Dinosaurs

 July 4, 2025

The most tragic and hypocritical Independence Day of my life time. I would take up arms, if I could, if I had any, if I knew where to aim first. 

Ingegneri on Pandora. 

DJ and R and I to Asheville Pizza last night to see the latest Jurassic Park film. In terms of storytelling (and of acting) the best of the lot, perhaps because, as DJ pointed out, Spielberg’s hand was off it. A large family sat next to us. The youngest boy (I’d guess about 4) was clearly too young to watch monsters devouring people twenty feet tall fifty feet away. He climbed from his seat into his father’s lap and said “I don’t like this movie.” I lost track of that drama until R stiffened beside me and said, “He just slapped that child across the face.” I don’t know what I would have done by myself, but R’s indignation aroused mine. We left little doubt that we had seen and it would not go unremarked. The father’s response was, “I’ll do what I want with my own family.” The answer to that was, of course, “No you won’t. At least not in public.” The wife said “We’ve taken care of our own problem,” but they hadn’t counted on R’s moral sense. I’m not sure of the sequence of events, but R went to the lobby to call the police. The father confronted him there, strutting about like the redneck coward bully he revealed himself to be (you are a coward and a bully to strike a four-year-old in the face, whatever the provocation). R did call the police, who came with Child Services in tow. I got this from employees standing around discussing it when the crowd exited, and later in DJ’s phone call to R.  At one point I assumed there would be fisticuffs between me and the young and very fit father. Thank God the wife was sitting between us. But I was happy with the mood in my mind, which was absolute fearlessness and readiness for whatever came. Part of my character was wasted, I think, in a basically tranquil life. 

Heroic weeding in the first half of the day, a visible dent in the work that needs to be done. 

Prom King

 July 3, 2025

The painting that moved me so in the Frick was The Purification of the Temple. KS is the beautiful delicate boy in the Glass House.  Wikipedia reveals he is 32 and has had a far bigger career than I imagined (having gotten his age so wrong as well). I’m glad I didn’t use the phrase “very promising” to one whose life is already in full bloom. Though he still lists High School Prom King among his credits. 

 July 2, 2025

Part of my feeling terrible yesterday was the onslaught of phlebitis, which after the strain and stress was quite expectable, which I caught in time to head off with the magic pills. The lesson I keep learning is that the bad feelings are never age (which of course is what I think it is) but the disease gathering in my vessels. 

Sat on my porch last night to revel in the difference between my garden and Times Square. On the capital of one of the columns was a fuzzy shape I took to be a bird nestling for the night. It was gone this morning, so whatever it was it was mobile. 

Lilly's

 

July 1, 2025

Home, planted upstairs in the blast of my fan. My last night in New York proved sweet. A little stroll (one block off 8th Avenue and it’s a neighborhood, sedate and picturesque) supper at Lilly’s on 9th with a waiter, Michael.  from Dublin. Incredibly, a firefly flickered and fluttered in the Paramount Hotel bar. My bartender was an immigrant from Bangladesh, who said the problems in his life were caused by the people poorer than he, who sucked away resources which might otherwise go to him and his struggling family.  The Republican strategy of making the poor blame the poorer rather than turning the right direction and blaming the rich has worked utterly, unaccountably. I couldn’t even form a sentence to counter him, so passionate and ingrained was his conviction. Quite dark dreams before waking and taking the plane, with minimal event, home. My body aches with a not quite definable ache– maybe just exhaustion. Lawn has not been cut. Hope Tony was not seized by ICE.

 

June 30, 2025

Walked north to 5th Avenue yesterday morning to attend mass at St. Thomas. Magnificent, as usual. I was not in a worshipful mood, but all was glorious as it had been before. Attendance not much better than All Souls. Attended the final performance of Old Friends, a review of Sondheim’s greatest hits, with some of Broadway’s brightest stars, like Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. Some trick of having booked only a few hours before got me in the front row, where I do long to be. I could have reached out and touched Bernadette Peters’ shoes. Did not do so. Peters spent a surprising amount of time looking at the front few rows– at me, I fantasized– while others kept their eyes on the back of the balcony. Was she expecting someone? Had she always been that way? Was it a gimmick to involve her audience more personally? Matthew and I met a portion of the cast at the Glass House across the street afterward, and one of the boys– the most beautiful onstage– apologized for spitting on me, so I know he too scanned the front. I assured him it was an honor to be spat upon. The show was quite wonderful– overpowering, even, sitting that close to the tip of the action, close enough to note every gesture was precise, sharp, readable, no slack moments on any face. Peters was a little delicate and past her prime, and there were a lot of crepey bare arms onstage– the cast being”legends” after all–but the energy was a blast furnace. I expected to be a little patronizing and above-it-all at such a spectacle, but assuredly was not. It was their final performance, so everybody got weepy onstage and all the backstage crew had to be introduced and applauded. Matt came down from Washington Heights to meet me afterward. We retired to the Glass House where, as I say, the younger portions of the cast gathered to celebrate loudly. I met them, praised them with extreme praise which was, nevertheless, fully warranted. Two of the main boys looked towering onstage, but were actually not quite as tall as I. The one I mentioned before was unimaginably beautiful, with the affect of kid right off the farm. He said he’s waiting with fingers crossed for his next role, having done a number of auditions. You never know for sure, but I think he has stardom written on his brow. Matt and I talked mostly about teaching, writing, and how much we hate Trump. I fell on the bar steps, and had to be levered up by Matt and the hostess. After Matt left, I retired to the Rum Bar and chatted with the giant Albanian bartender, who told me how to say “stupid” in Albanian, and that the word is also the word for a kind of flute. A couple from Columbia seated across from me were almost unnaturally beautiful, as though they had been chosen and set there by a theatrical director.  

On the street were mostly boys in glittery costume returning from the Pride Parade. V offered me a place on the Riverside Church float, but riding the streets of gay New York in the heat was not on my agenda. Besides, I had nothing appropriate to wear. Maybe somebody would have lent me a boa. Stopped answering V’s phone calls after the first one went nearly an hour, with lists of his acting credits and genealogies extending back to the old country. People look remote and dignified until you get them on the phone. 

PM: After a series of subway mishaps, wove my way through Union Square and Washington Square, sweating profusely. It was a mistake, based on the theory that Tuesdays are easier travel days than Mondays, to add this day. I wanted to be home the whole time, staggering here and there out of a sense of duty to fill each hour. 

Bryant Park

 

June 29, 2025

Yesterday spent largely in and around Bryant Park, dwelling, writing, watching, taking it all in. Trying to imagine what I would do and be had I chosen to live in New York City. Weaver finches took dirt baths at my feet. 

I do think my walking and wandering around is no less than it has been in the past, which is well, but at greater cost, which is a controllable variable.

Hiked down Broadway to 28th  to see night two of the play festival, only part two this time, my play and two others. Drank something sweet at the Milk Bar. How ludicrous I must look tottering about alone and adventuring at my age! Again, my team and the audience’s response fully satisfied. The other pieces (and those I heard through the curtain, having arrived early} were almost unbearable.  Like Mozart, I’d heard them but once and could practically recite them word for word. Nylon Fusion is a lively and popular enterprise, and I was honored to be part of it. I wish them well in all times to come. 

28th Street

 

June 28, 2025

Big Friday. Hauled off to the Frick, newly remodeled and newly opened, which meant crowds and lines, as the demand for tickets was great. Arrived early, sat in Central Park watching the passing show until my entry time. They were filming a fashion shoot which involved a statuesque woman and a dog walking across the street in a provocative way. The dog maintained his dignity. The first painting I saw was El Greco. I burst into tears. Wept through pretty much the first half of my tour, as one profound statement succeeded another. El Greco moved me; a big Corot landscape, practically monochromatic, moved me. Turns out I remembered my long-time favorite, Bellini’s St Francis, backward, as he faces left instead of the right in my memory. The crowd eventually got to me, and the clever way it was arranged so that if you veered off to the toilet or to get a coffee you could not return for a second look. Kept the crowds moving. 

My taxi driver from Central Park, an immigrant from Ghana, mistrusts both progressives and populists, insisting that virtue must find some middle ground. 

The part of town where my play is (W. 28th and environs) is fascinating and even, by the lights of the City, homey. Arriving early, had time to cozy in and get comfortable at a table on Broadway, sucking down some intricate juice. I worried about taxis and such, but when I arrived, I found a subway entrance (which would whisk me to Times Square) on the same block as the theater. Everyone and everywhere reeks of weed. Nylon Fusion is, by the way such things are judged, long-standing and surviving. The TaDa Theater, which they rent, I guess, is squalid outside but business-like inside, almost indistinguishable from the theater where Jack and Bruce did my plays farther Uptown. In an evening of brief plays, you expect some OK and some better, maybe a clinker or two, but you also expect that in New York the quality would be uniformly higher. It was, but only by the merest fraction. They didn’t know me from a haystack, and yet chose my play, so I know the selection process is upright, but, still– these were all they had to choose from? The end of that observation was that my piece was by levels of magnitude the best. It got tremendous laughs (I didn’t know it was that funny), and, as I sat in the front row, I could see the exertions my actresses put themselves through to sell the show. My gratitude, ladies. They read the room correctly. I wanted a little archness, a little more subtlety; they correctly came as close to burlesque as they dared. They were, for that moment, right. 

Heading home, stopped at am open-air wine bar on Times Square, right beside the lighted flag, to sip Prosecco and take in night at the center of the world. I compared it to sitting by night alone on my front porch. There were resonances I could not in the moment explain.