A Part of the Crowd
Monday night I traveled to Manhattan for the 7 p.m. unveiling ceremony of Saks' final Theater of Dreams windows. With a little over an hour of time to kill before it, I made another, futile attempt to shooting the red-drenched windows Saks already had on view and took some more shots at Bergdorf Goodman and Bloomingdale's. Bergdorf was more challenging this time because I had to wait for and shoot around various pedestrians and other folks photographing the windows, but I do value the crowd for giving me some valuable moments. One kid said that the mannequin with the feathery headdress and eyelashes in the gingerbread window was the clock's cuckoo, something that hadn't occurred to me but was obvious in hindsight. One man wondered what the "gingerbread" objects were made of, something I echo. Kids were in love with all the sweets in the various windows, with some getting told by their parents that it couldn't possibly be made of what it looks like because it'd have to survive for days under the lights and might lure hungry critters in. One woman thought the gingerbread was chocolate, and I (kindly) told her it wasn't.
Saks' unveiling ceremony disappointed me, partly because the last time I could see a lot while standing in Rockefeller Center's Channel Gardens, but this year they blocked the view off with some kind of VIP viewing section, partly because for the first ten minutes it was a song and dance number by a few people in the street, only viewable from people standing in the front row. Though the last bit provided some amusement when the mother in front of me told her complaining child that she couldn't see either, "Nobody can see unless they're in the front row with the important people and you're not important." Burn. Somebody must've been riding her Mom's nerves for too long. Some people next to me started talking to the family, who it turns out came in from Phoenix and were agog at the thick, dense crowd. The father of the family picked up Saks' livestream of the event on his smart phone so I got to see more of the dancing than I would've otherwise. Then came the very visible lightshow on the building and the fireworks off the top of it, with me telling the kids to look up, look up from the cellphone to see them.
When the show ended and the crowd was allowed to approach the unveiled windows things got a little crazy just from how thick the crowd was but not so crazy that it set off any of my old phobias. I saw a woman pushing another woman in a small wheelchair struggling to get through, with the woman in the chair at a very bad height for this, and I shouted, "Coming through! Wheelchair coming through, guys!" and the crowd immediately parted to let them through. The woman pushing the chair looked surprised that that had worked. (I didn't even think about it, just did it from being worried for the wheelchair-bound woman; I've always been better at speaking up for others than for myself.) Good people, my New Yorkers.
Here's a closer look at the cityscape on the dress from one of the Bloomingdale's windows (click on the thumbnail below to further embiggen):
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Saks' unveiling ceremony disappointed me, partly because the last time I could see a lot while standing in Rockefeller Center's Channel Gardens, but this year they blocked the view off with some kind of VIP viewing section, partly because for the first ten minutes it was a song and dance number by a few people in the street, only viewable from people standing in the front row. Though the last bit provided some amusement when the mother in front of me told her complaining child that she couldn't see either, "Nobody can see unless they're in the front row with the important people and you're not important." Burn. Somebody must've been riding her Mom's nerves for too long. Some people next to me started talking to the family, who it turns out came in from Phoenix and were agog at the thick, dense crowd. The father of the family picked up Saks' livestream of the event on his smart phone so I got to see more of the dancing than I would've otherwise. Then came the very visible lightshow on the building and the fireworks off the top of it, with me telling the kids to look up, look up from the cellphone to see them.
When the show ended and the crowd was allowed to approach the unveiled windows things got a little crazy just from how thick the crowd was but not so crazy that it set off any of my old phobias. I saw a woman pushing another woman in a small wheelchair struggling to get through, with the woman in the chair at a very bad height for this, and I shouted, "Coming through! Wheelchair coming through, guys!" and the crowd immediately parted to let them through. The woman pushing the chair looked surprised that that had worked. (I didn't even think about it, just did it from being worried for the wheelchair-bound woman; I've always been better at speaking up for others than for myself.) Good people, my New Yorkers.
Here's a closer look at the cityscape on the dress from one of the Bloomingdale's windows (click on the thumbnail below to further embiggen):
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost.
comments at Dreamwidth.