Central Perky
One of the many, many things I love about NYC is that when one neighborhood proves wearying (Williamsburg houses far too many of my exes), you can dip into a whole new world just by traveling a few miles. This holiday season I have been a tourist in my own city and have found real December magic, even when the adventures have left something to be desired.
Last Sunday I traveled to an unusually demure Midtown to ogle the big-hearted precision of the Alvin Ailey dancers at the New York City Center.
Yolanda and the Thief
I bought my tickets on the rush line, and everyone around me was drunk, sniffly, an entitled out-of-towner (no New Yorker is as rude as our visitors can be), but the work itself cut through the malaise of, well, other humans. I felt inspired to get back to rec-room dancing classes with the new year. (More on that in another post.)
On Christmas Day, though I felt too alone, I hoofed it around Prospect Park, digging on the promenade of Brooklyn’s finest (not cops, no).
And this weekend, on the Lower East Side’s Metrograph, I saw Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer swoon a soft-shoe in Yolanda and the Thief, the most surrealist of all Vincent Minnelli’s films and, alas, one of MGM’s least-baked mistakes. Mostly what I loved was surrendering to its bold pastels while sipping a mimosa smuggled in my purse. That, and giggling over how much Astaire obviously hated this cinematic equivalent of lysurgic acid; he looked like he’d swallowed a lemon.
Don Freeman’s rough “Corduroy”
Today I swung to the Upper Upper East Side—big quiet Central Park–nature, real nature!–and big quiet Museum of the City of New York, awash in civic-minded children’s illustrations and rainbow rebellions. That experience was truly great, especially the depictions of New York’s 19th century lady outliers. Every women in attendance smiled broadly at each other; even Stanley Kubrick midcentury photos read as renegade in that context.
I felt so glad I didn’t mind when one of the
a 1947 Stanley Kubrick photo!
Yorkville Housing Works balabustas called me zaftig. For one thing, she wasn’t wrong. Though my affair with the Legend shed most of what K calls Obama weight (the extra poundage of complacency), I always will carry more weight than when I was young, anorectic being a bad look in middle age (any age, really). At the precipice of 48, I’m impervious to fat-shaming, anyway.
It helped that the broad in question was lending me her 40 percent discount to help purchase a gorgeous new fur, and that I was pretty
zaftig in fur
sure I’d manifested the whole experience by envying
MTM wore it best.