On the first day of spring, it is snowing in New York and nice and warm back home where I’m headed. Last night, I was trying on a sundress and didn’t want to ask Cesar what he thought, so I asked an elderly woman sitting right outside the dressing room who had been on the phone updating a blow by blow of the shopping trip she was on with her granddaughter. She said, “Nah, the color is just not right for you. You could do better.”
Today, before going to catch my plane home, I ran out to the MOMA and stopped first at the Design store and bought a Chilewich bag for my new briefcase and got a bag for Tatjana. Then I raced through the exhibits at the gallery, pausing only in front of the giant Pollock with memory fragments of Steve and Kim’s words in my mind to warm me to the piece, then I stopped again in front of a photograph exhibit by Paul Graham of a black woman eating fried chicken and another of the King’s meat market on Washington and Broad in New Orleans. The images looked so foreign and yet so familiar – what must people think of New Orleans when they come (if they get out of the French Quarter).
I weaved through two groups of students sitting on the floor in front of a Picasso and then a sculpture with real looking legs sticking out of a box. Most of the children were black, and I find myself still looking at hairstyles. One said, “That’s a real person in there.” And the teacher said, “Do you think someone sits in that box all day at the museum?” And the rest of the kids all said, “YES!””
To the MOMA Cafe to get a bite since I hadn’t even had tea yet and it was near noon and I asked the two docents, elderly ladies, should I eat at the cafe or the restaurant and one said, “Well the money, you know,” referring to the restaurant and the other said, “Go in there (nodding towards the cafe), you’ll get what you want.”
So thank you all the elderly of New York, and the youth of New York, and all the rest except for the woman who called me a bitch – the pleasure has been all mine.