caption invited

Here's a leftover from this year's Folsom Street East festival. Click to engorge. Supply the appropriate caption





Or, if you prefer, leftover#2:

Bravo David!!!

Our very own dear David has written an absolutely brilliant open letter to a New York Assemblyman

The Age of Pride

We are always just a little bit in training for an event that we both love and hate, and one that is scheduled for our benefit on a weeknight so that we will not be forced to choose between it and Gay Pride Weekend in New York City: C’s annual family three mile road race. Organized by a triathlete older brother, the race circles a small pristine lake in Connecticut as shards of twilight through the woods keep the still water to our left and the horse flies urge us on.

Every year, some of us get older and swear we will never run it again, but we do. New youngsters whose parentage and familial relations are clarified for us seem to appear mysteriously each year to add to the crowded starting line. Seems like each one of them was born just yesterday.

C’s mother holds the stopwatch. The organizing brother comes in first. C is a close second. A nephew (cousin? Boyfriend of a cousin?) is third, and I am robbed of fourth place by C’s sister who tracks me throughout the course, and in a final burst of speed, passes me. I finish fifth with a respectable time of twenty-four minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Of course, I could have pushed myself, but being retired has made me less driven and more apt to gaze at the poetic post-war shabby-chic cottage carpentry that surrounds this lake.

Why can’t C’s family celebrate their reunions as does mine, with booze, cigarettes and hurtful arguments that are rehashed for decades?

We drive into the city too weary to attend any of the Thursday night pre-Pride events.

On Friday, the chemistry of the city has obviously changed. Responding to some systemic histamine-reactive cue, its coloration and behavior brightens, and we correctly diagnose the “everybody is now openly gay” syndrome that annually overtakes Manhattan. Queer boys appear in festive couplings and stylish packs even in our own relentlessly hetero Upper West Side neighborhood.

On the subway that evening, we watch the crowd’s lack of reaction to a handsome and very young couple of twinks who were not just seated next to each other but whose intertwined limbs made a public display of their fresh romantic attachment in a bold way that C and I would never have dared twenty-three years ago. The occupants of that subway car cut across every racial, economic, geographic, cultural and age demographic you would imagine, with not one giving them a disparaging glance. Am I wrong to suspect that in the true heart of this country there is no real denial for gay marriage or military service, and that our politicians ought to stop riding those outmoded and sputtering vehicles to re-election?

On Saturday, we accompany the indomitable Joe on a subway jaunt out to Coney Island to view the 25th annual Mermaid Parade. This colorful and sexy spectacle had a nervous undercurrent fueled by media reports of a developer, THOR Equities, controlling a good portion of the amusement park on the boardwalk and wishing its demolition and replacement with luxury housing and modern entertainments. Here we see a staging of the conflict in front of the nostalgic and original Nathan’s Delicatessan.



Later that evening, we accompany Joe to a party at the West Village home of the organizers of last week’s “Folsom Street East”. They have the sort of private terrace, surrounded by the tall brick walls of adjacent buildings, that one dreams about. In addition to the usual garden furniture, a large antique black leather and iron pummel horse was given prominent placement. Leaning against its supple grain and fluid with two of the bartender’s excellent frozen margaritas, I felt ready for the gymnastics that were reportedly being held in one sheltered corner behind some military camouflage netting. Instead, I remained pleasantly locked in conversation with C and the very same two young men we had watched on the subway the night before! Although they (like us) are not Folsomish, it turns out that they are Ian and Judah who live next door and had received a neighborly invitation from our hosts. They claim also to have recognized us from that subway ride (“two old leering coots?” I ask, to which they protest convincingly and keep me from sinking into my Maurice Chevalier persona.)

While on the subject of age, I suggest you read this man and this man. One speaks with wisdom and insight, having successfully ridden his wave to the shore. The other complains obsessively from that torturous place of longing for readmittance to a club that now belongs to others and under the velvet rope of which he tries to sneak. (Truth to tell, I think he is wiser about the issue than he likes to pretend.)

Also at this party is a well-known Provincetown photo-realist painter whose historic home at the shady bend of Commercial Street you would know if only for its ghostly bust of Shakespeare placed in an upper window and wistfully witnessing the round-the-clock street life. While we lived there, I received several different apocryphal accounts of how that handsome and amiable young artist came to be the owner of that prestigious property, never bothering to ask him for a photo-realist account of his fortunate past.

Later that night, we attend a recurrent event called “Double Headed Disco”, at Nowhere Bar, on 14th Street, intending to spend a while with bj and the bf, but they had gone home at a more sensible hour, as did relatively we.

On Sunday, following the stone-inscribed plan of the intrepid Joe, and wearing a t shirt he had graciously made for me with a newly devised “Farmboyz” logo, we present ourselves at the southeast corner of Gay and Christopher Streets in the full sun light of an intersection that Joe had remembered as benevolently shaded. Not to worry, for we are in wonderful company. David, with his ipod, convinces me that I may have been wrong about the music of “Spring Awakening”. The engaging Gavin, from upstate and here to meet some of the folks he regularly reads and chats with, whose brilliance of silver hair and periwinkle eyes justify the sun. The delightful Philadelphian Thruple who are in tow with Himself wearing his own “Joe.My.God." t shirt. And, a couple about whom Joe and I had spoken just the other night, deciding that if there was anyone we needed to meet immediately it would have to be Crixi Van Cheek and his partner Dick Zinya. (Soon after meeting them, I accidently fell into an opportunity to use a phrase I have been savoring of late: "I shit you not" said with a southern accent as if you were just released from a South Carolina prison and telling a story at a counter of the Piggly Wiggly. The handsome Crixi and Dick's eyebrows shot up at the sound of it, and I did not get a chance to enquadrate its usage. Anyway, painful it was to be in such delightful company but distracted by the spectacle. I can only hope that Gavin, Crixi, his Dick and the Thruple ( a Motown group?) will be back soon on some less hectic weekend. Guys, it’s not that long a trip for any of you.



Separated from them by the pressing mob, we can only wave to Chris, Stash, and Neil/Brice, while from several floors overhead, Jordan Baker Tommy angelically descends carrying two Vodka tonics with lime which are passed by helpful intervening strangers into our grateful hands.

As always, this parade is an appropriately sloppy affair like a tippling old aunt that one loves even with its logistic limp and growing dust upon its sequined emotions. We will always visit her, and hope she will never be placed in a home. Here she is:

(Don't miss the fierce baton twirler in this video. I know more about baton twirling than I've ever disclosed herein. In competition, this twirler would lose points for stopping the baton before and after the throw, but would get full points for not having to move a foot in order to make the catch, and also for the height of the throw. The hand gestures and head toss? Priceless.)





Clickable:





Clickable:






Clickable:


Clickable:



After the briefest of disco naps, we make our way down to Pier 54 and jump into a shirtless sea of gorgeous manly male gorgeousness. Just when you think that this annual event could never grow any larger or more boisterous, you are reminded that we are all living longer these days, and that the factory producing new gay men has not, unlike those of some industry sectors, gone offshore or slowed down.

There is something distinctly American about the sheer pushy Carl Sandburgian muscularity of the “Pier Dance” that sets it apart from all the other cattle-called circuit parties. Go to it without care about what will soon be unworn from the waist up, and expect to drink much cheap beer from blue aluminum. From the moment you set foot upon this pier, you are made a sequential friend of the thousands of men who slide against you in the crowd, sharing startlingly intimate contact that is of a second’s endurance garnished with a snippet of word before you are swept away.

(Note: in 2007, vintage rosary beads are the jewelry of choice, and every third person is named Christopher.)

Here, in one of the dozens of lines for the phalanxes of portable toilets, we join some extremely young and happy guys in an impromptu delivery of Styx’s song “Babe”, a hit many years before these boys were born, and yet, they knew every word. I should not be surprised. When I was their age, I knew all of Cole Porter by heart, and not because I was told to learn it. I simply went to the public library where that Brendan Gill bio with the complete lyrics found me. True story. I shit you not.



The sun set. There were fireworks to “All You Need is Love” which we sang with Joe, at peace in the revelry of which I insist will now be an unbreakable tradition, even through our advanced years. Let the aluminum of our future walkers match the beer cans that roll and crunch underfoot.


On our way out, I use the flash to record an unusual tattoo.



A friend of its owner says, “Dave! Show him the rest of it.” And he does.



We repair to TheEagle where we are wrung dry of any last drop of hydration, and we take off the rest of Monday to recover.

Martha Stewart, I'm available.

All those little scraps of paper that men leave behind. The ones that say "Call me next time you're in town". At home, you empty your pockets, and think to yourself "He was fun. Gonna save his number." Years go by. You never call the guy. One day you come across the scrap of paper and you can't recall the man who gave it to you. (This sometimes happens a week later.) You say to your partner. "Who's this? Luis? From Inwood?" Neither of you has any recollection. A year or two later you meet the guy again and none of you recalls the first meeting, but now you have two scraps of paper from the same guy...

I've never been able to toss these out. Instead, I save them in a box labeled "Ephemora", referring to either those scraps of paper or to their authors.

Several years back, I found a wooden footstool that someone had put out with the trash. I took off the old uphostery and stuffing, exposing the wooden frame work. I made a new cushion for it, refinished the feet and added some knobs. What to do about the bare sides?

Why not decoupage them with those little scraps of paper! I selected some of my favorites (truth to tell, we have enough to cover a fridge) and set to work with the appropriate paste easily acquired at any art supply store. Once the surface had dried, I protected it with two coats of urethane tinted slightly to diminish the impact of the information and also to pick up the color of the new upholstery.

Here is what experience teaches you: some ball point ink is fugitive, meaning that it will fade to invisible with exposure to sunlight. In order to preserve the writing on your decoupaged bits, apply a fixative UV light-repellant spray before you apply the urethane. These sprays are also easy to find in art supply stores. In our case, since some of the scraps are now blank, we will simply return to the Ephemora Box, select new ones, and apply a new layer over the old wherever needed.

PS: I've doctored the photo a bit to protect the guilty even if you click to magnify it, but I should think it a source of pride to find one's name among a pantheon of this nature, and to know that one's information now supports the honorable feet of our mothers when they visit.

video in the previous post

I've reset the Youtube video in the previous post to "public". I'm not sure if Youtube will approve of this. I can't find their policy. No one is having sex in the video. The guy is not exposing anything except his butt. He is attending a public street fair. You can see as much on public beaches. There were police present. All the same, I'm guessing someone will complain.

A BeautiFolsom Sunday Afternoon

We attended the eleventh annual Folsom Street East Fair on 28th St. in New York City yesterday afternoon. An efficient breeze mitigated what I recall most vividly from previous editions of this event: profuse sweat mixed with sunblock, jostled beer, cigar smoke, leather and metal gear and skin stretched over every imaginable human shape. Ten thousand attended. (Some of the following images will be magnified via your click)





To be sure, this is an event of high silliness focused incongruously on the celebration in full sunlight of a variety of fetishes commonly practiced in darkened rooms by the unsmiling inflictors or receptors of pain, domination or degradation. Yet, there’s much fun to be had here, especially among folks like us who are not into this vein but can appreciate a good show of kink and a chance to toss back a few with our buddies, and rub shirtless shoulders with some of New York’s hottest and friendliest regulars.

Also, I suspect that everyone in attendance, including men like us who are just “tourists” of this underworld, end the day reminded that your mailman, your minister, your plumber, grandmother, butcher or baker, and yourselves, all harbor some version of a lace-trimmed black leather jockstrap under our public personae, and that this reality ought to be classified as whimsical rather than worrisome.

Among the bloggers in attendance were Joe, Mark, Aaron, David, Tom, Glenn, Chris, bj, Vasco, Rey, Scott, Paul, Foxy and Robocub. (Sure I forgot some.)

The words most often said and most often overheard were “See that guy in the cap? I did him. Years ago.” Yes, indeed, the degrees of sexual separation in this huge crowd could easily be counted on less than the greasy fingers of one hand.

Here are Superdaddy Mark and Joe:


Here are C, Vasco and Joe:


And again:


Tommy, as always, looks top-ten hot in his leather, but “raunch” is out of his reach. No matter what he wears or in what shadowy circumstances we encounter him, he looks as if he is the committee chair for a garden party fund-raiser at the Met (C is in his favorite battered jeans and vintage Montreal T from a shop called Parachute):


Admit it. You visit his blog, and not because you like Bjork (He and the BF, who prefers to be unpixelated, were celebrating their second anniversary):


Here’s an uncomfortable looking ensemble that could cause tetanus or at least a rash:


The good ladies of the Hepatitis screening booth seemed nonplused by his “prime ass”, but you can hear the chair screaming:


Now that I know what “yellow” is code for, I did not introduce myself to these two buxom Bobsie twins:


I had thought to write something about the rampant obesity I saw, but instead, I’ll just wonder why the mothers of these ladies forgot to teach them about the perils of horizontal stripes:


If, upon waking, a man discovers the arrival of a zit on his butt, should he not choose a different outfit rather than apply a trimmed bandaid in an effort to conceal that to which the eye goes instantly?


Some butterflies need to be returned to their cocoons for reformation. I don’t care to know what a pink paisley kerchief in the right pocket signifies:


The sensible summer hair. The park-swing earrings. The sheer and retro-pale lipstick. The edgy black cocktail dress. The clever handbag. The clear lucite pumps. Here's a glamour girl who could turn the head of a soldier in full sun:


Or, enjoy the cool of a breezily bespoke chain mail shrug and miniskirt:



Finally, this astonishingly serene man:

I retire.

On Friday, I finished cleaning out my office. Hadn’t seen the bottom of the in-basket for many years, although it had never really held much of a stack. I had taken my share of kidding about that over the years. Other managers commented on the lack of clutter in my office, claiming that it offered evidence that I did not have much to do. I would level them with my reply. “I get paid to manage. To make the correct yes/no decision. I’m not here to do staff work. If that were the case, why would we be paying all those people in those rows of cubicles on the other side of that door. If you want to do the work of all the folks assigned to you, fine, but not me. I’m gonna sit here and read the paper until they bring me another decision to make, and when that moment comes, you can rest assured my decision will be the right one. Always has been. Always will be.”



Some of the other managers, the stupid ones, considered me arrogant or lazy, but in their hearts, they envied the fact that I could run the show without breaking a sweat, and with easy humor. They did not understand why it was that my staff had been loyal to me. They did not understand the fact that key decisions: hiring, promoting, mentoring, rewarding, getting rid of and streamlining – made less than a dozen times a year – make all the difference in the ease of one’s job. Now the rumors about who will succeed me run like electricity throughout the building. Managers who have rarely stopped by have visited me this week, pretending to say goodbye while asking about the future of my assigned parking spot in the basement garage, while coveting the view from my windows and sizing up the wall space for the photos of their pasty-faced no-necked distempered spawn.

At the end of the day, I am the last to leave. The send-off parties are over. The hugs and “remember whens” are done. I will miss my team. So competent. So able to make any task enjoyable.

I take one last look at my view of the Wretched Little City.



Twenty-five years have gone by in a flash. I think about the day I was hired. Delighted to be making $14,000 a year! Figuring I’d stick it out for six months and then leave it for something more glamorous. It’s not like I had any better offers. A degree in theology coupled with an allergic reaction to organized religion can leave you on the street. Perhaps the fact that my extra-office life was such an elaborate distraction actually helped my rise from intern to CFO. My detachment may have been viewed as level-headedness. My total disinterest in the business of my agency may have been viewed as unflappable calmness, the obvious strength of a leader. Maybe my time in the Vatican, scurrying around a pope, and making me totally unimpressed with the needs of a governor, made me seem competent and able to handle the servicing of the largest fish in this tiny pond. Perhaps it was simply the fact that I was amusing, and the only man to notice and to be unafraid to comment on someone’s new jewelry and the fact that turquoise is a color that works for her. Perhaps it was the fact that I had our largest conference room done over in rich ebony and high-backed black leather, and put the lights on five pre-set dimming patterns that I could control remotely from my office, throwing someone else’s meeting into semi-darkness whenever I felt like it. Tee-hee.

I take the elevator down to the basement and I begin to feel the headrush of freedom. This must be how it feels to end one’s time as an indentured servant. What’s the worst that can happen to me for the rest of my life? C and I will now have free health care and dental coverage forever, and a check will come in the mail monthly. Granted, taking the earliest possible retirement option vastly reduces the size of that check, but so what if I still must find work to maintain our current lifestyle? This time around, I’ll do something fun, something more creative. Something that doesn’t involve a suit and regular hours. Something more playful. Truth to tell, I’ve always watched with fascination the men who repair stucco in Florida. I think I might enjoy that. And, during the hot months, when we are in New York, I could do Venetian plastering in the apartments of the wealthy. There. The next ten years are settled.

At home, I take a moment to pick some roses before going inside. This one is called “The alchemist”. Each blossom’s color changes from a budding orange to peach to a blushing pink as it unfurls. If you don’t know this, you’d be perplexed to find flowers of so many different colors on the same bush. “Cosi va la vita mia” I think to myself with a laugh.



Inside, C has prepared a surprise to celebrate this long-awaited moment. It’s been twenty-five years since I last launched myself into uncharted waters. This time, I am not alone, and I am entirely without fear. The possibilities are exciting. This is the right decision.

A weekend like any other.

On Friday, we speed away from The Wretched Little City determined to beat the traffic that kinks up around the other failed little cities like knots in a cheap phone cord between here and New York. We win, and are able to park and dress and present ourselves not too late at The Chelsea Brewing Company to join Doug, Olivier and their friends in celebration of Doug’s birthday. We are at a long table under a spectacular evening sky by the Hudson River.

Four couples and three singles. All guys. We had met one of the couples on Thanksgiving three years ago when they had just moved in together. Now they wear matching rings. Each ring is composed of two interlocking gold sections, in different colors. The sections easily slide and bind (or, as they explained, separate whenever they argue.) I state that I can never get C to tolerate the wearing of even a single piece of jewelry. For some reason, I hear myself say this in a Georgian accent, as if I were Ruby Turpin in Flannery O'Connor's story "Revelation".

One half of this couple is an event manager with experience on the gay wedding circuit. We discuss the recent New York Times article flatly stating that “civil unions” are not enough, and encouraging Connecticut to go all the way to gay marriage. I tell him that C and I will probably get married when it is legalized in New York where we would be pleased to hold a party for all our friends. I wonder aloud about the ceremony. We are both indifferent to the practice of organized religion, and what of the business of vows. Our unspoken devotions are Loch Ness deep. Won’t the sweet speakery of them trivialize and shrink them a bit? Still, such a party we will have, and, afterall, there was that beautiful Boston wedding in which we participated.

To lift the table, I ditched the subject of marriage and placed the business of Paris Hilton’s dramatic ride to court squarely on the center of the table where everyone gleefully forked it to death. This was followed by the news that the house in Fort Lauderdale that Doug and Olivier had coveted but lost to another buyer had magically reappeared. Purely by chance, they met someone who just happened to know the owners. They have since met those owners and spent time in the house. The owners want to sell it, but do not want to recognize the fact that the market now belongs to the buyer and that the house has slipped in value. D and O know that sooner or later those owners will cave, and they will get to move into the house they were meant to have. I decide to remain quiet about my vague feeling that the house is haunted and may strangle them.

One of the guys at table whispers to me a frightening account of his experience of crystal meth. He knows he is lucky to have survived it. I mention the way guys talk about how it can rewire your brain permanently. He says that in his case, with the help of a good doctor and having made the decision to kick it, he was able to undo that rewiring. This is not the expected end to a story in which he recalls week-long sex marathons in which he would look down at his dick that had turned blue from relentlessly priapistic ramming and still he could not bring himself to stop. I am glad when we both wordlessly know that this evening is not the time for such a story and we catch up with the table where an account of a Costa Rican vacation full of dizzying jungle cable rides and impossibly handsome tour guides is holding sway. Over our heads and just beyond the next pier, fireworks make the sky pop and glow like a reflected campfire, and the eleven of us seem to fall silent for a moment as we look into each others faces and trade back and forth the satisfied smiles that we see there.



Much later in the evening, I feel compelled to visit The East Side Club before my membership expires. Therein, I make the acquaintance of a black man with one of the three largest dicks on the planet today, of a social worker originally from Trinidad (He did not mention Tobago.), and of a muscular Puerto Rican who seemed inordinately interested in what I did for work. I told him I was an exterminator.

On Saturday evening, we go to TheEagle after a long day of paint stripping, phone shopping, salad eating, coffee drinking and park sitting. At the top of the stairs on the second floor, we bump into Rey and Darryl. There was very little floor space to be had, and the mob pushed us to one side where unintentionally, the four of us surrounded – and talked through – a very patient fellow whose ability to cruise the traffic had been entirely disabled by our sequestering.

For reasons unrecallable, I launched into a monologue about anal bleaching. I wondered if perhaps dentists seeking to build their practices could not offer this service with the same equipment used to whiten teeth. Perhaps on alternate days, or, better yet, with some slight modification of the chair, simultaneously. (Darryl confessed to never having actually seen that part of himself. We suggested he apply the scientific principles of incidence and reflection to a hand-held mirror.) We imagined the photos in the ads for such a business, showing a model flashing a brilliant smile starred with a lens flare while pushing out her tush and lowering her jeans to reveal a bit of dazzling butt crack also starred with a lens flare. Yes, of course the equipment would have to be sanitized between clients. “Show me that autoclave, Doctor!”

Rey then confessed to a fetish for forehead wrinkles. He is especially drawn to the exuberant wrinkling of the forehead of Mel Gibson that he feels trumps the man’s repulsive personality. I ask him how he felt about Russell Crowe’s forehead. He had a well formulated response at the ready, explaining that over Russell’s eyes, the wrinkles go left to right, but in the center of his brow, the wrinkles go north to south. This does not excite him. He prefers his wrinkles lined up like the furrowed rows of a Methodist farmer.

Darryl confessed that he had once had his entire beard lasered off but that within six months it had grown back.

Rey, Darryl and I each told the story of seeing our first uncut dick. (I was in junior high. His name was Ralph.) C told the story of seeing his first cut dick. We all discussed the demerits of circumcision, and three of us wistfully wondered in what sorrowful landfill our little cutlets ended up.

It would have been obvious to anyone listening that the four of us felt no need for sequitur, that perhaps we were experiencing some form of dementia. Perhaps we had been chewing the beer bottles we held, and were light-headed with internal bleeding. I looked at the guy pinned in the center of us and decided it was time to apologize for cramping his style. He replied that there was no need to. He was fascinated by our talk. We launched into him.

He is an actor named Stephen (Darryl secured the correct spelling). Originally from Providence, Rhode Island.

Darryl screamed, “How about that Paris Hilton?” and the evening spun out of control.

On Sunday, we encountered a street promo for the grand reopening of the Kiehl’s cosmetic shop next to our coffee shop. A snappy do-wap group called GroundStone sang and bounced. A pale man wearing a hairnet whipped up blue cotton candy out of a battered metal vat and took swigs from a bottle wrapped in black plastic when the children were not watching. A red-capped broom-handler swept up spilled popcorn to appease the nosey co-op boards. A fresh-faced girl made obscene swellings out of tubular balloons and twisted them into fantastic hats for the kids. Very Penny Lane. I went into the shop and asked for free samples of some products. I do this every three months. The staff turnover means that I am never recognized, and my gym bag is always replenished for free.



At four o’clock we walk down Ninth Avenue to attend a party at Kashkaval, which is a sort of wine bar serving cheese, sausage and all sorts of good mushy stuff with which to plaster your bread. Our friend, Ken, has assembled us all to celebrate his completion of nursing school, and his becoming a full time New Yorker – with a job. (He is also part of a singing group called Mystery Date. They are often featured at The Duplex in Greenwich Village.) At our table is a lady he has known since grade school when he kissed her without warning. She is thoroughly over living in Northampton and is about to relocate to Ireland. She is quite spirited, and already looking very Irish Springy, is certain to be well received.

At our table are guys from all about the city: the Upper West Side, Hells’ Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Riverdale, Astoria and Clinton Hill (Brooklyn). One of the guys, originally from Wisconsin, is now back from several years in Amsterdam where he became a chef. The only work he can find in New York is table waiting which he says pays better than being a chef. He says that in Amsterdam only the tourists order the hash in the coffee shops. Isn’t this proof that legalization is not an automatically slippery slope to perdition? I am rather certain that I have had sex with the black guy seated next to him who is wearing the ACT UP t-shirt.

To my right is a man from Connecticut who is highly placed among the Democrats of that state. Seated across from him is his Ex, and to his right is his current partner. He tells me their story which consists of two overlapping thruples. He and his Ex took in a third. The third remained even after the Ex was phased out. The new partner was phased into the household and was introduced to the perduring “third” who eventually wandered away and was never heard from again. They all seemed wistfully satisfied with the telling of this history. When they ask me my affiliation, I don’t quite know how to respond. “How about that Paris Hilton!” is well received.




We are back in the Wretched Little City in time to see Fantasia at the Tony Awards deliver a stunning performance of a mediocre song from The Color Purple but we are fast asleep before the show is over.

Miss Hell's Kitchen?

The things you do see when you've got the camera with you. Corner of 9th Ave and 57th St.





And a block later, (Click to experience the make-up. This is the pic exactly as it came out of the camera.)

Red Hook Garden

We wandered through the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn. Low rise, big sky and lots of pocket gardens.
(Having fun rediscovering the filters of Photoshop. Not sure why I'm fixating on vanishing brick.) Click the pic to make the poppies pop.