Art Before Death: Girls in Thai Places

1.  Began the night by trying to catch the opening of the Moby Dick marathon reading and discovered that it had started at Word in Greenpoint, not Housing Works in Soho.  Moby Dick moves to Soho tomorrow.  At Housing Works tonight was a Granta-sponsored reading.

Banana leaf!  This is the vegan version, the only version not rendered in pork fat.

2.  My family and I ate at Pok Pok Thai--where the menu is basically pad thai, three different ways.  The music was Thai versions of '70s hits like "Funkytown" and "Boogie Nights."  Pink Floyd's "The Wall."  Amazing.

2.  Did not want to go home so we headed to the reopening of the Clemente Soto Velez center--a hundred-year-old recently restored public school.  It's a hive of a place with a million rooms and theaters:  there were two gallery openings, a theatrical performance, video screenings, and on the main floor the most brilliant salsa band, performing as part of the Borimix Puerto Rican fest.  Women older than my 70-something mother had joined the band of their own accord onstage and were sexy salsa dancing, making the most of their bodies, dancing until they drop dead.  This music is more than just party music--something about the drumming and percussion, the slave origins of it, I find incredibly moving, especially live.  No one could stay in their seats.

At CULTUREfix, refusing to go to bed.

3.  Still didn't want to go home.  Ended up at performance art night at CULTUREfix.  A man in kabuki-inspired drag divided the audience in half.  One hummed "E;" the other hummed "C."  He arranged us around the piano and played through our humming.  That, too, was moving.

4.  All the lights are on; the art is on.  After six straight days of work, it was a good night for me.

Boys are Back in Town

Earlier I was with Lara's husband, C and C's bro-in-law, G.  They are both in from the west to play the Monk marathon at Spectrum tomorrow night.  This was taken at Mission Chinese.  After that we went to the New Museum, then Il Laboratorio Gelato, Culturefix, then the Angel Orensanz Center.  I can't wait to see them tomorrow night.  (Guess what, Lara?  G knew our waiter from the music scene in SEATTLE?!)

THEN later--I met up with an old friend from Utah, J.  I met J the first semester of grad school at the U--Fall '88.  J was a film major from Ogden.  Now he's a recruiter for a law school in San Francisco.  Here he is with his boyfriend, R.  J bought me a cone at the Big Gay Ice Cream truck.  Before that we'd gone to my favorite Vietnamese place on Orchard and had edamame salsa with a big sesame cracker.  (I also took them up to Spectrum for five minutes.)

I never do this much on a Friday, never hang with so many boys, never eat so much food.  I feel like I've already had a very full weekend.

Summer Dresses, Graduation Dresses

Young combo at Culturefix

Today is Make Music New York, lots of free music all over the city (indoors and out) in celebration of the summer's advent.  I strolled into Culturefix and saw this jazzy Joni Mitchellesque combo.  And then I went back later and saw a duo:  a gal playing violin and a dude playing electric guitar together.  They did an experimental version of Waylon Jennings.  I'm going to go back again in a minute.

I was excited about this all day despite the fact NYC is under the pall of a heat wave, which is why I'm enjoying everyone's summer dresses.  This morning, I saw this woman in a pink dress with ruffles.  The ruffles were almost too hot for the day.

Tomorrow, is my second kid's elementary school graduation, and she will put on a new dress that has been hanging on a hanger on a mic stand in the living area for the past couple of weeks.

All this talk of graduation and dresses makes me think of my own 8th grade graduation and graduation dress.  I was a tiny 8th grader, the second tiniest kid in the school (only one boy from Mexico was tinier).  I was as big as a fifth grader, and couldn't find a thing to wear in my low-desert town.  Nothing I tried on at the one small fit me.  My dad ended up driving me to the old part of town where I found a Mexican peasant dress in heavy cotton in an import store that was actually kind of groovy, except that my peers did not understand my dress, which was long and beige with Mayan-inspired embroidery in shades of blue making a pyramid on the skirt.   I was already very shy and awkward with a bad ersatz Dorothy Hamill haircut and a handful of friends (my fellow Mormon girls, who weren't particularly nice), and so showing up in this dress did me no favors. 

All of the other girls were in Gunne Sax, you see, or dresses inspired by the Gunne Sax company, Victorian inspired, romantic, off the shoulder or with sexy straps, eyelet and satin ribbon trim.  They were nascent, full bodied Steve Nicks' goddesses in these cool dresses on a hot, dusty graduation day.  Hour later, I stood alone at the graduation dance.  I stood and stood in my rustic southwestern frock, and I'm not sure I talked to one person.  :-(

That said, my 5th grader graduates tomorrow in a dress from Lord and Taylor (where, oddly, she insisted on going) and  I'll post tomorrow.  I'm glad my girls are having far less traumatic childhoods than I did, but in the process, have I deprived them of anything to write about?