Around and About in NYC

Trip Start Sep 15, 2008
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14
Trip End Oct 06, 2008


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Flag of United States  , New York,
Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Day 2, and we're back at Lucerne Hotel on the upper West Side, for the third time in 15 months. Most welcoming after the 5-hr flight from Oakland and a tediously long wait for a cab at JFK. When we finally landed a beat-up cab with a sullen driver who told us, before we'd left the curb, that he wanted to be paid in cash AND with a tip.  By midnight,  we were wandering around Broadway  looking for a diner and a bowl of soup. We encountered one outraged NYr in business suit, as  harassed as we were, declaiming that there was "no place to get a goddamn cup of coffee on Broadway anymore."  (He meant the street, not the theater!)
 
My seatmate on JetBlue was from LonG Island (yes, she pronounced that "g"), three towns away from Merrick (which I managed to dredge that up, thank you, Wendy).  She knew almost nothing about Manhattan, she said, but her husband did because he's a mailman who drives a truck in Manhattan every day.  She's a dental assistant who had been to Napa to attend a cousin's wedding, which was nice, but they do not know how to do a New York wedding in California!  Not enough food!   I found her utterly fascinating--kind and down-to-earth--and had to hold myself back from asking her how she felt about Sarah Palin.  She had a capacious pale pink down jacket with "San Francisco" embroidered on it, a necessity because she had found SF "freezing."

Today, we walked across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum, where we saw a vast show of JW Turner paintings, with many imported from the Tate Britain, so we won't see them THERE.  Then we walked to to the church on Park Avenue (at 63rd) where my parents were married after my mother managed to get a visa and fly to New York in 1947.  The church was dark and full of carved wood; there were a few intricate but not very interesting stained glass windows.  Mostly it was fascinating because of the gaggle of nannies waiting in the foyer. Why? I thought.  Is there perhaps an AA meeting here for nannies (God knows I'd need one if I were a nanny)?  But no.    The church rents out rooms to a school, and while we were there, a flurry of kindergartners appeared, the girls in dull gray/brown/sky blue plaid jumpers, the boys in gray corduory bermudas and pale blue polo shirts.  One of whom was named Maxmillian (as in "Get over here, Maximillian!" shouted by one of the few mothers).

We leave for "South Pacific"  in about an hour and a half, which is playing at the Vivian Beaumont on Lincoln Center.  I can hardly contain myself.
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