The Wrap Around Gotham

My heart is happy when I’m in New York.  Neither I nor my employer can afford a decent hotel room in the city that’s big enough to accommodate kung fu practice – and I don’t care.  This is notable because I care very much about space to train with any other place I visit for work or pleasure.  That should say it all when it comes to my feelings about NYC, but I’m going to go on.

Manhattan has been special to me since the first time I stepped off the commuter train from Connecticut, holding my mother’s hand, to go visit Santa at Macy’s, then go slip on the ice at Rockefeller Center.  Later, I loved it because I was a middle school glee club member and stage rat who fell head over heels for Broadway and everything about the theater district.  Then came the crazy teen years and jumping on the train to hang out in Greenwich Village with my best friend and my fake ID.  That was followed by a first salaried job as a wardrobe supervisor for a suburban theater, where I was invited out on the island with the ladies and gents of the ensemble and introduced to several of the city’s great restaurants.

Winter traditions, Broadway, Bohemia, food – they all just scratch the surface of what makes me nuts about New York.  As I write, I realize that I’ve had goosebump-great moments there with each parent, both spouses, both children and three of the four people who were my closest friends before the age of twenty-five (and are still friends to this day).  That’s not true of any other place on the planet, including my hometown.

Anyway, here’s some of what I saw, did and enjoyed in this working, reunion weekend in Gotham.

 

I finally got a meal at a seafood joint I’ve been wanting to get to since I first heard of it a year ago – and the food was as good as it looked.

   

Work was crazy-making and exhausting, but there’s no denying it offered a rollicking good time to those around me, both outside the Schomburg Center…

…and in.

 

A brush with Mr. Mosley’s literary greatness didn’t hurt either.

 

All in all, it was exactly what the doctor ordered at the end of a sad anniversary.  Funny how the universe provides what we need… though often in unexpected wrappers.