Winter Wonderland
More snow is falling today. But it's what they call a "soft snow," most of it melting on the warmer city streets and sidewalks, with little accumulation.
But I was out in the blizzard two Sundays ago, and here's a shot from that early evening to prove it. I had a whole day of activities and culture planned with mudcub, who wisely decided to hightail it back to DC that morning, trying to beat the worst of the storm, since he still had a week's worth of moving work to attend to.
But there was still an extremely rare screening at the Museum of Modern Art that I wanted to see, Viktor und Viktoria, a 1933 comedy/musical from Weimar Germany that I wanted to see, which Blake Edwards adapted for his comedy decades later. (It was interesting to see the plot points that were almost identical -- the rain storm and cold, the fistfight in the working class bar, the scenes with "men" drinking and smoking cigars, which were pipes here, and the inspection at the end to find out if Viktor was actually a woman -- although there was no restaurant/cockroach scene.)
I was dumbfounded at the number of tourists out and about in the snowstorm that Sunday afternoon, but then I realized that half of them probably come from areas with snow, so they're used to being out it in, and the other half come from areas without snow, and for them it was a novelty, not only were they doing Christmas in New York, they were doing Christmas in New York in the snow.
Afterwards, the snow still coming down heavily, I holed up in MoMA's cafe (with some incredibly delicious lentil soup, foccacia drizzled with E.V.O.O., and a plate of cookies) with a window seat facing out, watching the storm and the garbage trucks, now outfitted with snowplows, battle the accumulation. I had tickets for us to see The Pee-Wee Herman Show that evening, and could have gone without him, but I knew I wouldn't enjoy it as much with mud missing from my side. Fortunately I had a couple of friends who were adventurous enough to come out in a blizzard to see a Broadway show, but I still had to get down to the theater eleven blocks away to give them the tickets.
So here's a view of Sixth Avenue as I trudged along. Shortly after I put my camera away, along came a group of gonzo pedicab drivers racing up the Avenue on their taxi trikes and whooping it up in the storm, but I couldn't grab my camera fast enough to document this surreal scene. Once I passed on the tickets to my friends at the box office, I took the subway home, where the blizzard increased to blackout conditions -- I couldn't see the bright lights from other buildings outside my windows -- and curled up with a pipe and the internet.