i'm sorry to disappoint, but no cloying mother's day post here. i have the rest of the year to do that.
instead, here's one about a big motherhood statement. that if you live and love in new york city. and that is, few other cities, if there are at all, would let you live like my city.
and the weekends here, they just kill.
yesterday, free admission day to brooklyn museum. a friend and i went again for the jean-michel basquiat retrospective. and although this is our second visit, because we, against our latent snooty ways, followed the walking tour led by another witty museum docent, it felt like opening night again.
and the crowd, the hippest there was. honies sporting peacock plume earings. hepcats wearing fedoras and distressed jeans. this in a museum, in a borough museum. it felt like being lost in a meat packing district party.
from there, we felt a night of jazz would be great palate cleanser. and so we went back to midtown to this landmark club named after charlie "yardbird" parker.
a jazz trio, who bills itself a quartet, was doing pop takes on classics. in the middle of a joint with riffs from this ubiquitous incidental music to mendelssohn's a midsummer night's dream (better known as the wedding march), a cabaret chanteuse came out and did a take of an impossible to sing stephen sondheim's song from company. you know, the one where the bride had cold feet and in between shooing off guests at her wedding, had to deftly navigate between hysteria and the impossible tempo?
then while smoking at the curbside outside the bar, i heard these two ladies talking about the woman who sent cable news channels into a frenzy the other week when she disappeared a few days before her wedding only to turn up in new mexico confessing to, what else, cold feet.
and they were pointing out the similarities between this woman and a mid-19th century fictional character, jane eyre. a charlotte bronte fictional creation, jane stood up her fiance at the altar after learning of a not so sanguine revelation then ran away without a penny and threw herself at the mercy of strangers.
literature and tabloid at the curbside. jazz and baroque in a cabaret. graffiti and high art in a hipster museum. nothing like these, if i remember right, my mama could afford me in her care.
sure, there's the garbage, and the noise, and the annoying people. but still. new york! new york!
in one of the last episodes of sex and city, the workaholic miranda, after finally buying a house in the faraway borough of brooklyn, rues about leaving la vida nueva york. then, after exulting about the luxurious space she now owns in the borough, she was reminded of the series of sordid apartments she had in manhattan.
"why do i think living in manhattan is so fantastic?" miranda asked. then gorgeous carrie, without batting an eyelash, responded, "because it is."