New York, New York

A couple of weeks ago, Mum and I spent a few days in New York. We flew in on a Thursday, landing in the early evening and greeted by fairly heavy rain and wind. After checking in to a boutique hotel on the upper East side, we walked to a nearby restaurant, one of several recommended by the hotel. Il Vagabondo is a little Italian joint, nestled just below street level in a former bocce alley. The bar, kitchen and coat check are at the front, and a narrow hallway leads to a small dining area running the length of a bocce alley, still intact and available to play on. The long, narrow dining arrangement called to mind the dining car on a train; not made for large groups, but quite cosy for two people. I ate delicious, hand-made agnoletti with butternut pumpkin (or squash, as they call it), sage, garlic and burnt butter. Yummy.


On the Friday we took ourselves off to the Guggenheim museum. Their current special exhibition is called Chaos and Classicism, and focuses on art produced between the First and Second World Wars. The (mostly) paintings on display include early works by Picasso, and are a mix of muscled bravado and idealised beauty. The human body is much on display, and the images are clean, quiet and orderly, as if artists wanted to return to a sense of calm and hope after the shock of the Great War (not knowing, of course, the world was headed for another within a generation). One of the most beautiful pieces was a golden sculpture of a woman’s head - the artist’s wife (or mistress, you know these artists). It is goddess-like and elegant in its simplicity. Check it out:

Head in Brass

After the Guggenheim, we took a stroll through Central Park to the West side, and headed south to catch up with an Aussie friend of mine who is now living in New York and pursuing a stand-up career. We feasted on bagels and then, having merrily chatted for an hour or so, suddenly realised we were going to be late for Memphis, the Tony Award-winning musical we had booked to see.

Which reminds me: when lining up at the Shubert Theatre box office to purchase our tickets that morning, we found ourselves an involuntary audience to quite a performance. The woman at the front of the line - hereafter known as the Obnoxious Brit - was pleading her case for free tickets for that evening’s show. She described the sad tale of the eight people she was traveling with “all the way from the south of France” who had bought tickets to the previous night’s show through an agent, only to have the tickets delivered to their hotel after the performance had begun. OB had got on the phone to the theatre straight away and was told to come to the box office first thing in the morning where, they promised, she’d be taken care of. After hearing her repeat her story countless times, three things were clear: (1) she had probably annoyed the person on the phone sufficiently (not getting the answer she wanted) until that person got rid of her by handballing her onto the box office; (2) she wanted to be given replacement tickets free of charge, although she didn’t exactly say those words; and (3) the theatre was not going to give them to her. I’ve got to give her props for trying, she threw it all out there, pled her case and was very persistent. But there comes a time when one must recognise that one has done all one can and it is time to stop. I don’t know when she reached that point. Perhaps as she was escorted off the premises by security.
That night, the theatre was packed to the rafters (which was pretty much where we were sitting) and I half expected to see OB there with her entourage, bullying her way into sitting in the aisles if necessary (something she offered to do during her box office performance). The show was terrific; telling the story of black music’s emergence into white popular culture through radio and television, it had great songs, choreography and dancing, performed at breakneck speed with joy and verve.

On Saturday we slept in and then headed to Greenwich Village. It was a lovely, sunny day, though windy. We strolled along Bleeker Street, lined up at Magnolia Bakery for some yummy delicious cupcakes, and had a late lunch at a funky fish café called Choptank. That night we saw another show, Time Stands Still, written by David Marguilies and starring the wonderful Laura Linney, the urbane Eric Bogosian, and the pixie-like Christina Ricci. Beautifully written and performed, it’s about two adrenalin-junkie war correspondents and what happens to their relationship after one nearly dies when a car bomb goes off, yet can’t wait to go back, while the other decides he has had enough and is ready for a “comfortable” life. Fabulous.

On Sunday we took the subway all the way to the southern tip of Manhattan to board a helicopter. After more than an hour of waiting in various lines, we got our 15 minute ride around the Statue of Liberty (aka “The Lady”), up the Hudson River and back again. I had been hoping the ride would take us right over the city, but I guess there are laws about that, so we stuck to the waterways. Nonetheless, it was rather exciting to be perilously airborne (yet feeling quite safe) and we got a good view of Manhattan in all its high-rise, metropolitan glory; Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Ground Zero, Madison Square Garden, Central Park. We also got a birds-eye view of Hoboken, New Jersey and Brooklyn. By the time we got back to the hotel we barely had time to grab something to eat before the airport shuttle arrived to whisk us back to Newark. This journey introduced us to the second most obnoxious person in New York. The shuttle bus driver greeted us by yelling at us for making a double booking (we didn’t) and slammed the doors of the bus in our faces before we had a chance to load in our suitcases. He then proceeded to lean on his horn every few seconds, as apparently he was in a hurry and nobody in New York was moving fast enough for him. I was disinclined to tip him, but Mum’s a softie.