Hot Town, Summer in the City

We made it to Brooklyn only hours after Jesse & Thom returned from their Portland Oregon excursion. After a brief and stormy visit to Brooklyn Flea, Jesse & Thom, Helen, Mark and I hopped a few Bklyn bars.Then we settled in for some amazingly crispy and delicious pizza, and this huge calzone, at Lucali.
The next day Mark and I met Jesse for lunch in Soho near her new job. And watched her walk back to the office before heading down to the lower east side for a bit of shopping.
Uptown the next day Mark and I headed to the roof of the Met to see the Jeff Koons balloon sculptures.Love how New Yorkers enjoy their parks. Central Park is spectacular. Prospect Park is nice too, and we enjoyed a picnic by the lake one day.
Prospect Park is pretty trashy though, so Mark did his bit to clean up the environment.

Another day we went to MoMA to see Home Delivery, interesting show about prefabs.
There was a great little show of Picasso sculpture at MoMA too.

The boys really enjoyed hanging with Helen while Mark and I ran around. Our last night in the city, Mark and I met up with Jesse and Thom for dinner at La Paloma in the Village for some good Mexican food.


We ended up back in Brooklyn at Beer Table.

Fun time, but there's more. Next up: the hot tickets we managed to fit in to the trip before heading northeast to a cooler climate.

A Farm Boy Reflects

In the NY Times today, Nicholas Kristof said "the tide of history is moving toward the protection of animal rights, and the brutal conditions in which they are sometimes now raised will eventually be banned."
Oh, I sure hope so, and I sure hope some people who read this column think hard next time they eat meat, especially pigs, who are so like dogs in most all ways but looks.

Saturday Night Live in Hillsdale

There's Barbara, and Meryl right behind her, shortly before Meryl, Mark and I decided to call it a night. Saturday we spent many hours at the festival and we were not only tired but wanting to get back to the dogs. So the three of us headed home around midnight, on the long dark winding unpaved country roads. Lots of deer, lots of nervous driving. We arrived at the Solovay driveway, and right on our tail were a couple of impressive emergency vehicles, including a real fire truck. We got of the car, assuming we'd watch them drive on by, when to our surprise they pulled right in behind us. The rather large Captain approached in a hurry, "the smoke alarm is going off", and Mark and I threw open the front door and ran for the stairs, each grabbing a poodle and heading back out. Three guys ran through the house, while the three of us, two holding poodles, watched, stunned. The big guy came barreling down the stairs calling out to us, "the house has been ransacked, the closets have been emptied!" "Let me go look" was my response and I ran upstairs, into each bedroom, noticing that Leandra's room appeared to have every possible article of clothing in a pile on the floor. I took a quick look at the other rooms which looked pretty normal to me, ran back downstairs, and said to the Captain, "a teenage girl came home from camp today, I think that's what her room is supposed to look like." Meryl asked, "is this a Saturday Night Live sketch, and is that John Candy?" Meanwhile Mark was running around with two phones, the house phone with the alarm company, which only worked inside the house, and his cell phone with Paul on it, which only worked outside the house.

It took quite a while but the nice and concerned volunteer fire guys all left with their serious trucks, the three of us still standing around, half in shock, half hysterical, until Susan and Paul showed up and we got to tell the whole hilarious ridiculous story, and then again when Barbara, Steve & Alec arrived.

A wild ending to a great, long day. Oh, and I guess the conclusion was that the heat lightening in the air was what set off the fire alarm. Which, by the way, mostly rang in the fire station, or wherever, and not in the house. And the lightening preceeded a major storm that started moments after Paul left to go back to the festival to pick up Leandra and her friend. But that's another story.

Falcon Ridge

After driving for a day and a half with very patient dogs, we arrived in Hillsdale NY Thursday night. Barbara, Steve and Alec beat us there by several hours but Susan & Paul, whose home we all congregate in for Falcon Ridge, were away picking up their daughter Leandra from art camp. Alec greeted Mark and me and the dogs.
We enjoyed the use of the Solovay home and pool, and were joined on Friday by Judy Zerden (an old camp friend of Barbara's & mine) and her husband, Hank, on Friday. That night we saw and heard some great music. The Strangelings were wonderful, and the Friday night song swap, with John Gorka, Eliza Gilkyson, Vance Gilbert & Patty Larkin, was the big late night favorite.
When we woke up Saturday morning Susan, Paul, & Leandra were home and soon Barbara & Alec's cousin Meryl arrived from Bklyn. Saturday was a long day of music at the festival.

Janis Ian is as great a storyteller as she is a musician. Dar Williams & Eddie from Ohio were wonderful as always.

And Susan was brave enough to do some contra swing dancing.

A great festival, if a bit too hot, too cold, and too muddy at times, but greatest of all is being with old, good friends.

Abby & Doug

Last weekend we had dinner with Abby & Doug at The Fly, one of our favorite places in this town. Afterwards we had dessert and dogs at our house.

The possum who lives over our compost pile

A Virginal Goth Girl

"Our topic for today is The Twilight Saga, a series of extraordinarily popular books that you may never have heard of. The attraction is clearly the vampire hero, who is quite a hunk. Before you make fun of this, I want you to seriously consider whether you're interested in denigrating people who spend their leisure time actually reading books rather than watching 'America's Got Talent.'"
Read the rest of Gail Collins' NY Times OpEd piece on modern romance and the state of feminism.