One would think that asking a taxi driver who picked us up at the southernmost tip of Central Park to drop us off at the Met would be an easy ride. After getting plopped off at the Museum of Natural History, where a big Tyrannosaurus rex banner hung in the entrance, I realized it wasn’t so simple. I also realized too late that we were on the wrong side of the park completely. Fortunately, the morning was holding off on the rain, so we made our way through the lush verdant expanse of the park, where we could enjoy what spring flowers still clung to their first flush of the season.
Most years we simply skirt the edges of Central Park ~ only rarely do we end up going through it. We really should do it more often. From our lofty hotel room vantage point, the size and immensity of the place was especially striking. (It’s also how I knew we could never walk to the Met in a few short minutes, particularly when rain was a continuous threat. It’s just too far for my lazy legs.)
Once ensconced within all the greenery, it’s almost easy to forget you are in the middle of New York City. Even here, however, and perhaps especially here, there were lots of people going about their day, so the idea of crowds and surging population was never quite that far. Once in a while, we’d round a corner and have a brief respite from the bikers and walkers and tourists, where we’d stumble upon something like these geranium plants, giving off a delicacy not usually found in the city. It was a calmer and more subtle variation on the beauty that awaited us at the Met.
‘Camp: Notes on Fashion’ was this year’s Met Gala theme, based on this stupendous exhibition. We arrived early in the day (despite our wayward taxi ride and park walk) in order to beat the crowds, and for the most part we succeeded. There were not yet the two-hour lines that greeted the great Alexander McQueen exhibit from several years ago, but a healthy stream of viewers ebbed and flowed past the pair of mirrored-fig-leaf-clad male sculptures that marked the entrance.
The thing about camp is that it all too often defies definition, and the moment you try to pin it down and label it is the moment that its very campiness departs. Still, a worthy effort was made to encompass the theme, placing particular emphasis on Susan Sontag’s epochal essay ‘Notes on ‘Camp” and using that as a guide for the wildly disparate ideas of camp which ran throughout the exhibit.
There were so many great outfits on display, I couldn’t possibly capture them all in this single post, so keep your eyes out for a follow-up post at some point. It was a beautifully-curated exhibit, captured in a gorgeously-crafted book (which at $50 was a relative steal) but I didn’t want to carry that thing around the city, so I’ll find it online later. Camp is nothing if not fertile ground for inspiration, especially in these parts.
For now, we return to the New York adventures at hand, which found Mom and I having dinner at the Hunt & Fish Club before taking in a production of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ starring Jeff Daniels. Dinner was lovely ~ in a myriad of soft lights and mirrors, everything looks and tastes better ~ and the play was a remarkable feat of wonder. It’s a brutally difficult thing to adapt such a beloved classic to the stage, and they managed to do so while keeping true to the soul and spirit of the book. Powerfully relevant to today’s world, it was quite the theatrical achievement with an ensemble that rises to the material and task at hand.
As much as I abhor Times Square, and the crush of people and madness of the world crammed into such a small space, it is always worth braving for shows like this. It’s also worth it to spend some time with Mom, haunting these grand old theaters, with their faded velvet seats that start out too small and confining, then expand into an entire universe as spun out thrillingly upon the stage before us.
In the moments before the curtain rises, the usual giddy anticipation pervades the atmosphere. We know that something wondrous is about to happen as we thumb through the Playbill articles and look back at others shows we’ve seen in whatever theater we happen to be in. At this point, we’ve been in many, and all have their happy memories and connotations. On this night, a new memory is being made by way of Harper Lee…
