New York City Snaps --  A Birthday Treat                                      May 11, 2001

For my birthday this year, Witta organized an overnight trip to New York City.  Here are some snapshots:

Emerging from Penn Station and passing three young cops on bikes in front of Madison Square Garden.  Then watching with amused satisfaction as a bicyclist runs the red light, weaves through crossing pedestrians, and is instantly pursued by one of the cops, who grins at his buddies over his shoulder as he peels off.

Checking out the menu at a crowded Madison Avenue lunch spot and noting that, although it had a fancier Italian name, spaghetti was $28.  This just down the block from a “Chocolat” shop with $45 candy bars tantalizing us from the window.

Amidst the mixed-media jumble on buildings visible from our hotel room, a bright red Ann Robinson glaring from a video billboard and reminding me that I am “the weakest link.”

Theater district eavesdropping on lunch and dinner episodes of “Gays of Our Lives” at adjoining tables.

Seeing blurred images of ourselves over the bar (captured by security cameras when we passed through the revolving door) at The Brasserie, where teenagers, Witta and boyfriend/manager’s son Richie King, were treated like royalty in the good old days.

Leaving the hotel and noticing a news reporter at the next corner.  Turns out three people had been killed in a drug-related shooting in a deli across the street.

Unrelated other "shootings": a late night film crew following a cab with a shiny Mylar balloon trailing out the back window; brightly-dressed extras for the next Stuart Little film lining up on Central Park benches, quietly enjoying the spring weather.

Drifting back to the hotel at pumpkin time through a suddenly-materialized army of  Jamaican peddlers with Santa Claus sacks of Rolexes and who-knows-what-else as they kept one eye out for customers and the other for police.

Crossing paths in Central Park with a gaggle of chic, twenty-something young women each with an obviously unrelated 5-6 year old kid of differing flavors.  Rent-a-kids?  The latest in aerobics?  Mommies in training?????

Noticing that Manhattan is not totally flat!  Central Park is hilly and there is a definite slope to Madison Avenue.

Two black guys in scruffy tee shirts and jeans chatting in the two-hour line snaking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the soon-to-end Vermeer exhibit.

Just being on the streets and seeing places whose names have become a part of our culture:  Forty-Second Street, Broadway, Madison Avenue, Times Square, 2nd Avenue, Madison Square Garden, Carnegie Hall, 5^th Avenue, Central Park, Wall Street.