January 16, 2008 - Receipt #10 – Angelo’s Pizza, 117 West 57th Street

January 16, 2008 - Receipt #11 – Angelo’s Pizza, 117 West 57th Street

Sunday morning May 19th was living up to its name as sunlight brightened the inside of our room on the 11th floor of the Buckingham Hotel. This would be the last day of our four-day weekend in the Big Apple and we would fly westward to our work-a-day world in Silicon Valley, which would be no different that the same work-a-day world in Manhattan had we lived here. A vacation always put me in mind that somehow the world that exists when I’m not working is better than the world when I am. Of course, it’s an illusion no different than that of time itself. What happens to those happy moments you experienced some time ago when things were so much better than they are now? Those moments lost in the past make me realize how fleeting and transient human experience really is.

My wife IM and I have tickets to a matinee performance of the Broadway musical “Curtains”, which features the actor, David Hyde Pierce, who played Niles in the television sitcom, “Frasier.” I suspect the transient nature of human experience is why we so enjoy a good play and can return to see them over and over—if any of Shakespeare’s play or for that matter Andrew Lloyd Webber’s in our time is any indication. Plays are more engaging than cinema or video because the actors are real. They strut about an imaginary landscape that our minds make real for the couple of hours we suspend belief. They provide an unframed three-dimensional illusion rather than the two-dimensional framed one of film or video—always restrained by the limited range of a lens. In a play we are able to see a period of time reanimated over and over again as if we were watching the events unfold in life—somewhere in Boston in 1959 for the setting of “Curtains.” We watch Boston Police Detective Frank Cioffi try to unravel the mystery of who in the cast of a Broadway-bound western musical is killing the other cast members. In the process, he helps rewrite the play and wins the heart of the leading lady. How nice to see life’s most overwhelming problems solved before our eyes and why isn’t real life like that?

The great problem we confront in our lives is that our memories lose that three-dimensional quality captured in badly framed photos and video. It’s as if you were looking at the past through a keyhole that won’t let you see anything except what’s in front of the hole. It’s that way with the video I took during our stay in the Big Apple. Hours of recorded footage and all I have to show for it are minutes at most of various street scenes taken around midtown—up and down 6th, 7th and 8th Avenues; Times Square; and 8th, 5th, Park, and Madison Avenue and east and west along 43rd, 44th, 45th and 57th Streets. We’re too busy confronting the present to spend much time reconstructing the past, though I have tried by editing those hours of footage into 3 to 5 minute clips that I’ve uploaded to YouTube.

One clip is of the Sunday morning of which I’m writing. It begins with us walking along West 56th Street between 5th Ave. & 6th Avenues. The camera is capturing the storefront on the side of the street opposite to where we’re walking. Pictures of the front of the Judge Roy Bean Pub at 39 West 56th and further down the block the dark green awning of D & S Market Place and finally a red and blue stripped sign before a building with “Nails…” (fingernails) centered on the red stripe and “Torino” centered on the blue stripe. The scene segues to a slow motion sequence of us walking west on 56th Street toward 5th Avenue where we come upon Trump Tower at 725 West 5th Avenue. The building is encased in a vinyl canvas four-story—at least—high and extending from the 56th-Street/5th-Avenue-corner to the building entrance on 5th wide. Upon this humongous canvas is printed a bright red Gucci ad with several giant skinny models dressed in elaborately patterned red print frocks looking down on the pedestrians passing beneath. As you might guess, Gucci has a large very upscale retail store inside Trump Tower. Advertising has managed the illusion of stretching a perfect minute out for as long as the viewing public is held captive. Another perfect moment replaces the first once the first fails to capture public attention.

As we turn right and amble down 5th Avenue, coming upon the Disney Store on our left, we pass a young couple coming toward us. The young woman is draped in a gauzy green-patterned ankle-length dress flowing in the gentle breeze blowing down the avenue. Sensibly, she is wearing a long sleeve green woolen turtleneck sweater beneath the dress—it’s cool in the shade of the tall buildings along 5th. Her companion walking on her left—guarding her from the traffic along the street—is attired in a blue pullover vest worn atop a short sleeve T-shirt—a red left sleeve and collar and a blue right sleeve—atop a pair of jeans. The man was forgettable; the brownish-blond woman, with deep-set eyes and distinctive Celtic nose was not because of her features, her outfit, and the figure she cut walking down 5th avenue.

The video segues to six seconds of video shot across Madison Avenue from the entrance to the Sony Building at 555 Madison. Hanging upside down from the top of one of the first floor display windows partially hiding a “Sony Style” sign is Spiderman, straight stands of his spider web shooting down the window toward the street—kitsch to say the least. At a stationary position away from the street and out of the line of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk, I zoom my Panasonic video camera all the way to maximum magnification until Spiderman fills half the frame from top to bottom then slowly zoom back out. Spiderman is the hero of both grandsons.

The video ends with a slow-motion very jerky walk—as recorded by in the video—along 57th Street to the Buckingham Hotel just beyond 6th Avenue. The most compelling features of the remaining 45 to 50 second of video is the cacophony of traffic sounds along the street and the busy pedestrian traffic coming toward us and crossing in front of us at 6th Avenue. All the while Bobby Darin is wailing the lyrics of “Sunday in New York” over the ambient sounds of the city. “You can spend time without spending a dime watching people watch people pass. Later you’re pausing and in one of those stores there’s that face next to yours in the glass…” That song always comes to mind when I think of the times my wife and I spent in the city during the first months of 1965.

We return to the hotel and rest until it’s time for the afternoon matinee of “Curtains.” As Broadway musicals go, it was entertaining, but it lacked that one piece that followed you out of the theater and stayed with you for months on end. In the first months of 1965, the song was “People” from “Funny Girl” and “Who can I turn to” from “Roar of the Greasepaint, Smell of the Crowd.” The song lasted far longer than the play, which closed in less than a year. During our children’s theater going years, it was “What I did for Love,” from “A Chorus Line”; “Memories” from “Cats”; and “One Night in Bangkok” from “Chess”; among others. Still, “Curtains” was enjoyable; talented actors bringing to life a play we in the audience wanted to see. It was a good mystery and love story and had enough song and dance that the theatergoer didn’t fall asleep.

At the end of the performance we made out way out amid a river of people flowing out each of the theater’s exits. Out on the sidewalk we joined an even larger stream of theatergoers all trying to make their way to the cars or hotel rooms. We managed to cross 45th on 8th Avenue heading toward 57th and let ourselves be swept away by the current of pedestrians moving up the avenue. Turning right on 57th we headed toward the Buckingham and just before arriving, we came upon Angelo’s Pizza, where we decided to have our last dinner in the city before our return trip home. It’s your family style pizza place that also serves pasta, which is what we had. It sated our hunger sufficiently that we decided to walk along Central Park South back toward Columbus Circle. By the time our walkabout brought us back to the hotel, the sun was setting and we were ready to call it an early evening.