magical mystery tour!!

The background: Babydaddy asked me to keep the weekend of June 11-13th free, and to turn up at SFO at 8:00 a.m. on Friday morning with warm weather clothes, good walking shoes, and a nice going-out-for-the-evening outfit. I am learning to do what I am told when it comes to babydaddy and travel, so I duly caught a ride down to SF on Thursday evening, spent a very comfy night comatose on the meeps' sofa, and then barted down to SFO early the next morning, where we ended up in.... the Virgin America **first class passenger** ticket line! Wait, did I say line? There was no line. It's first class. You get your boarding card stamped w/ a big red Priority Important Person stamp, and you sail past all the plebeian masses in security and then you get on your flight to... NEW YORK CITY!!

After some initial excitement which related to whether we would be able to feed, entertain, and transport ourselves over the course of the weekend - babydaddy had managed to leave his wallet in California, and I had managed to send mine through a wash cycle the night before & wasn’t sure in what shape the magnetic stripes on my credit/ATM cards would be in) - we were on our way into Manhattan from JFK. We dropped our stuff at nice friends' lovely cosy apartment (hello nice friends!) as they were away for the weekend - they had very kindly offered their place in exchange for the not-onerous task of feeding nice friend’s cat her allergy medicines in a spoonful of cat food every evening. Can I just say that tinned cat food has to be the most unappetizing substance to pass under the designation of food? Liver chunks marinated in slime with a faint aroma of rotting fish. Eeuw. But I digress. Quick wash and change and then out for dinner…

I don’t know why babydaddy bothers asking me what I feel like eating, because he usually disregards completely what I say (which I think was “mm, how about Vietnamese or Thai?") in favour of something much better , which in this case was a little hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant called Spigolo. (warning to readers: some fairly graphic food porn is coming up. I gained about five pounds in 48 hours on this trip, so some of these descriptions are for mature audiences only. You have been warned.)

First course - octopus salad (grilled, lemon vinaigrettey dressing), followed by sheep’s milk gnocchi that were the gastronomic equivalent of a new Ikea duvet - warm and white and soft and fluffy and I was torn between eating them and wanting to actually take off my clothes and lie down in them (in the interests of being allowed to continue to the next course, I opted for the former). Course #3 (don’t worry, we were splitting everything, and so far everything is appetizer sized) was more pasta in a totally scrumptious hearty sausagey ragu oh oh oh oh sausage you are the one thing that seriously stands between me and vegetarianism. I could live with out almost all forms of dead animal, but sausage and morality is an irresistible force versus an immovable object. I will continue to indulge in occasional sausage until I have satisfactorily resolved the quandary. Main dish (number four for anyone who likes to keep detailed track of where we are in the food porn inventory) was a prosciutto-encrusted halibut in a tomato and fava bean sauce, which was actually the least exciting thing we had I think (but still good). And then and then oh my god I am starting to drool again just thinking about it for pudding we had a very, very authentic Cumbrian sticky toffee pudding (what the hell a sticky toffee pudding was doing in an Italian restaurant in New York, I don’t know, but when the little baby Jesus puts a sticky toffee pudding on the menu, I don’t think it’s up to me to question it) as well as an (also curiously English, now that I think about it) strawberry and rhubarb crumble. So so so good.

From there (no, the evening’s decadence was _not_ done yet, thank you) to a wine bar down the street where I sipped at a ladylike pink bubbly something and babydaddy had a deep dark peasanty Italian something out of a bowl (also very nice). Then, yes, it was home to bed (one a.m.ish or something at this point - going to the east coast is brilliant because I can feel really sophisticated at how late I’m able to stay up without getting sleepy.

The next morning we were very serious and businesslike; we got up and went straight out and got in line for the cheap-theatre-tickets booth (with a very restrained and plain half a pita bread sandwich from a street vendor each for breakfast while waited in line) and bought theatre tickets for Saturday night and Sunday afternoon (ooh, you’ll just have to wait to find out what we went to go see, won’t you. Here’s a hint - we’ve been watching the Tony awards on the aeroplane on the way back, and both shows that we saw ended up scooping up Tonys by the bucket load, so we are feeling very smug at our ability to pick good stuff).

BUT! Mystery raison d'etre of the whole trip coming up! From the ticket booth, we went to the ...Metropolitan Museum of Art (babydaddy sent me to the loo while he got an audio guide and tickets, so that I wouldn't know what we were going to see), and then I was led

...to the medieval wing (excitement is mounting)

…down the stairs into the rotunda (do you know where we're going?)

….to see the (drum roll....)

...once-in-a-life-time exhibit of the illuminated manuscript pages of the Tres Belles Heures of Jean Duc de Berry. The book had been taken apart for restoration purposes and the pages are being exhibited separately for the first time ever before the book is put back together again for the next six hundred years. Oh. My. God. When I realized what we were going to see, I actually started to tear up (I am not making that up. I really did).

So while I’m betting that public interest is possibly slightly higher for food porn than for medieval art porn, I just have to take a moment to rhapsodize about this exhibit. Once again, it was a lesson in how completely pathetically inadequate reproductions are when you finally see the real thing in person. Every single one of the pages was exquisite, with tiny little pictures that just glowed off the page, every millimeter of space packed with saturated colour and hilarious/bizarre/grotesque/gorgeous detail. They had magnifying glasses so you could get right into the picture, which was totally great, and a video showing every step of the illumination process (although irritatingly, it didn’t show how they did any of the restoration work, which I would have been quite interested to see.)

Anyway. It was a bit like going to visit Eleanor of Aquitaine’s tomb at Fontevraud abbey, a perfect scratch of an itch that has been there nearly my entire life (except more so, since I recovered from my Eleanor of Aquitaine phase once I hit puberty, apart from a brief moment of glory on an undergraduate history exam, when I amassed undeserved piles of points on an extra-credit question for being able to write a five-page mini-biography of her that I am sure took the grading TA by surprise. I have yet to recover from my medieval illuminated manuscript fetish.)

After the Met, we went to have tea w/ nice friend's great aunt M., who is an astonishing person and I would not mind one jot if I were just like her when I grow up. She paints her own house, walks all over New York, goes to the ballet and the theatre all the time, has an apartment jam packed full of books and art and interesting magazines, does an hour of strengthening exercises of her own devising every morning (and has the body and posture of a dancer to show for it), travels regularly to Europe, speaks Russian, French and probably several other languages as well, and except for lack of email appears to be completely up to date. Did I mention she’s 95? Pretty fucking good, no? We had tea with lemon cake, and then she had both of us down on the floor on yoga mats so she could teach us her exercises. She can do more situps than I can, and is more flexible than babydaddy She gave me a floral shawl thingy from Russia, on the grounds that “I’m coming to the end, so I want to give all my possessions away” - I initially felt a bit funny about accepting it, because after all, I’m not her family (to say nothing of the fact that she’s showing no signs of slowing down, let alone coming to the end), but then I thought, screw it, I want to have this so that one day my kids will say, where did this random thing come from, and I’ll say, ah, well, let me tell you about great aunt M. who was a force to be reckoned with.

Nice friend has shown me photos of great aunt back in the day, and she never looked anything less than mega-glamorous, and in all the pictures has at least three handsome young things falling all over themselves to get to her. It’s got to be hard to be as spry as she is when you’re in your nineties - if it were me, I’d be jumping up and down saying, “I’m not dead yet!” but just because of your age, people say things like, Oh back in the day she was really glamorous, and using the adjective "spry" about you, implying that, despite the fact that you’re completely healthy and with marbles, all you are doing now is hanging out waiting to die. (Although I think if I make it to 95 I will be extremely lucky if people say how glamorous I was. I should start doctoring photos of myself now, I think. For now, I will be content with being a spry 35 year old).

Ooh, speaking of age, BP was trying to convince me recently that it is completely common accepted practice to lie about your age on online dating sites in order to fit between the usual search criteria of under 35, which seems totally peculiar to me (and equally common accepted practice to then announce casually the first time you meet someone, oh, by the way, even though my profile says I’m 28 I’m actually 35. I like the concept of blaming your profile for the misinformation, as if it wasn’t you who wrote the profile in the first place). I will have to think about how whether this is unethical or not. I think it is. OK, I am digressing again. Back to New York.

After Maia’s, we went for a wander past the Lexington Avenue shops (stopping off for a brief je ne sais quoi at la Maison du Chocolat (really we needed to use their loo, but once you’re there…. You know how it goes) and back on the subway to nice friends' flat to get ready for the theatah, (Having been in Tokyo not a month before makes you very, very self conscious about how filthy and decrepit and generally crap U.S. cities’ public transportation is. But hey, at least we have it. Oh, wait, that’s right, we STILL don’t have regular decent bus service between Sonoma County and San Francisco. Never mind.)

We had tickets for La Cage aux Folles (with Kelsey Grammer and Douglas Hodge as Georges and Albin) and it was AWESOME. The first ten minutes I felt a little bit, meh, oh god, it’s a musical, with all the schmaltz that implies, and then I completely got sucked in. there’s lots of sparkly costumes and slapsticky bits and _amazing_ dancing (I have never before seen six burly men in tutus and feathers land in the splits from a height of about six feet; my non-existent testicles ached for them, but it was very impressive) but the really impressive thing was how the two main guys managed to keep their relationship so entirely human and believable despite all the over-the-top silliness. Douglas Hodge in particular - despite the fact that he was playing a flaming transvestite gay guy - never let his character slip into just campy cliché, and the story was actually extremely moving as a result.

After the theatre - to dinner! Are you ready for more food porn? Oh goody. We ended up at the Spotted Pig, a British gastropub somewhere at the bottom end of Manhattan (I am not good at New York geography, and besides, it was late, so we took a cab and I didn’t have to pay attention). Starter: little plate of bacon-wrapped (warm) dates oh oh oh mouth orgasm here I come. Then (because the gnocchi of the previous night were so good) some sheep’s milk gnudi (I don’t know what gnudi are. Maybe they shear the sheep before they milk them?) and some pea bruschetta on toast, followed by a yummo high-end cheeseburger with a pile of perfectly done string fries. Chocolate amaretto cake and rhubarb tart for dessert, coffee, and we were home, by a very staid two a.m.

This morning needless to say I woke up still full (might need to change the name of the blog to gluttony diaries) so we had to go for a walk along Broadway to look in all the posh overpriced boutiquey clothes shops (aren’t you glad to know there is a place where a pair of silver hotpants can be yours for the low low price of $250? I was). Breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien - generally I am happy to keep pain as infrequent as possible, but in this case I would have no problem with daily, if it comes with fennel lemon scones, soft boiled eggs, and fresh fruit. (Today also marks the first time, I realized, that I have ever tried to eat a soft boiled egg in public. If anyone has any tips on how to do it neatly, please pass on. Do you peel the whole thing first? I was afraid it might fall apart, so I opted for the gradual peel while keeping it in the egg cup, which I am assuming gets easier with practice. And what are you supposed to do with the shell bits? They didn’t give me a receptacle, and I ended up panicking and just leaving them in a messy pile on the table. Restaurants are so difficult. We should have antisocial ramen bars like in Tokyo where you practice eating soft boiled eggs until you can get it right.)

After breakfast to a matinee of ‘Red,’ which is a two-man play about the artist Mark Rothko (whose work I can’t stand but babydaddy absolutely loves.) starring Alfred Molina (whom I have a little bit of a premature middle-aged lady crush on). It was interesting - sort of a meditation on what’s-the-point-of-art, interspersed with the character study of a completely unhinged narcissist (that’s my take) - clever but ultimately not that emotionally engaging, I thought, because it was hard to like either of the two characters.

We battled out of the theatre into the chaos of a) pouring rain b) post theatre traffic and c) the remains of the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which is a major, major event in New York as it turns out, and blocks up traffic for miles around. Once we were completely soaked through (despite the fact that we did actually have an umbrella with us), we got a cab to the airport, and it was looking as it we were going to barely barely make it… and then our flight was delayed 2.5 hours. On the flight home now (sadly, I am being forced to fly proletariat class on the way back), and we will likely not be getting back to San Francisco until 1 a.m. oh lordy work will be fun on Monday…

update: in bed in SF (having had a shower, even) by 12:30. God bless taxi drivers who drive at breakneck speed up 101 in the middle of the night to get you home, and good night to all....