Since my arrival two and
a half weeks ago, I wake up and Google all the great places that have been
recommended. The Museum of Sex is apparently a bit of a laugh, but I still
haven’t managed to get there. I suppose I am engaging in a kind of museum
foreplay: a little bit of a Google here, a Tweet there. But it still hasn’t got
me through their doors.
One friend recommended
the Frick Museum, and, of course, the jewel in the NYC crown, the Guggenheim.
When I hit 50, I vowed that the one thing I would never do again (apart from
date anyone called David – by far my worst relationships, but that’s another
book) was queue, so I paid $75 for membership of the latter, just to enjoy the
priority entrance (or was that for the Museum of Sex?).
I still haven’t made it
there, because the route from 106th Street on Central Park West, where
I have been staying, looks way too complicated. Helicopters might have to be
involved. There is a bus that would take me directly there, but that would mean
walking in the direction of Harlem first, and, with my luck, that would turn
into another Find my iPad situation on the computer. If I don’t have at least
one iPad stolen a year now, I feel as if I haven’t lived (my last stolen one,
by the way, has shown up on my computer as being in Burbank, California, but
the range of addresses is too vast for me to go there to confront the thieves.
Just as well, I suppose).
So, it’s now lunchtime,
and I am again contemplating the Museum of Sex, not least because someone is
having a singing lesson at full throttle a little down the hallway. I am a
trained singer and know a bad throttle when I see one (watch out, Museum of Sex
– I can be very critical).
My experience of bars
and restaurants is currently outdoing the museum visits, although, with the
exception of Mickey Spillane’s on 49th Street, I have found the
service leaving something to be desired – namely, any service at all, in some
cases.
A very nice Brazilian
waiter gave me an extra glass of Chianti because a morsel of pork landed in the
first glass (note to self: take pork scratchings to all Brazilian restaurants
in future), and the youngsters at MS are a joy. But as for the rest, you could
have three birthdays waiting for a frozen Margarita.
At one Italian
establishment, a female Russian behind the bar was so aggressive, I thought the
US must already be at war with the Ukraine.
The blind piano player
took a shine to me, something that no one with 100% vision has yet done. He
asked me how tall I was and, when I told him five foot, he said that I had the
personality and charisma of a five foot seven woman, whom the gods had chosen
to put in a five foot body as a joke. “They can be mean like that,” he said.
“Look what they did to me.”
True, lack of inches
doesn’t come close to blindness in terms of the gods’ punishment, but all the
same, it put a bit of a dampener on the evening.
He then proceeded to
sing every song to me – and I mean EVERY song, even changing the hair colour of
the woman in Eric Clapton’s The Way You Look Tonight. Well, he had to shorten
my explanation, which had been “dark brown from birth, but it lightened as I
got older, then when I started going gray, I began to use Laboratoire Garnier,
which I found much better than Clairol”, to “brown”. Heck, I was only trying to
help the poor guy with the visuals.
The venue has the most
exotic rest room I have ever seen. Candles, statues, even a small garden table
and two chairs. I’m not sure I want anyone to see me on the toilet, let alone
two Italians sharing a limoncello.
The whole escapade
turned out to be a bit of a damp squib, anyway, as the many stone fountains of
running water around the all too modern, white plastic receptacle, resulted in
my barely being able to deposit a drop. I know that running water is supposed
to have the opposite effect, but this really was overkill. There was enough
running water in this tiny space to persuade a killer whale to empty its
blowhole.
Which reminds me once
again. I have to visit the Museum of Sex.
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