Happy Father's Day

A very wet weekend it has been here in New York. It started out promising on Saturday and we were lucky as Max's tennis lesson ended just as the downpour began.

While he went to Battle of the Bands (which turned out not to be a battle at all as there were no winners from the 10 bands that played until 1am at the school, and some of the bands were actually already high school graduates, but really, who cares I wish I could go but parents are frowned upon), we went to a fancy party at the Museum of Modern Art where a fan swung overhead while we imbibed free wine and sugary nuts while trying to dry our very soaked feet and pants.

There were some real characters, and being judgmental and out of place we decided that we we would enjoy meeting only 10% of the people at the party. At first I thought 1% but then I looked closer and saw some people that I would really like to meet, such as this woman.
But not these four with the uncomfortable shoes.Thank you Cathy & Eric for being bigwigs and hooking us up with the tickets.

Getting to the museum was an event unto itself. It was raining pouring so hard we decided to have a phenomenal beet salad in the cafe downstairs that has some of the best food at great prices, until it let up, which it did, until the very moment we stepped out of the subway when it started pouring all over again, so hard that our umbrellas were funny black jokes on metal spikes that might have worked for Gene Kelly, but last night, not for us.

Here's a tip for those of you who never travel uptown, or haven't in many years (like me) - the F train no longer goes to 53rd & Lex. It swings up to 63rd and goes to Roosevelt Island. Who knew. I thought people were still getting there by tram. I need to get out of the house more often. When I saw 63rd Street on the sign it evoked the 69th Street Bridge in Escape from New York.



The presumably new 63rd Street subway station is a perfect instance of never learning from mistakes. Why oh why would they make a new station where you can't transfer from uptown to downtown without going up and then down a one mile long escalator? (After I typed this I looked it up and apparently the wall is hiding an unused track so I guess there is a reason for the nuttiness of this station.)

And what is with that hideous cheapo plastic brick facing?

Then on Sunday we went to a performance of Frequency Hopping. Getting the tickets was an event that took my entire week to figure out. What attracted me initially to this production was their description of a robotic orchestra. Turns out, the robotic orchestra was 6 or 7 player pianos. The play is about the pretty incredible story of Hedy Lamarr, 1940's actress and great beauty, who, with the composer, George Antheil, invented a system that would stop the interception of Allied torpedos and aid in greater destruction of Nazi warships. The US government didn't develop technology for WWII and it wasn't used until the Cuban missile crisis. Turns out this technology is basically what we now call "wireless." Neither of them ever made any money from their patent.

The companion piece to the play, a revival of Ballet Mecanique, written in the 1920's by George Antheil for 16 player pianos and other instruments, was rated by New York Magazine as despicable and highbrow, auguring the apocolypse.