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.

November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

November 25, 2007 - Receipt #10 – Brasserie 8 ½

May 19th, Saturday evening, my wife IM and I decide to spend having dinner at a nice restaurant nearby the Buckingham Hotel where we’re spending a long weekend in Manhattan. I’m recounting the four days in the Big Apple through the receipts I’ve collected during our stay. I’m on the 9th receipt, which we acquired Saturday evening at the Brasserie 8 ½ Restaurant at 9 W. 57th Street—just over a city block from the hotel. The towering 725-foot high 49-story black and white building occupying 70 percent of an acre of prime Midtown Manhattan real estate where the restaurant resides is a landmark on 57th Street. A large red sculpture of the number “9” smack in the middle of the wide pedestrian travertine marble sidewalk in the front of the building announces its address.

What makes the building—designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—unique is its shape. Viewed from a distance looking east or west you can see a distinct bell-shaped 40-degree slope on its north and south face as the building descends from the 19th floor to street level. Looking at the east or west side of the building, you see two white columns of travertine marble separated by a dark area slightly wider than either column. The white marble frames the dark area at the top. Within the dark glass covered center column you can make out three huge “x”s—the width of the center column—equidistantly spaced between the roof and ground floor of the building. The north and south façade of the building is likewise covered from top to bottom in dark-colored glass framed on the sides, top and bottom by a width of the same white travertine marble.

Brasserie 8 ½ occupies the basement of 9 West 57th Street. You get there by descending a red-carpeted spiral staircase that curves around a red-carpeted lounge within the center of the spiral, passing a long bar—about as long as the diameter of the lounge with a slight bow in its middle—and ending at a Maitre ‘d at the end of the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase, the long bar is on your right and you’re facing a smaller bar just ahead and in front of the 250-person capacity main dining room—one bar is smoking; the other non-smoking. At the end of the room opposite the staircase is the kitchen.

Patina Restaurant Group owns the restaurant along with many others scattered on the east and west coast of the country. One of the restaurants the company owns in Manhattan is the Brasserie, located in the Seagram’s Building at 100 East 53rd between Park and Lexington Avenue, where my wife IM and I have dined on many occasions starting back in 1979 when I first started traveling to New York as a PR account executive.

The Brasserie derives its name from the French word brasseur, meaning brewer. Refugees from the Franco-Prussian War in the late 1800s found their way to Paris from the Alsace Region. Some Alsatians started breweries like those they owned in their region. In the breweries they also served the food typically found in a hofbrauhaus in Germany—sauerkraut with sausages of various kinds, which the French called choucroute garnie—as well as the dishes Parisians demanded.

Patricia Wells writing in the December 4th 1992 issue of the Herald Tribune described the quintessential Parisian brasserie, “Le Train Bleu” founded at the turn of the 20th century. She writes “the two giant dining rooms—with their eclectic, "neo-renaissance baroque" décor—are adorned with signed paintings by more than 30 provincial artists, each selected to depict the glories of his region. The paintings fill the walls, curling up onto the ceiling, and their cheeriness is particularly welcoming on gray Parisian days.”

The Brasserie was the place where the classes mixed: shift workers showing up before or after the morning, swing, or graveyard shifts for a quick, inexpensive, good, and filling meal; rubbing elbows with artists, professionals, politicians, and every other occupation found in a thriving metropolitan city. That’s how I came to first find my way to the Brasserie on East 53rd in the late 1970s. Landing at Kennedy at 8:00 PM on a Sunday evening and wanting to grab something to eat after a long flight from the west coast, my companion—a product marketing manager from Apple Computer—and I ended up there having dinner and wine at 10:00 PM.

The Brasserie 8 ½ couldn’t qualify for the description Patricia Wells attributed to “Le Train Bleu”, though the original Brasserie in the late 1970s certainly fit the mold of egalitarian eatery. Both restaurants today tend toward the avant-garde in décor. The banquette of the 1970s in the original Brasserie replaced by plush leather booths—the bench seat backs of which extend to the ceiling providing a floor to ceiling barrier between diners in adjacent booths.

We had arrived at 7:30 PM and the Maitre ‘d showed us to our table and the waiter showed up with menus and we each ordered a glass of champagne, Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label. We ordered a dish of Escargot—the evening’s appetizer special—to split between the two of us. The evening’s fish was a halibut, something IM couldn’t resist. I, for my part had my heart, set on steak frites. Before the snails arrived, the waiter showed up with a complementary appetizer, a bite of something special he had come up with to surprise each guest. The main course came and I ordered a glass of Chianti to go with the medium rare steak. IM opted for another glass of Veuve. We finished off the meal with chocolate cake that we shared and latte for IM and regular coffee for me. The receipt came to $222.41 with tip. Up the stairs a little after 9:00 PM, we decided to walk our dinner off along Central Park South.

November 1, 2007 - Receipt #9 – "Curtains"

November 1, 2007 - Receipt #9 – "Curtains"

In recalling four days in Manhattan earlier this year through the receipts I collected during the stay, I’ve arrived at the ninth one, which was acquired during the middle of a day of walking through midtown with no other goal than to get some exercise and experience the city on its first weekend day. It's Saturday morning May 19th and most of the Manhattan’s weekday workers have abandoned their jobs and those living in the city have started enjoying themselves. Mayor Bloomberg or someone in the city’s bureaucracy had issued a permit that turned 6th Avenue from 56th Street south for a good 15 blocks or more—we didn’t walk the entire length—into a street fair. We stumble upon the festival after leaving our room at the Buckingham Hotel and walking out into the now overcast Saturday morning south on 6th Avenue.

At 56th Street, NYPD-blue painted wooden horses with white lettering blaring “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” blocked southbound vehicular traffic on 6th Avenue. Once behind the police line, we joined pedestrians filling the center of the avenue. On either side of the wide thoroughfare along the curb stood a line of mostly white tents, each occupying a 10-foot square space. Supporting each were four poles, one at each corner holding aloft a four-sided pyramid top. Beneath each top, vendors offer everything imaginable for sale: ethnic foods, tee shirts—lots of tee shirts, Big Apple souvenirs, etc. As we walk, a blue- or green-topped tent intermittently disrupts the uniform pattern of white. And nearly every block has its flat, square-topped, red or yellow tent with huge “Gyro” sign painted on each side of the square. As we walk, a loud speaker somewhere to our right blares out entreaties to “step right up for a free sample of fresh made kettle corn.”

As we reach Radio City Music Hall, we see one vendor who has broken the uniform mold of his conformist neighbors. He has constructed a complete emporium of ladies decorative shirts hanging from pipes within his unusual tent. This structure is unique in that the pipes supporting each 12 ft tall sidewall form the shape of the Greek letter pi. At the top of the tent, a pipe running between the two pi-shaped structures at the front and at the back keeps the sides upright. A large blue tarp drapes over the top and hangs down both sides. Hangers on the pipes contain the large variety of women apparel being offered for sale.

Next to this large tent in a simpler one with a shallow inverted “V” tent top and no sides. It has a huge “OILS” sign hanging in the front. Next to it is a red tent the size of the white ones we’ve passed along the way. It carries a large sign reading “psychic”. In the center of 6th Avenue between 49th and 50th street is a smoke stack twelve foot high or more and about a foot in diameter painted the familiar alternating bands of international orange and white, with smoke or steam wafting up. You see them in the video intro to “Saturday Night Live.” Is this why 6th Avenue was converted into a street faire so that New York City Public Works could perform maintenance without the distraction of traffic?

At 45th Street we leave the faire and head west toward Times Square. Before I left the room this morning, I had gone on line and purchased theatre tickets to “Curtains” at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre for a matinee performance on Sunday. We made our way toward the theatre, which sits at the corner of 8th Avenue and 45th Street, to claim the tickets waiting for us at the will-call window. The overcast that had begun the day persisted casting a somber atmosphere to an otherwise upbeat, frenetic one.

Each time we pass through Times Square I’m reminded of earlier visits to Manhattan and the appearance of the place at that time compared to now. The last time was the spring before the September 11th attack. Back then NBC had a hit program entitled “The Weakest Link” hosted by Anne Robinson, and her image towered above Times Square. On this visit corporate brands had replaced the pop star. Sony was promoting its screen super hero, Spider-Man.

We found the theatre and collected our tickets at 2:55 PM, a grand total of $223.00 including a restoration fee of $3.00 and unspecified expense by Telecharge.com for processing the order. The cost of live theater like that of every other good and service we purchase has gone up.

October 29, 2007 - Receipt #8 – Coffee & Danish from Associated Supermarket, 225 W. 57th Street

October 30, 2007 - Receipt #8 – Coffee & Danish from Associated Supermarket, 225 W. 57th Street

It’s Saturday morning May 19th and we’re two days into our four-day stay in Manhattan that I’m reliving through my accumulated paper receipts. We awake just before 9:00 AM to the sound of a city enjoying the first day of a weekend. Outside, the sound of construction can still be heard as well as felt from the vibration of heavy equipment wrestling steam beams into place. The chaotic sound of horns punctuate the earning morning as traffic along 57th Street and 6th Avenue struggle to make its way faster than conditions will allow. New Yorkers talk a great deal more than Californians and perhaps the horn is a surrogate for vocal chords when you’re wrapped in a cocoon of steel, glass, and rubber. We’re right next to the elevator in the Buckingham Hotel, which reminds me of the residential hotels my family and I lived in when I was a boy in Ponce, Puerto Rico and Portland, Oregon; though the Buckingham was a couple of stars above those of my childhood.

You turn left out of the elevator and walk a few steps to reach the door or our room, number 11A. When you enter, to your left is a small closet size kitchenette with stove, refrigerator, sink and cupboards with dishes and silverware. In front and to your right is the living room with couch, on the wall opposite the entrance and television on the wall across from the couch. From the doorway, to the right of the couch is a window that provides a peek-a-boo view of 6th Avenue and the wall of an adjacent building. The Peak-a-boo view not only provides a view of traffic on 6th Avenue but the back of a nightclub featuring a year-around Halloween theme. From our vantage point you can see the props that keep the façade standing, thus spoiling the illusion of the building when we view it from the front.

On the wall across across the twelve-foot space from our room, an elderly woman occupies the rightmost of the two rooms facing our wall. Her bed is near her window and we’ve seen her sitting in her dressing gown on the bed watching television: an Edward Hopper painting, with just as much poignancy. We keep out blinds closed to provide her privacy except at night when we turn off the lights and open the window to air out our room. Our queen size bed is off to the left of the couch viewed from the doorway. Another window behind the headboard of the bed gives us a view of the wall of another tall building. To the left of the bed is a closet. At the foot of the bed adjacent to the closet is a small bathroom, about the size of the kitchenette. A desk sits on the wall next to the bathroom entrance across a small walkway from the foot of the bed. Despite being a bit cramped, the room does have a high ceiling, thus making it feel less claustrophobic.

The Buckingham has no restaurant and thus no bed and breakfast accommodations. After my morning toilet, I leave IM checking her e-mail on the iBook G4 portable we’ve brought with us at the desk at the foot of the bed and go out of the hotel in search of a morning breakfast. I head west on 57th toward 7th Avenue. We had passed a supermarket on our way back from the theatre last night and I’m en route there now to purchase breakfast for the two of us. I reach Associated Supermarket at 225 W. 57th Street just before Broadway and I enter. It’s sparsely filled with early morning shoppers. There is a deli section and a few patrons are enjoying coffee and pastry while reading the paper at small tables set up inside. I purchase two Danish and a cup of coffee. IM prefers tea and we have Lipton tea bags and hot water in the hotel room. I pay cash at one of the two checkout counters going this early on a Saturday. I’m the only one in line but a lady comes up after I’m rung up. The bill comes to just over $5.00 and I add sugar to my tall coffee, put a lid on it, and take my purchases out into a slightly overcast Saturday morning—the rising sun peaking beneath a persistent cloud cover that threatens to enshroud the day in a pall.

On my way back to the Buckingham, I walk beneath scaffolding of a building under repair. We’ve seen quite a bit of construction everywhere we’ve walked in the city since we’ve arrived. Manhattan resembles a living organism that is constantly repairing its damaged body, replacing aging parts of its anatomy with new construction or renovating structures that have elements worth preserving—this appeared to be the case with building I’m walking beside. When I return to the room, IM has heated water for her tea and she and I sit down to have our Danish before heading out into to the increasingly overcast Saturday.

October 28, 2007 - Receipt #7 – Candy Before Performance of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail”

October 28, 2007 - Receipt #7 – Candy Before Performance of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail”

Back in the room, IM surfs the Internet while I write in my Reporter’s Notebook and read the May 21st issue of the New Yorker. I’m absorbed with Peter Hessler’s “Letter From China: Walking the Wall” describing David Spindler’s fascination with China’s hundreds year old defense against the marauding Mongols. Spindler is an independent scholar of the Great Wall and pursues his scholarship with a Quixote zeal that borders on obsession. I’ve visited Shanghai several times in the past year and a half and never gotten beyond a two-mile radius of the Hotel Sofitel Jin Jiang Pudong, the distance I can comfortably walk in the small amount of time my business reasons for visiting China allows. The author and Spindler hiking the little known sections of the ancient wall in remote areas of China I will probably never visit makes for a compelling read.

Curiously, the Great Wall has kept foreign cultures out all these many hundreds of years in contrast to America that has embraced continuous waves of immigration since the first Europeans set foot on this land. And nowhere is this influx of cultures and ethnicities more evident than in Manhattan, where north, south, east, Middle East, and west come together—a trip round the world experienced in a walk through the city’s neighborhoods. After over half a century watching the rest of Asia prosper by engaging the West, the gates of China’s Great Wall have been thrown open and the world is flooding in. I get the impression that if you understand the Great Wall you might well understand China.

Rested and refreshed, we leave the Buckingham at a quarter after seven in the evening, and walk down 6th Avenue to 44th Street, where we turn right, join the throng of theater-goers all making their ways to their play or musical, and proceed across Broadway and 7th where the two cross one another. We make it through the mass of humanity and arrive at the Shubert in plenty of time before the performance begins. The musical was vintage Monty Python, bits and pieces of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a tune from “Meaning of Life”, all begun with a musical version of the fish face slapping skit from the original “Monty Python Flying Circus” BBC Series. It’s the joke that starts the play.

The audience at the Shubert for the play was unique in that most were fans of Monty Python comedy, much like the audience for “Jersey Boys” and “Mama Mia” are fans of the music in each play. Perhaps the uniqueness of the audience owes more to my observing its members more closely than when we attended musicals and plays in the past. Perhaps the audience for “A Class Act” the musical based on the life and work of Edward Kleban, which IM and I saw in 2001 were there to see life of the lyricist who created the songs to “Chorus Line” or the audience for “Aspects of Love” which I saw alone in 1991 were fans of Andrew Lloyd Webber, its creator. Neither garnered the Broadway acclaim of long running hits “Chorus Line” or “Cats”, perhaps because they lacked the fan base that causes one musical to succeed beyond expectations and others to sink into oblivion after a few performances.

I’m reminded of a musical playing during the time Irene and I were dating back in the 1960s. “The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd” book, music, and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The musical had posters plastered throughout Penn Station and at every train stop on Long Island and in Manhattan. It failed after a few months on Broadway, despite producing the hit song “Who Can I turn to,” that every singer of note in the 1960s recorded. IM and I chose to see “Funny Girl,” with Barbra Streisand. It too produced the popular hit “People” but enjoyed long running success as well. On reflection, perhaps neither the Broadway plays nor the audiences have change, perhaps I have.

We are seated in the Mezzanine in row H seats 112 and 113 one in from the aisle. After we get settled, I want something sweet and venture to the concession stand at the a few rows up and behind us. There I purchase a box of junior mints for IM—her favorites—and a roll of Mentos mints for me. The attendant was so busy that I didn’t want to ask her for a receipt which she didn’t offer when providing me change for the five dollar bill I tendered for the purchase, which I dropped into a tip jar.

The aisle seat on our row is occupied by a lone male in seat 114, ten to fifteen years my junior, putting him in his fifties or late forties with thinning graying dark hair. Spreading in the middle, he fits uneasily in the narrow theater seat with so little leg room in front that those seated must stand up to allow others to pass. Throughout the play he squirms restlessly trying to get comfortable but to no avail, bumping into me in the process—the one reason I took notice of him. He is dressed in a white shirt and dull gray slacks and carries a white plastic shopping bag packed roundly with stuff—hard to tell if its recent purchases or belonging he’s carrying around for lack of a backpack or briefcase. Once I noticed him, I couldn’t help trying to fathom how he came to be at the play alone. Perhaps the simple answer was he wanted somewhere to spend a couple of hours and be entertained

The play had some funny bits, though the gay humor did get old after a bit. The female, who kept reminding the audience in typical Monty Python style that she was the female lead, was funny. The play ended to considerable audience applause and IM and I made our way out of the theater and headed for 8th Avenue for our return walk to the Buckingham Hotel.

October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

I’m recounting four days in Manhattan through the written receipts we’ve amassed during our stay. This is the sixth. After paying for our purchase we leave the store and find a bench across from the museum store entrance to sit for a second to gather all our purchases in a single large plastic bag. All around us is a steady stream of pedestrian entering and leaving Rockefeller Center Plaza, many stop on either side of where we are sitting and attempt to take photos of sculptor Paul Manship’s famous gilded statue of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind. Prometheus guards the Rockefeller Center Plaza subterranean patio as you enter from 5th Avenue. The statue was commissioned in January 1933 for this quintessential Art Deco center built in the depths of the Depression. It was the ultimate statement of capitalist optimism in the darkest period of modern history—“let them eat cake,” and why not?

Purchases all packed into a single bag, we head back to the hotel along 5th Avenue, passing at 55th Street, the St Regis Hotel, which was the preferred Manhattan staff lodging during the year and a half I spent in the late 1970s working for Regis McKenna Public Relations in Palo Alto—himself having a penchant for staying at the hotel that bore his name. It was a late night arrival on the occasion of my first visit to Manhattan in the agency’s employ that the St. Regis Bellman introduced me to the Brasserie Restaurant at 100 East 53rd Street. “It’s open 24 hours a day, has modest priced, great food, and it’s where everyone who work nights in Midtown go for dinner when they get off,” he enthused. I had a product marketing manager from Apple Computer Inc. in tow at the time and the two of us had great steaks and pommes frites, accompanied by a California red. Back then the Brasserie was the kind of egalitarian hang out with the 1960s décor that resembled its Paris namesake.

A block further north, we pass Trump Tower; the first three stories of the building’s face wrapped in a bright red advertisement for Gucci—the wrap art style of Christo and Jeanne-Claude commandeered for a completely commercial purpose. How could you ignore all that red adorned with glamorous women, made-up and coifed to look perfect in Gucci designed apparel? IM and I certainly couldn’t. A block further north and we turn left onto 57th Street intending to return to the Buckingham, but hunger sets in and the two of us realize we’ve not had anything to eat since getting up this morning except a glass of orange juice. On the south east corner of 6th Avenue and 57th Street, we spy the restaurant Rue 57 and determine there is where we’ll sate our appetite. The restaurant’s entrance is on the 57th Street side of the corner and we enter to a full room of diners—the midtown lunch crowd finishing up before heading back to their offices to finish off their workweek. Being in a big city on a weekday when everyone else is committing themselves 9 to 5, I always have the impression of being truant from school. All around you the conversation is shoptalk, except for the smattering of tables with other truant tourists like IM and me.

Just as we give our name to the hostess, a corner table comes available at the back of the restaurant opposite the entrance. We follow our hostess to our table snaking between diners’ chairs squeezed so compactly together that it was hard not to brush the back of each chair you passed. Once seated IM orders a Margarita, and I order a glass of champagne. The three tables to our right, toward the reception desk, were being bussed and made ready for new patrons when we were seated and by the time our drink order arrives, the two tables next to us are squeezed together for a party of four. The one lone third table accommodates of a couple that arrive just after the foursome is seated. Our neighbors are a young couple and an older couple—son and significant other being treated by Mom and Dad—or vice versa to lunch in midtown. The older couple speaks French to one another and English, with little accent, to the younger couple, with the conversation eventually becoming all English. I’m not terribly observant when it comes to other peoples’ conversations except when their body language conveys tension that compels me to listen. The foursome’s conversation resembled white noise to me, sounds beating against my consciousness but nothing registering. IM and I discussed the day, what our kids back in California were doing now, how bad the plane ride was and how great it used to be, and what New York used to be like when we were younger.

IM and I met at the Page Two, a nightclub in Oceanside on Long Island in February 1964, which had dancing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was looking to meet someone and IM was dumping her boyfriend. She was sitting alone at the bar drinking a rye and ginger and I asked her to dance, She accepted and we spent the rest of the evening dancing and talking. She had come with girlfriends and left with them later but not before I had asked her out the upcoming Saturday to tour the city doing tourist things. She accepted and I spent the rest of the week trying to plan out the day, without much success.

The next Saturday I picked her up at her place, without a clue as to what we were going to do for the day. We walked to the train station near her place, and took the train into the city, getting off at Penn Station, where all the commuter trains disgorged their loads. Our first stop was the United Nations, which I had wanted to tour. IM had already been but was eager to do it again. The UN was a major topic of discussion during my current affairs class at Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington—taught by a retired military officer, who had been stationed all over the world and had turned the whole class on to getting out and seeing what had excited him so. He was one of the reasons I joined the Navy rather than going on to college. You could say he contributed to my being where I was at that instant.

Secretary-General U Thant headed the institution back then, but I was more familiar with Dag Hammarskjöld, the man who preceded him. I was struck by his untimely death in a plane crash on a peace mission in the Congo. Men like him were larger than life characters and to have one of them die accidentally made you realize that death didn’t make exceptions for standing in the community. I recall during the tour how small the rooms appeared. On television during the evening news broadcasts, the rooms all seemed larger and more spacious. It was especially large when black and white video showed Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on his desk in the General Assembly during the fall of 1960. Did the camera lie or did my mind make these places and events larger to fit their purpose in the world? I suspect the latter. The other impression I left the UN with was the diversity of people working there. It was my first encounter with black Africans, Europeans, and Asians in such numbers, more than I had ever come across in all the travels the Army provided my family and me. IM and I toured the UN again during our visit in 2001. The revelation then was the increased diversity of people over our first visit, not only working at the UN but among the visitors touring it as well.

Our lunch arrives, IM has a chicken salad and I have veal scallopini and another glass of champagne. On our first date in New York IM and I left the UN in the afternoon and took in a movie—Goldfinger—Sean Connery playing James Bond, a young Dame Shirley Bassey singing the title song during the opening credits. After the movie we walk around midtown riding up the Empire State Building elevator and looking out over the city, wandered about Rockefeller Center and eventually ended up in a little Italian restaurant on one of the streets in the Theatre District. All I remember of the place was our table had a checkerboard tablecloth in the center of which was a bulbous-bottom Chianti bottles wrapped in basket with a candle burning and candle wax encasing its neck and bottom. IM and I talked about our families, her mom and dad, her married older sister and two bachelor brothers in Scotland. I described my Filipina mother, Southern Baptist father, and three younger school-aged sisters. Here we were two people from the opposite ends of the earth having dinner in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan—what were the chances? Our lunch at Rue 57 was memorable because we were both very hungry; our dinner at the little Italian restaurant 47 years ago because it was the first, because the day had been perfect, and, except for a few other tables of early-bird diners we had the place to ourselves.

The waiter returns after we had finished our meal and asked if we wanted dessert, which we both decline. I offer him my credit card and he returns a few minutes later with the credit card slip, which I sign. The bill came to just under $112 with tip. It was just coming on 3:00 PM and sated, we snake our way back to the front of the restaurant and out onto 57th Street. We walk back to the Buckingham and take a rest before the performance of Spamalot at 8:00 PM that evening.

October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

I’ve come to the fifth receipt that I’ve collected since my wife IM and I started our four-day trip to Manhattan. After collecting our tickets at the Shubert Theatre box office, we exit the theater and walk along Shubert Alley between 44th and 45th streets toward 45th to the theater gift shopped named after the alley. We had given this shop plenty of business over the years—t-shirts from Cats, Chess, My One and Only, A Chorus Line and cast recordings of Nine, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love, Les Miserables, among other items. IM was looking for T-shirts for the grand kids, but realized that they would not recognize any of the shows pictured on the shirts on display. We leave the shop in search of a store with t-shirts showing action heroes—Buzz Lightyear, Spiderman, to be specific—two favorites of our young grand sons.

We walk back toward Times Square, picking our way through the crowds spilling off the sideways into the street and turn left on 7th Avenue sure we’ll find a souvenir shop overflowing with the types of T-Shirts IM wants. How the mass of humanity and stream of car, truck, motorcycle, and bicycle traffic manage to move and not collide with one another in the confined space of the square is nothing short of amazing. IM leads the way as we walk up 7th, heading directly into the oncoming flow of pedestrian, which give way just enough to allow her passage. I follow along in her wake occasionally averting the throng approaching me by walking in the street mindful of the IM’s blue-jacketed back off to my left. We reunite at 46th street and stand fast as other pedestrians dash between east-bound traffic along the street. When the light changes and traffic stops, we resume our trek seeing off to our left the souvenir store with the shirts we’re after on display in its window. Weaving our way through the flow of people coming towards us, we enter the store and IM finds the shirts she’s after.

After looking for something for the grand daughters, however, she becomes frustrated and decides to look elsewhere for everything. We return the shirts to their rack and exit the store merging into the flow of northbound pedestrians heading north on the west side of Broadway. On the east side of the street, Virgin Mobile has an drive-in theater size screen mounted one and a half stories above street level playing a rock video. Just south of Virgin Mobile, Planet Hollywood beckons pedestrians to escape the hustle and bustle of the sidewalk and join the hustle and bustle within. We continue on until we reach 49th where we turn right heading east to escape the crush of humanity we’ve been struggling against for the past five block. Moving along 49th toward 6th Avenue, the amount of pedestrian traffic has diminished to a far more reasonable amount: plenty of room on the narrow sidewalks along either side of the street. As we walk, we pass restaurants filled with diners—it’s the lunch hour—and make our way around patrons loitering in conversation on the sidewalk after finishing their meal or couples eyeing the menu posted outside before committing themselves to enter. It’s still dull and overcast and occasionally we feel drops of rain that abruptly come and go.

When we reach Rockefeller Center we walk around the subterranean patio restaurants below, tables and umbrellas deserted in the face of an overcast and chilly day. Diners in the enclosed Sea Grill Restaurant and Roc Center Café on either side of the open-air patio below deprived of a view to accompany their meal. We enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art store on the south east side of Rockefeller center and spend time looking at the paraphernalia the store had for sale. IM finds a doll for our eldest grand daughter and a T-shirt with a ballerina on it for our youngest grand daughter. I buy IM a Kaleidoscope and a DVD tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The store receipt shows the purchase took place at 1:49 pm on Friday May 18th. Another moment in time documented in print.