Making a Scene

Picture the scene, your son has run away, he’s flown thousand of miles to find a crazed woman who’s been stalking you. After too many views of “An Affair to Remember” she’s managed to brainwash your gullible child into thinking that she’s his new mother. This is a child in mortal danger, you have to save your only son from this lunatic. You finally track down your errant offspring and save him from a night alone in the streets of New York but there’s the stalker and she sees you, do you:

a) pick up your son and run, run far away from her?
b) call security and have then arrest this dangerous woman?
c) look into her eyes, sigh and then realize that this is the woman you’ll spend the rest of your life with?

Any sane parent would have chosen options a) or b) but sanity doesn’t sell movies, so stepping out onto the platform of the Empire State Building, I can’t help but be reminded of that scene from Sleepless in Seattle.

—

You could be sitting at an everyday deli, savouring the tempting repast put before you, the soft bread, the succulent meat, the liquefying cheese, there’s nothing in this world but you and the burger in front of you, even the gentle hubbub of your fellow diners is turned to mute, salivating with the pleasure of anticipation you reach for it –

The peace is shattered by a woman shouting positive affirmations, “Yes!” she cries.

Other diners turn to look at her.

“Oh yes!”

She’s obviously fairly definite about it.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”.

One begins to wonder what the question was…

“Yyyyyyeeeeeessssss”

She’s getting more emphatic, her eyes are closed as she concentrates on delivering just the right level of agreement

“Yyyyyyeeeeeessssss! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! YES!”

Having made sure that her companion understood that she utterly concurred with him, they continued with their discussion and I was left to my burger. My burger, my lovely cheeseburger, yes, oh yes, yes, yyyes….

—

Exploring the nooks and crannies of New York and unbidden, memories of other people’s lives rise to the surface, lives never lived but real none the less. Movies and television make up so much of our lives and experiences that New York is like the city you’ve always known but never visited, everywhere you look there’s another false memory:

Ellis Island, where Will Smith tried to seduce Eva Mendes in Hitch

The Statue of Liberty, the first thing seen by immigrants from the decks of their ships on their way to Ellis Island , the same statue that saved the world in Ghostbusters, that trapped the X-Men and whose decapitated head was last seen lying discarded on a Manhattan street.

Fifth Avenue – Flooded in the Day After Tomorrow and the perfect location for hunting deer with Will Smith.

Empire State Building – even before it was completed we already had the iconic images of builders balancing on the iron girders, then we had King Kong and the circling planes, we even had some Daleks and it had a good life then until one Independence Day…

Brooklyn Bridge – Blown up by jets in I am Legend, destroyed by a monster in Cloverfield and I’m sure Godzilla did a bit of damage to it as well but they’ve done a good job with repairing it.

The Rockefeller Center – Home to an ice-skating rink dwarfed by the surrounding high buildings and home too to many a New York Christmas scene, including a film called Serendipity with the always wonderful John Cusack and the lovely Kate Beckinsale.

Central Park, where there must be some city edict that all romantic comedies have at least one scene shot in Central Park, either on the pretty bridge over the lake (the scene of both romantic gestures and tearful break-ups) and the avenue lined with benches perfectly suited for deep and meaningful conversations.

It’s at this stage that both you and I begin to realize that I’ve been watching far too many romantic comedies and blockbusters set in New York and that I can’t remember even one scene from a Woody Allen film….

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Coney Island

and the craic was good…

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Pieces of New York 5

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Show and Tell

There are times when my father feels a bit left out of the planning, like, for instance, my parents’ trip to New York this summer.

“Apparently, we’re going to see a show” he tells me.

“You have to see a show when you go to New York. It’s what you do. On Broadway” my mother informed us.

“Broadway” she repeated for emphasis, as if that one word was argument enough.

Naturally the discussion moved onto musicals they’d seen and they told me about the show they went to see one time in London – Smokey Joe’s Cafe. They loved it and always talk enthuastically about it. Smokey Joe’s Cafe is filled with the music of Somebody and Somebody, a very famous song-writing team which as you may have gathered, I’d never heard of and have since forgotten their names again.

My parents were aghast that I’d never heard of this pair of lyrical maestros and told me that they’d written songs for Elvis and of course the song “Poison Ivy”. I may have mentioned that I’d never heard of “Poison Ivy” to which my father replied “ah, you have” and proceeded to start singing the song. Uncertain that my blank look was a result of his version of the song but sure that I really did know the songs by somebody and somebody he retrieved the Smokey Joe’s cd.

And then the pantomime began, I was treated to the intros and first minute of each song on the cd accompanied by “you know this one”, “you can’t not know this one”, “how can you not know this one?” and bursts of song from my parents trying to uncover my buried memories of these songs but, alas, their prospecting was futile, of the 20 songs on the cd, only two of them were vaguely familiar, I was a lost cause….

Primed with the Smokey Joe’s songs spinning around my head I flew to New York. On my first evening we strolled beneath the bright lights of Broadway and I was relieved to see that Smokey Joe’s wasn’t on. I’m not the biggest fan of musicals, I generally go out of my way to avoid them. That said, I have to admit that I did enjoy Mamma Mia and am even thinking about going to see the movie version.

Filled with notions of musicals, one day while rambling the streets I saw the word “Rent” emblazoned in large letters on the side of a building and thought to myself that it must be a theatre. It was moments later that my evil mind informed me that the word that preceded “Rent” was “For”.

In New York there are three classes of theatre – Broadway, Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway and the show that I went to was most definitely Off-Off-Broadway, I’d even go so far as to call it Off-Off-Off-Broadway. My suspicions that it was going to be somewhat different began with the ticket price. The price was quoted as $10 + the roll of a dice, so as we lined up to pay, we each rolled a dice and that determined the amount of money we paid, I rolled a 4 so I paid $14.

The show is called “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” and attempts to fit 30 plays into the space of an hour. Everyone is provided with a menu listing the names of all 30 plays and the audience is free to select which one will be next which results in the end of each play producing a cacophony and bedlam as the audience shouts their numbers at the cast. Somehow a number is plucked from the noise and the next play begins…

And the plays, looking down the list of plays now, there are some that leap out, shouting “remember me”, plays like:

The inspired and beautiful “And you are a spark in the grandeur of space” was probably worth the ticket price alone, it was completely different from everything else they did and that probably made it all the more special.

“Poor Taste Striptease” was jaw-dropping in the sense that I spent most of the time thinking “Oh my God, I can’t believe they’re doing this” while a small part of me was admiring how much in poor taste the strip-tease was…

“A Man Having an Orgasm Sounds as Though He’s Been Hit By a Car” – they provided some very convincing evidence…

“You Are Now Competitors” – a very enjoyable audience particpation play, especially enjoyable because I wasn’t chosen to partcipate, where two audience members were regressed to childhood and subjected to a gruelling spelling bee.

“Untitled Head Piece #1 or What if everyone on the f**king A Train lightened up a little bit and rocked out with their c**k out a little bit” which was clever and thankfully none of the male cast members showed us their ‘talent’.

And then are the ones where I look at the bizarre titles and draw a blank, I know they happened because we got through all 30 plays but they were somehow forgettable, plays like:

“I’m over you and pumpkin butter”
“Cabin Fever Rehabilitation with unconventional use of confectionaries, condiments, and such”
“it’s a mandolin”
“TML Bonus Feature: Special Commentary for 1”
“Note to self (Sandpoint Idaho)”
“A personal short play with no tech no props that isn’t about the presidential campaign and has a little music”
“This is more difficult than you think”

And then there was a true classic where the cast did nothing and instead had members of the audience act out the play which is a brillant concept, get people to pay in to see the show and then make them do the work…

An interesting night.

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Pieces of New York 4

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Alice, Alice….

I blame Smokie.

If they didn’t have a song about living next door to Alice, then I wouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction to people called Alice. It’s the unofficial lyrics that Smokie never wrote but you’ll find in every pub rendition in Ireland, it’s all about audience participation, whenever we hear the line “living next door to Alice” we shout back at the band “Alice, Alice, who the **** is Alice?”

So now whenever I hear the name Alice, I have the urge to shout the required response, which is why if I ever have children, I’ll be making sure that the mother of my children reads “Through the Looking Glass” to them, as they might get to learn a new word that’s worse than Jabberwocky

——

Our guide was Alice (Alice, Alice, who the….) and she seemed quite nice, I only wish she didn’t say her name so much during the tour, she may not have appreciated the soundtrack playing in my head.

The tour was great despite the soundtrack (or possibly because of the soundtrack), you see, Alice (Alice, Alice, who…) was taking us on a tour of the United Nations. I’m not sure why I went on a tour of the UN, it’s not the first thing you think of doing when you go to New York but I went and I’m glad I did.

Parts of the tour are fairly dull, but there was something about being in the General Assembly room and asking Alice difficult questions about Taiwan, Tibet and West Papua that made the experience fascinating. The room that resonated the most with me was the Security Council chamber, it would be great (though possibly a bit boring too) to sit there and watch a council meeting, you could almost sense the power radiating from those seats.

——

In other news, I stopped off afterwards at Rockefeller Plaza to see if the ice-skating rink was still there…

And it was but there were only two people on the ice, a couple. They stopped, he got down on one knee and took a small blue box from his pocket, we couldn’t hear what he was saying but a crowd gathered none the less.

He had a lot to say down there with his knee resting on the ice, I could imagine his knee getting colder and colder as the freezing cold water seeped through this trousers but he kept talking, you had to admire him for that, he kept going, talking, unwrapping the box, and extracting a smaller box. Fearing that this would be a babuska-style box, I worried about his knee getting frostbite.

Thankfully there was only a ring in this box, he asked, she accepted, they kissed and we cheered, it was a New York moment…

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Pieces of New York 3

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Pieces of New York 2

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Eating The Apple

Anytime I travel I always like to sample the local cuisine and New York was no exception, I sampled the best of what New York had on offer – Japanese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese and Chinese but what I really wanted was good New York food:

Pizza – call me unsophisticated if you will but I have to say that I don’t get too excited by “real” pizza, give me a greasy deep-pan pizza from Dominos or Pizza Hut anyday!

Hot dog – I bought it off a street vendor, the simplest of foods, a sausage, a bit of bread, a splodge of ketchup and mustard, it was amazing, far more than the sum of its parts, I was on a high for hours afterwards.

Chilli dog  – essentially a hot dog with chilli con carne poured all over it, it was nice but didn’t compare with the beautiful simplicity of a hot dog.

Cheese Burger – I’m not sure if I had what she was having but it tasted divine. No frilly bits like lettuce and gerkins just a burger, melted cheese in a bun, lovely.

My friend was telling me that while I was in New York I should try soulfood. After explaining to me exactly what soulfood was I commented that it sounded like normal food but she replied, ” no, it’s soooooouuull food”. I stood corrected.

Wait til I tell my mother that she’s been making sooooouuuuuulllll food all these years….

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Pieces of New York

Living in a country that’s not exactly over-endowed with sun can be a challenge for a photographer, especially for one who loves having blue skies in his photos. The grey clouds and the murkiness really don’t enhance a photo.

While I was living in Australia, I went to a course on travel photography and one evening I asked the teacher the question that had been bothering me for a long while:

How can you take good photos on grey days?

Her answer wasn’t the spark of genius that I was expecting, coming from a warm sunny country she didn’t know about grey and confidently she pronounced “Don’t. Buy a postcard”.

This wasn’t entirely helpful and so I continued on my quest to capture the grey. Along the way I realised that if you eliminate the sky and concentrate on the smaller things then you can get some nice images.

 

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