wondered what the guru was going to come up with. When what he came up with turned out to be an online service that his outfit, Good Experience, Inc, provides for a small monthly fee, you may be sure that I blinked. In his opening pages, Mr Hurst is eloquent about the flimflammery of most “productivity solutions”:

Although we need hardware and software to work with bits, no technology company has the solution to bit overload. It’s far too rarely stated that the technology industry is not in the business of making people productive. It is only in the business of selling more technology. Granted, some companies make better tools than others, and users can be productive with some of today’s tools. But in the technology business, users’ productivity is secondary to profitability. No matter what a company claims, feature lists and upgrades are designed for the company’s success, not the users’. This isn’t a judgment against technology companies; to the contrary, they are a vital part of the economy and do the world a service by creating new and useful innovations. The point is merely that users should not look to the technology industry to deliver the solution to their overload. Doing so cedes control to companies that, whenever they have the choice, would rather have paying customers than productive customers.

([Gnash!] No wonder I was invariably disappointed.)

Now here was Mr Hurst, turning around and presenting himself as a “technology company” in search of paying customers! I blinked, as I say, but then I forged on. The faith that I had already placed in Mr Hurst’s advice had earned me, within an hour or so, a totally empty inbox, with all the email that I chose to save stashed in handy folders that I already had the wit to set up according to the way my mind works. By the time I read about Gootodo.com, I was fairly sure that the $18 investment (for six months) would not be a waste of money. The secret of Mr Hurst’s To-Do list lies in a blend of its simplicity and its interaction with email: to add a To-Do item that’s due next Wednesday, for example, you write an email addressed “wednesday@gootodo.com,” summarize the task in the subject line, and add any details in the body of the email. Done! (Assuming, of course, that you have set up a Gootodo.com account, and that you are writing from the email address that the service recognizes as yours — in case you have several [and who doesn’t?]. And don’t forget to hit “Send.”) You can work with the service from outside its interface. Pretty cool.

Mark Hurst has apparently been a computer person since childhood, and he has two degrees from MIT. More importantly, perhaps, he is a shrewd psychologist. He prescribes that computer users read personal mail first, not that they wait to get their work done before hearing from friends and family. The only people who will abuse this liberty at work probably don’t merit their jobs for other reasons. About To-Do lists, Mr Hurst’s eye is gimlet:

The truth is that many users just don’t want to do their work. Given a choice between completing a todo or spending several minutes deciding what color it should be, lots of people — especially techies, who love playing with software — would choose the latter. Color are fun, and don’t require much thought. Doing the actual work in the todo requires time and energy, risks railure, and might not be any fun. Users are best served by a tool that encourages the discipline of actually getting the work done, rather than endlessly tweaking the system.

Let’s hear a bit “GOTCHA!” for Mark Hurst! After all, instead of getting round to my first To-Do item — organizing my in-box — I’ve been merrily blogging away!

For a Tuesday, I had a big day. I got through all the important jobs — reviewing the Book Review, writing up the One Day University program for my second note on the subject, lunching alone at Café d’Al  — and most of the small ones as well. On top of all that, though, I took what I had read in Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy to heart, and purged the bulk of my email in my inbox.

It feels, shatteringly, like my own private Protestant Reformation. (But enough about Les Huguenots, which I’ve been watching in the furtherance of my understanding of Verdi’s immensely more important grand operas. The DVD of Joan Sutherland’s farewell performance at the Sydney Opera is a lot cheaper than the Decca CDs. It may be wildly off-topic to point out, in the middle of this discussion of computer hygiene, that Dame Joan drifts through Lotfi Mansouri’s staging as if she were Dame Edna’s older, dafter sister, but I write under the protection of the Geneva Convention’s Droit de la Parenthèse.) Piff Paff! No more nasty email!

Of course most of what I didn’t delete was simply transferred to folders that I set up on the spot. That’s okay with Mr Hurst. You may ask, what difference does it make where you stash your email? but I know better, or at least enough to commit to the Bit Literacy credo of the Daily Emptied Inbox. 

Tomorrow (or whenever), I’ll bone up on “todos.” No point in quibbling: the younger people are comfortable, for the time being, with this brutalist appropriation of the Spanish plural for “all.” Which, to them, means, “to-do lists.” If you’re going to hold out against “hopefully,” you really need to know how to pick your fights.

For two or three years, I’ve had a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done on my desk. Literally, right next to Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths. It would be difficult to say which book has impressed itself more palpably upon my daily life. It is true that I grasped Mr Allen’s “two-minute rule” right away (it’s recommended, without credit, by Mr Hurst), but the fate of King Pentheus has had a much greater impact upon my behavior both in public and at my sites. In other words, Getting Things Done has left my stables pretty much in their Augean originality.

Whereas one night alone with Mr Hurst was all it took for me to light virtual bonfires of the vanities — the vanities of thinking that I would ever progress in a leisurely way through the bilgy backup of my unclassified email. Not that the inbox is empty. I saved the headaches for tomorrow. I know that I wasn’t supposed to; I ought to have gotten rid of everything in one fell swoop. My consolation, which I hope is not fatal, is that I didn’t plan to do anything today.

Seriously, folks: Bit Literacy. May I live to hail the fifth edition!

Times Center, One Day U’s New York City venue. Couldn’t be nicer.

The typical One Day University Program, I gather, consists of four lectures, each about an hour long, separated by breaks and, between the second and third, a box lunch provided by ODU. Last Saturday’s program began at nine-thirty and ended at around four o’clock.

The Times Center,* with its rear wall of glass, graced by the stand of birch trees in the atrium just beyond, makes an ideal venue for a midday of insightful talk. To the illusion of being on the campus of a major university, ODU and the Center add distinctly uncollegiate comfort and convenience. Coffee and rolls on arrival; Times Center personnel to watch over the auditorium during breaks; stout notebooks designed for writing on laps — it would probably be inappropriate for a genuine university to be so thoughtful. Steven Schragis, who runs One Day U with John Galvin, is quite frank about the fact that ODU is a “fake university.” The “students” don’t do any work and they don’t earn any degrees. It will not be the worst thing in the world if this new institution, once it establishes itself, finds a new name, because the idea of a “university” is something of a red herring here, even if the professors are indeed gifted teachers from the best schools. I shall enlarge on that statement in this and succeeding notes.  

Saturday’s program was as follows:

• Music: The Remarkable Genius of Mozart/Craig Wright, Yale
• Law: Criminal Justice in America — A 250 Year History/Stephanos Bibas, Penn
• Art History: Lies, Propaganda, and Truth in Photography/Robin Kelsey, Harvard
• Psychology: Understanding America’s Depression Epidemic/Shelley Carson, Harvard

Now, because I wanted to see what One Day University itself was like, I didn’t let the familiarity of these topics persuade me to wait for another lineup. Rather, I made a virtue of that familiarity.

• I have thought about Mozart for most of my life, for the simple reason that his music has been a source of unending and astonishing beauty. (How lucky I’ve been to live after him!)
• In law school, I learned that the study of criminal justice in this country involves very little black-letter law, but concerns itself chiefly with Constitutionally-sanctioned procedures.
• As for clinical depression, I have first-hand (family-member) familiarity with its unimaginable desolation.

The only one of the four lectures that promised to break new mental ground was the third, and even there I would be bringing the thoughts inspired by Susan Sontag’s On Photography. In other words, “familiarity” was something of an understatement. If ODU’s professors could make any of this material fresh for me, I’d be mightily impressed.

Reader, they all did. I said this yesterday, and I’ll say it again: the more you know about the world, the more you’re going to get out of One Day U.

Next up: Craig Wright’s remarkable thoughts about genius — and about why Mozart’s genius was remarkable.

Times Center, One Day U’s New York City venue. Couldn’t be nicer.

Perhaps, in some dusty corner of your memory, there lurks the recollection of an institution, named — after the Lyceum, Aristotle’s school in Athens — that was popular in Nineteenth-Century America. The Lyceum was all about what we might be tempted to call “self-improvement,” except that Lyceum programs were more community-oriented. The idea, which I’d give anything to recapture for this country, was that by improving one’s own mind one improved the community’s.

In the wake of World War I, the Lyceum, like most betterment schemes, got swept into the dustbin. After World War II, knowledge was professionalized as never before — and, schizophrenically, popularized as never before, too, in the form of alluring television programs, such as Nova, that created the mirage of learning without pain. Contact between university professors and laymen was mediated, during this benighted period, by bursars.

When I signed up for One Day U a couple of months ago (well in advance, that is), I wondered where the experience of sitting through four lectures on significant topics would stand in relation both to the Lyceums and the Novas. Would it be lite & trite? Would I already know it all?

In its own little way, the prospect of attending One Day U was terrifying. It was very much like wondering how a first date would pan out. First dates? How about first days at school?

You can put me down among the kids who didn’t want to go home when the first day of school was over. I came away convinced that, the more you know about the world, the more you’re going to get out of One Day U. So, although I did, rather, “know it all,” the program was the very opposite of lite & trite.

More anon…

Morning

¶ Deck Chairs?: Something in Joshua Rosner’s tone, in “Goodbye capitalism,” his piece in the Financial Times,  makes me think of a cranky gent on one of the Titanic‘s lifeboats, complaining that passengers are no longer dressing for dinner.

Noon

¶ CrocEatDog: Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand giggles. All right, ten giggles. Okay, a chuckle.

Night

¶ Lawn: This internal-exile/vacation thing is working so well that, after I dealt with the Book Review, I sat outside on the balcony and read. And read. And read. And then I decided to watch a movie…. But you know that prayer that Jewish men are said to begin the day with? My version goes like this: “Thank God I don’t own a car.” If I’m being really thoughtful, I add, “or a lawn.”
(more…)

Mars attacks!

Morning

¶ AntErnauts: It looks fussy, with the capital ‘E’ and all, but it’s easy to say: anternauts. It’s my coinage to describe people who don’t know enough about the Internet to be able deal with it intelligently. Combine such ignorance with police power and watch out!

Librarian William Hallowell, sadly for him, knows a thing or two about the type. He was held for thirty hours, among other affronts, because police officers lacked the basic Internet competence to know that they had picked up the wrong man. Benjamin Weiser reports.

 Noon

¶ Cool: I just bought one of these. Now I wonder if I needed it.  

Night

¶ Patience: How did flounder evolve, with both eyes on one side of their head? Slowly but surely, that’s how.

(more…)

It’s not often that I embarrass myself here at The Daily Blague. In fact, I can’t think of a precedent for the mortification that hit me a few minutes ago, when I discovered that I’d posted what I’d thought was only a draft. The squabble that Kathleen and I had about our spur-of-the-moment tour of Bronxville* last night wasn’t the main story, but it’s all that I wrote about.

To write the rest, I would have to sleep on the complicated feelings of visiting the place where I grew up. It is as familiar to me now (I discovered last night, even in the dark) as it was when I lived there, over forty years ago, but like the clubs that my parents belonged to it is very much a place that would never admit me on my own. I wouldn’t want to live there — I can say that with bottomless sincerity — but I feel that it behooves me to point out that the feeling of being an alien in Bronxville long preceded that of feeling that Bronxville was alien.  

From the draft, which I’ve deleted all on my own.

We were in a Broadway state when we got home, each ready to accuse the other of total worthlessness. Looking back, I think that it’s kind of neat that we can do that. But not really. I hated feeling so estranged. Kathleen kept saying, “I just wanted to get home,” but it couldn’t have been just that. Could it? You watch: tomorrow, I’ll be asked to take down this entry.

I’m too used, I think, to feeling estranged, too ready to think that I’ve been rejected. I can thank a Holy Square Mile of smugness for that.  

When we talked over last night’s disturbance, apologising for being overtired and a little bit drunk, respectively, I told Kathleen — and myself — that growing up in a very privileged suburb was the opposite of reassuring precisely because I believed its not-so-implicit message that the rest of the world was a rougher, more difficult place. As someone who knew that he was going to wind up out there in the rest of the world, I was acutely aware of lacking easy access to the skills that I would need, once I’d been ejected from the protected pod that posed, and still poses, as a charming old village.

So I spent my entire youth feeling guilty about not pursuing the hard access option. Pretty silly when you think about it. But in this country of old men, no alternatives.

* Don’t you love long footnotes? This is going to be one.

We were in Scarsdale for a graduation party. We’d decided on the regal mode of transportation: what some people in New York now call a “black car.” The cars — Lincolns, for the most part, but with the odd Lexus — are, indeed all black. We use them very sparingly, which only enhances the pleasure when we allow it. We could have taken a train to Scarsdale and then gotten a taxi, and the train is not unpleasant. But we could justify the rather monumental expense of a car service by its very rarity: the last time we hired a car on such terms, it was to take us to the very same Scarsdale address, for a Christmas party, and that time we had the car wait, well over an hour. Last night’s arrangements were far less luxurious, which is why Kathleen was pooped when the car to take us back to town finally showed up. Had the driver pointed his black car in the normal direction, toward the Sprain Brook Parkway, I probably wouldn’t have had the idea that came to me as we drove down, instead, Central Avenue — a boulevard worthy of Dante. As we inched along from light to light, it occurred me that, as we were already spending a ton of money, it wouldn’t add much to the cost to run through the neighboring village where I grew up. If Kathleen and I had words about this unilateral frolic & detour later on, it was because she had no way of knowing that I wasn’t really taking us that much out of the straight-arrow route home.We turned off Central Avenue onto Palmer Road, heading east. It was all so familiar that I had a hard time paying attention. Presently we passed my maternal grandfather’s last address (The Winchester), the building that I spend my early childhood in (The Wellington), and, crossing the Bronx river into Bronxville proper and dipping under the tracks and back up onto Pondfield Road, my paternal grandparents’ last address (The Towers). All of this apartment living in a suburb may seem surprising, and I expect that it’s peculiar to the New York Metropolitan Area, but in point of fact there are lots of people who want to live in the “country” without actually keeping up a house.We drove on down Ponfield Road, past the Post Office, until we came to Four Corners, the intersection with Midland Avenue that is garnished by (moving clockwise from the northeast corner) the Library, the Town Hall, the Dutch Reformed Church — in my day, no less a civic institution than the other three buildings — and Bronxville School (K-12, 650 students in the Sixties). We turned left at Midland and then sloped up the hill at Masterson Road. It was on this bit of hill that I understood, in the course of many private drives, the nature of automatic transmission. At Elm Rock Road, we turned up into the steep hill at the top of which our Gallagher cousins (the Willkie, Farr Gallagers) occupied their gloomily wainscoted Tudor manse. It was dark, but I could miss the elm trees that made the street a cathedral until Dutch Elm took them out. At the end of the road — Route 22, the White Plains Post Road — we jagged right and then left, onto Paddington Circle, where, at Number Four, I spent my teens.Paddington is a cul de sac, so we drove to the end, turned round, and then stopped in front of my old house, which was entirely dark. Too dark, if you ask me: abandoned. It had never struck me as a big house, because it wasn’t meant to look like a big house, but in the night light it looked like a cottage that had been bloated by an airhose. An addition, with a little dormer window, had been added over the den, next to my sister’s bedroom. The spruce tree that my parents planted and lighted up every Christmas had grown to positively ridiculous, Jack-and-the-beanstalk proportions.

Shown here: no more than a paltry simulacrum of the intense brilliance that blasted down, more light than heat, onto the terrace at the Huntington on Thursday morning.

We’re home. We reached the apartment at about twenty of eight. Our flight was delayed at LAX for an hour due to a problem with one of the engines that may have required no more than a system reboot. I shrug it off now, but not knowing how long we’d be detained, or even if &c &c, was close to unbearable. I just about managed to bear it.

Sometime after 4 AM, EST, with more than two hours to go, I looked round and saw that mine was the only light on. Everyone else was either asleep or considerate.

Morning

¶ Blot: Any hope that, having attained the age of reason (ie sixty), I might have grown up to be a steady, sensible man, finally, was shattered yesterday when I almost landed George and myself in the LA clink, or at least loaded us both with $200 fines.

¶ Hallelujah: While we were at breakfast, the hotel did a bit of recomputing…

Noon

¶ Unfunny: It’s Friday, but I’m not going to the movies today. What would I have seen if I’d stayed home? Not these turkeys.

Night

¶ Homebound: Time to head down to LAX and eastward. Home for breakfast! More anon…

(more…)

Morning

¶ Arrivés: We’re here. Here in Santa Monica, that is; far from the Navy Terrace, from which I took the snap of the Bethesda Fountain the other day. Pictures to follow, probably much later today, if and when I can turn on the camera. Everything was “much later,” yesterday, and it will take a while to catch up.

(more…)

Morning 

¶ Oregano: Having seen Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class when it came out, in 1973, and liked it very much, I remembered two things about the film very clearly: the assignation that Steve Blackburn (George Segal) and Vicki Allessio (Glenda Jackson) achieve during a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh, a symphony that ever since has trailed a rather unwonted allure. The other was “oreGAHno.”

Noon

¶ Apron: There’s a movie, don’t you think, in Dan Barry’s story about the West Virginia Mason who was expelled because he advocated reforms that would put an end to archaic discriminatory practices.

¶ Gidget: George Snyder — whom I hope to spend Thursday with, in Los Angeles — sent me a link to Peter Lunenfeld’s delightfully polymathic look at Gidget, in The Believer. Who knew she was Jewish?

Night

¶ Tornado: If you haven’t seen the most amazing close-up of a tornado ever, be sure to check out Lori Mehmen‘s ticket to the photographers’ hall of fame. (via JMG)
(more…)

For reasons too complicated for explanation on a Saturday night, I found myself in Brooklyn this evening.

We all take incompetent photographs from time to time, but tonight I broke the records. Miffed that I couldn’t get hold of Kathleen on the phone, even more upset that I’d never, in the downpour, get a cab back to Manhattan, and more than a little jellied by two bottles of Chianti, I was not in the best shape to take pictures of the Pride parade that materialized this evening outside Sette, a very good restaurant on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, just as I was leaving.

These pictures do, however, convey, at least to my memory, a sense of the tremendous fun that everyone was having in the downpour.

I only just noticed, but this is a not-bad picture of my cousin, Bill. Bill lives in New Hampshire. The photograph completely fails to capture his delight at having dinner in the big city — and I must say that Park Slope more than qualified this evening. It was much bigger over there than it was in good old Yorkville when I finally got home, damp as a steam room.

Then the fun was over. As it happened, a young man in the subway station was just about to give me a reason to live. He needed to get to Grand Central, and I was able to say, “follow me.” And he did! I, of course, stayed on the train all the way to 86th Street.

A Pride parade in Park Slope! The world has turned a pretty turn since I lived out there!

Morning

¶ Santa: After Top Girls at the Biltmore Theatre last night, we headed over to Restaurant Row for an after-theatre dinner at Le Rivage, only to find that they were closing.

Noon

¶ Walkabout: If I have ever walked across Central Park to do something on the West Side and then walked back through the Park on my way home, I’ve forgotten about it. Today’s back-and-forth felt like a first.

(more…)