I woke up on our second day in the city with plans. Did I? Yes, I always have a plan. I believe I intended to go up to the Metropolitan and maybe the Frick and also Central Park, which is just about my favorite place to sit and watch people in NYC.
But when I opened the curtain facing downtown, I saw the the avenue was blocked off as far as I could see. A couple of canopies had been set up. This was about 9 a.m.
By 9:30, more trucks, more things being set up.
And I can’t account for the two hours that went by, but by 11:30 there were even more stands and my new plan was to check it out.
Ready to go!
Hello! Hello? Ha Ha! In addition to the fun old-fashioned-looking phone, photos of movie stars and other such stuff lined the walls. I’m ready to go back!
And there was the Jerk stand which I’d seen from way up in our room. The food looked good, but we were more in a breakfasty mood. Mom didn’t want to go back to the Astro Diner, so we started down the street. It’s called the Avenue of the Americas Expo, and there were booths from all over the place.
We made our way slowly as I kept stopping every few feet to look at different handicrafts. But nobody was really selling any breakfast-type food so instead we got a couple of empanadas and sat in the shade. It was getting a bit warm as we walked in the sun.
After a while Mom had had it with walking. I wanted to reach the end of the festival, so we found a McDonald’s and went in. It was very crowded, and Mom and I walked upstairs where she found an empty table. I promised I wouldn’t be long, and continued down the avenue. As I got closer to the end, at 42nd Street, the stuff for sale just looked like the kind of stuff you’d see anywhere for sale on the street in New York. Funny that the more interesting merchandise had been right outside our door way up on 54th street.
I bought mom a sparkly NYC hat for only five bucks, and then I walked back to retrieve her at McDonald’s. We stopped in at the delicious Magnolia Bakery, where I bought a chocolate and Mom bought a lemon cupcake. I assured her that there would be plenty of seating at Rockefeller Center, but when we went to the lower level, all the free seats had been turned into restaurants. A couple of people were sitting on on some steps, so we also sat and enjoyed our cupcakes. But pretty soon a guard shooed us away, telling us that there were seats somewhere else on that level.
We finally found them, and when before there had been enough seats for more than a hundred people, there were now only enough for 30 or so. We sat at a table with a friendly woman and her son. She was a New Yorker, and said she’d moved from near the Warwick, on 54th street, to uptown. She said it was hard to get used to, even though it was only a few blocks difference. Ah, the problems of the Very Very Rich.
She was very nice, and was interested to hear Mom telling her all about when she and Dad ran away to New York and got married, and couldn’t afford their $125/month apartment in Park Slope, so they moved to a cheaper one in the West Village, a whopping $67.50. They only went to see Broadway shows when their wealthy friends visited, but they managed to see Ethel Merman in “Gypsy” and Mary Martin in “Peter Pan,” and others that I can’t remember. Ah, to have been young and living in the city back in the 50s.
After a while I told Mom we needed to go, and we took our only subway ride of the trip to get up to the Metropolitan Museum. We could have taken a bus up 6th Avenue but of course it was closed. I don’t recall quite a million stairs going down to the subway, anyway.
People were hawking their wares in front of the Met and I came across a guy selling these fantastic ukuleles made of different funny things, like maybe cigar boxes? No, surely not. I hope I have his card somewhere, because I’d certainly like to peruse them more carefully. I knew I wouldn’t buy one then because it wouldn’t have been easy to get it home on the plane, plus I already have a beautiful uke that Kevin bought me for Christmas.
I mean, it looks like a cigar box.
And my friend Joanne has many, many ukuleles…
Anyway, TA DA! We’d arrived at the Met at 2:30, so we’d seen many things since venturing out only a few hours before.
The thing about New York, at least it seems to me, is that it’s easy to get tired because there’s so much to do. And we hadn’t even entered the museum yet…
OK then,
Mrs. G.H.