Celia, the Chocolate Thief

So this is entry is not about NYC or travel, but it's too adorable not to post.  This is my two-year-old niece who has recently learned not only to climb out of her crib but to explore the refrigerator.  (Maybe this is about travel, after all.)  Note her indifference at being caught brown-handed:  she simply gives her name and continues chewing in a chocoholic haze. 

"Our Miles Go in Circles"

Another fabulous conversation with an eighth-grader on the Downtown R.

ROBERT:  The city blocks are the shorter blocks, and there are twenty blocks in a mile.

EIGHTH GRADER:  What?!

ROBERT:  Twenty blocks make up one mile.

EIGHTH GRADER:  If you walk in a straight line?

ROBERT:  Um, right.

EIGHTH GRADER:  Our miles go in circles.

ROBERT:  What do you mean?

EIGHTH GRADER:  Like one mile where we're from is four times around the track.

The Logic of an Ambivalent Eighth Grader

ROBERT:  (speaking to eighth grader who bought a bat--with his name engraved--at Yankees stadium):  Do you play baseball?

KID:  No.

ROBERT:  Do you like the Yankees?

KID:  Not really.

ROBERT:  Then why'd you buy the bat?

KID:  My mom said she was gonna take back any change I bring home, so I thought, Might as well buy a bat.

The Garden of Eden

After a visit to the Conservatory Gardens in Central Park, a middle schooler, who loves to walk up in the front and talk, begins to ramble.

MIDDLE SCHOOLER:  Those are nice.  I'd like to go to the real Italy and see if it looks like that garden..

ROBERT:  Well...

MIDDLE SCHOOLER:  ...and the real France and the real England.

ROBERT:  That would be a nice trip.

MIDDLE SCHOOLER:  Where's the Garden of Eden?

ROBERT:  Um.

MIDDLE SCHOOLER:  Because that would be real nice to see.

ROBERT:  Mm.

MIDDLE SCHOOLER:  What happened to it?  Did they tear it down?  That's sad.  I wish they didn't tear it down, because I would've seen it some day.  Would you want to see the Garden of Eden?  What do you think is nicer?  The Central Park garden or the Garden of Eden?

ROBERT:  I like Central Park.

MIDDLE SCHOOLER:  Why?

ROBERT:  Because it exists.

A Subway Subscriber

MIDDLE SCHOOLER FROM CENTRALIA, MO:  How much does a subway ride cost?

ROBERT:  Two twenty-five.

MIDDLE SCHOOLER:  Each time?  But you ride it a lot, so you probably have a membership.

If You Cleaned Your Plate Like My Cousin's Daughter Did...

...I hope you have a restful holiday weekend.

 

 

A Little Behind on the Blogs

I just returned from a long weekend in Palm Springs (away from the cold and endless rain of New York) where I spent the whole weekend lounging in the pool with my six-month-old niece and chasing after my cousin's daughter who just started walking... like a drunk sailor.

I will, however, have the next installment in NYC--Decade by Decade (1670-1679) ready for Thursday.

Actress Andrea Burns Debates Theater with a Four-Year-Old

One of my favorite exchanges of the last few months took place on Election Night between Andrea Burns (Danielle in the Tony-award-winning In the Heights) and her son, Hudson, who appeared in several Little Bytes videos when he was three.  (He plays the eponymous Little Tourist Who Could in the Bowling Green tour.) 

(This picture was taken of the family one year before the 2008 debate.)

Hudson was kneeling behind a chair in the living room, putting on a puppet show for his parents and me, but he was four and I'm not afraid to say that the narrative was all over the place--the characters were inconsistent, the voice work muddy, the themes carelessly established and then just as carelessly abandoned.

Besides, Andrea and I hadn't seen each other in a while and we were trying to catch up.  When the constant chatter became too much for the puppetmaster, he stood up from behind the chair and scolded us for not paying attention.

"Hudson," Andrea stopped him, declaiming: "The number one rule in the Theater:  Never bully your audience."

Hudson, who's been attending the theater since he was less than a year old, replied:  "I thought the number one rule was:  The audience has to be quiet."

Touche.

The puppet show resumed.

A Byte of Balto

 

To continue the top dog theme of the week (not including yesterday's Lincoln tribute) here's our Balto blog, originally posted on March 27th:

While giving tours, I sometimes yield the floor to a specialist in the group--an engineer, architect or historian--or to a student who might have just finished a report on the subject for school.  On a recent stop at the statue of Balto in Central Park, an eighth-grader volunteered to tell the story.  Since she was from Ohio, I thought it possible that she was an authority--the real Balto lived out his life at the Cleveland Zoo and was subsequently stuffed and put on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. 

Judging from her lecture, quoted below, her research was clearly not conducted at a museum but came exclusively from the 1995 animated movie.

"Balto inspired the Iditarod race, because he brought medicine through a snowstorm all the way to a far part of Alaska.  They needed it or people would die and nobody thought he could do it.  The other dogs made fun of him and there was a rival dog who didn't want him on the team and there was a lot of prejudice because he wasn't a purebred, he was part wolf..."

I cut her off before she got to the love interest or Balto's comic sidekick, Boris the goose.  I had to explain that there were some differences between the movie and history and pointed out the well-known fact that, besides humans, only reindeer make fun of each other.

 

I'm Back!

Thanks to Cayce for helping out with the blog this week.  Where have I been?  From the picture it might appear that I attended the southern California Ping Pong Championship, and that's not too far off since my family takes ping pong almost as seriously as it takes miniature golf.  My parents live in Myrtle Beach for Golf's sake! 

I finished drafting the new novel the weekend before last and took off for a week in sunny California.  (Actually, it rained a bit, but the temperature beat the crap out of New York's.)  My family flew out or drove up to Los Angeles for a belated Christmas reunion.  Only a month late.   

Now that I've returned, I'm ready to dive back into the novel and resume the blog...right after I celebrate the New Year.  The ball is still up in Times Square, (read this if you've forgotten), so those of us with a flexible holiday schedule can do the countdown whenever we feel like it.  I love this city!

To wrap up, here are two shots of my niece, the real redheaded reason I flew west:

 

GORGEOUS!!

 

Bald on top with a red fringe in the back, she has a Ron Howard look going on right now.  It works.

How Long Was That Lame Duck Period Anyway?

For a visual measurement of the weeks between the election and the inauguration, let me present the growth of my niece, Celia Virginia, who was born during voting hours on November 4th, 2008...

 

...and who had become a Love Bug by January 20th, 2009...

Here's a comparison using a basketball signed by Michael Jordan (her parents used to work for ESPN):

 

November

January

The Battle for Belvedere Castle

It's snowing again today and I was reminded of the Battle for Belvedere Castle, a massive snowball fight waged last February.  This is a repost (2/2008) of that epic confrontation:

During the season's first winter storm last Friday, a day when most news outlets focused on the Serbian protesters setting part of the U.S. embassy ablaze or on the Turkish forces crossing into Iraq to engage Kurdish rebels, a much less publicized battle raged at Belvedere Castle, high above Turtle Pond.  It was my mission that morning to lead an unruly squad of forty-two eighth-graders and four of their teachers across Central Park.  After stocking up on rations in Times Square, we were transferred by the local B to our starting point at 81st Street.  A few in the ranks reported that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was closed due to snow, but they were from California and didn't know the difference between the Metropolitan Museum and Metropolitan College or whatever school would have announced its closing on the news that morning.  I ignored them and entered the park through the Hunter's Gate.     My plan was to march them south, then east to the Swedish Cottage, where we would turn north and then east to cut between the Delacorte Theater and the Great Lawn, slipping below the East Drive via the Greywacke Arch to reach Fifth Avenue and approach the Met from the south.  At the West Drive, however, I decided that we couldn't rush through such a beautiful winter landscape and I led them instead into the Ramble and up the windy path to Belvedere Castle.  I alerted my fellow guide, who was responsible for an additional forty-eight students and teachers, to our whereabouts.  He replied that they too would make the climb.

A Byte at the Plaza Hotel, Parenting Trick 6475-56-B3

On the steps at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Plaza Hotel, a mother is trying to take a picture of her three young girls, dressed up for the holidays.  The youngest is tired and sits as her two older sisters stand and smile.

TRICKY MOTHER:  "You have to stand on the red steps.  You can't sit down.  Those are the rules.  It says so right there." 

Girl looks for sign.  (There is none.)  She stands.  Mother presses button on camera.

Floridians in the Snow

School's out.  The fall tour season ended for me on Friday just as the winter's first real snow began to fall.  Cayce and I worked with a group of students from South Sumter High School located an hour north of Tampa.  Most of them had never seen snow, so they were very excited.  "It's snowing!  It's snowing!" some yelled on Liberty Street when it was still hard to make out the flakes.  (More dandruff  than snow.)  When we left Federal Hall to walk on Wall Street, the snow could be classified as a genuine flurry. One of the students asked if we could walk farther east, because it looked like it was snowing much harder four blocks away.  I had to explain that it was just the poor visibility that came with snow and that there was no blizzard on Front Street.

After Trinity Church and a visit to the Charging Bull, it was snowing hard enough for me to put up my umbrella.  I wasn't the only New Yorker doing that and it baffled many.  I heard one girl on her cell phone talking to someone from home:  "Do you know people up here use their umbrellas in the SNOW?"  Another asked me why.  "Well, you see, snow is actually frozen water and...oh, just wait."  As we walked up Beaver Street, I heard several say, "Wow, I'm really wet!" and "It's not like the movies."  There were very few complaints though.  Two of the guys kept running their hands over my umbrella to gather enough snow for a snowball since nothing was accumulating on the wet sidewalks.  But when we reached South Street Seaport, the wooden docks were covered with a blanket of snow...

...and South Sumter's first snowball fight instantly broke out.

 

A Holiday Reminder from the Cast and Crew of "In the Heights"

After a recent Saturday matinee, Lin Manuel Miranda and the cast and crew of In the Heights, winner of this year's Best Musical Tony, stayed at the theater and helped realize a dream for a ten-year-old "super fan."  Watch what they did! 

I hope you didn't miss the very funny coda in the last five seconds.

Bytes of Trivia: The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

--The first parade took place in 1924.  It began at 145th and Convent Avenue and marched over 5 miles south to Herald Square.  The participants were immigrant employees of Macy's who wanted to recreate the parades they had in Europe.  The first parade included animals that they borrowed from the Central Park Zoo--elephants, camels, and goats. 

--The second parade, in 1925, featured lions, tigers and bears.  (Oh, my!)  Because children were a bit frightened by these parades, balloons were introduced in 1927.  That was also the year that the parade was renamed the Thanksgiving Day Parade (instead of the Christmas Parade which you see in the original advertisement).

--The balloons in 1928 were filled with helium and released at the end of the parade.  They almost immediately exploded.

--Safety valves were introduced the following year and subsequent balloon releases were accompanied by a contest--whoever returned a balloon would win a reward from Macy's.  1933 was the last year they held that contest--a pilot's engine stalled while going after one of these balloons and two tugboats in the East River crashed racing each other for the dachshund balloon.

----The second-largest Thanksgiving parade in the United States takes place in Stamford, Connecticut on the Sunday before Thanksgiving and features retired balloons from the Macy's parade in New York.

--After the U.S. government, Macy's is the second biggest helium consumer in the country.

--The balloons and floats are designed at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

--The most dangerous parade was in 1997 when winds almost reached 40mph.  The Cat in the Hat crashed into a lamppost, which fell into the crowd, leaving one of the four injured with permanent brain damaged.  To prevent further calamities, both the Pink Panther and Barney (who were threatening the crowds) were slashed and stomped to death in front of crying children and cheering New Yorkers.

AND I'M AN UNCLE!!

My brother's first child was due on the 28th of November, but she woke her mother up yesterday morning, eager to vote or at least be out in the world on this historic day.

 

My niece,

Celia Virginia, 6 lbs, 6 oz.,

 born November 4th, 2008,

holding the pinky fingers of her mother and father...

...and trying to watch the election results.

COFFEE BREAK AT THE MUSEUM and THE WORST SEED

THIS WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED ON MARCH 13, 2008.  FOR MORE OF THE ORIGINAL BLOG (MAY, 2006-SEPTEMBER, 2008), CLICK HERE.

Last weekend, as my tour group strolled through the fossil record, I bought a cup of coffee and tried to get some writing done in the basement food court, stupidly forgetting that the basement food court at the American Museum of Natural History is where children come to throw their grandest tantrums.  Billed as NYC's top family attraction--and I have no doubt that it is--there's not a place in the tri-state area with a higher quota of screaming, crying, and whining children or of parents fuming, mutually loathing each other, resenting whomever had the bright idea of a trip to the museum, regretting every decision in their lives that brought them to this moment.  Night at the Museum is about a security guard at the Museum of Natural History who discovers "an ancient curse (that) causes the animals and exhibits on display to come to life and wreak havoc."  This is a comedy.  A horror movie would be entitled Coffee Break at the Museum and would also involve an ancient curse that transforms all the children who come through the doors of the basement food court.  I gave up writing and decided instead to transcribe the pandemonium around me.  Here are selections from one ten-minute period.