Hawleyblog

Two Plays and an Exhibit

Two weeks ago Sunday, Tony and I went to see Anything Goes with Dan, Paul, and Dan's momma, Josephine. First, we got lunch at Ceci, an Italian restaurant where Tony and I had eaten once, in between the media event and the party for the season 3 finale of RuPaul's Drag Race.

We all enjoyed our food. It hadn't been that long since breakfast, so I didn't eat a lot. I got the Rigatoni Pollo Ceci, which was in a pink vodka sauce and featured sundried tomatoes in addition to the chicken.

I had ordered the tickets for us, and when I went to the will call window to pick them up, I thought it was strange that there was a line for refunds. As we realized not long after, thanks to signage in the lobby, that was because Sutton Foster, who won the Tony for best actress in a musical, was off that day. "The role of Reno Sweeney will be played by Tari Kelly. Noooo!" I wrote on my Facebook wall. My biggest theater-fan friend, Andy, commented: "You can exchange for another date. Sutton is above the title. Go to the box office." But we weren't not going to go, because of the trip involved for D&P, who had picked up Dan's mother in South Plainfield on the way in from Trenton. And I was really excited to see the show anyway, even though I was very disappointed not to be seeing the Tony Award–winning actress for the first time. (I never caught her in Shrek, The Drowsy Chaperone, or Thoroughly Modern Millie.)

It didn't take long at all for Kelly to win us over; we all thought she was terrific. And Paul, who had caught the show once before, with Dan, when Foster wasn't taking the day off, said he found Kelly to be better in some ways. For instance, he said, he thinks Foster tends to overenunciate when singing.

I'd still like to see Foster sometime. Maybe I'll take Dad to see the show.

***

Last month, Tony, Joyce, and I caught Other Desert Cities, starring Stockard Channing, Rachel Griffiths, Stacy Keach, Judith Light, and Justin Kirk. The production was great, and the actors were outstanding, to a man/woman. I left the theater feeling like I needed to think some more about the play. Overnight, I realized that I wasn't buying into the script.

THERE ARE SOME SPOILERS HERE BUT NOT THE BIGGEST POTENTIAL SPOILER OF ALL: The plot concerns an author, Brooke, visiting her über-Republican parents, Polly and Lyman, for the holidays. Her second book is about to be published, and she wants her family, including her younger brother, Trip, to have a chance to read it beforehand because of its controversial nature.

The book isn't a novel, as Brooke had originally claimed; it's a memoir focusing on the eldest sibling in the family, Henry, who committed suicide after perhaps being complicit in the death of a man killed by a bomb planted by a left-wing group he belonged to. Polly and Lyman are horrified by the book. They want Brooke to wait until after they're dead to publish it. And toward the end of the play, they reveal a huge secret that provides a reason deeper than their own embarrassment for why she shouldn't publish the book. That secret is so big that I would never have been able to forgive my parents for keeping it from me until I was in my early 40s/late 30s, as Brooke and Trip are. But the play makes it clear that that wasn't the case for those two characters. It was especially difficult for me to accept that Brooke was able to move on from this revelation because she had had a breakdown a few years earlier and was perpetually struggling with depression, largely because of what had happened to Henry.

Light plays Polly's alcoholic sister, Silda, who secretly helped Brooke write the book while hiding her own Henry-related secret from her.

The play did a great job of having you go back and forth about how much you liked/disliked the various family members. But that big reveal blew everything that came before it out of the water and made the nuances of character seem like a waste of time.

*** 

A week ago Saturday, Tony and I caught Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, at the Brooklyn Museum. (The exhibit closed yesterday.) It was powerful enough to move me to buy the companion book.

The most-moving image for Tony was Interim Couple (1164) by Bill Jacobson. I enjoyed the levity of Poets (Clothed), Poets (Naked) by Wynn Chamberlain and was haunted by Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph of gay archhomophobe Roy Cohn.

A Muppets-Based Weekend With the 'Phews

Matt and Mike visited with us two weekends ago. One of the highlights was a second trip to Museum of the Moving Image, on that Saturday. M&M and I went this time specifically to catch Jim Henson's Fantastic World, which I had seen back in November 2009 in Doylestown. In that linked Hawleyblog post, I had mentioned that Miss Piggy and some other characters weren't in the traveling exhibit because of legal disputes. Well, they must have gotten at least some of them worked out because Miss Piggy, dressed in her wedding gown from The Muppets Take Manhattan, is now in the show.

On Friday evening, Tony and I treated all of the Gerbers to dinner at Bistro de la Gare, like we said we'd do for a Christmas present. We all enjoyed our meals a good deal. And Tracey, Tony, and I partook of the wine Tony and I have been most enjoying from BDLG's list: the 2006 Château Roc de Candale, a grand cru Bordeaux from the St-Emilion appellation. Fancy! *nose in the air* Not really. But it is very good. And when Tony and I go to BDLG on Tuesday night, which is half-price-bottle-of-wine night, it seems like a steal.

I have no good photos from the dinner. The one that I took using the flash on my iPhone camera has an annoying amount of brightness. And the ones I took without the flash look bad when enhanced in iPhoto.

On Saturday morning, the guys and I had breakfast at Cafe Minerva, where Dan and Paul and I ate on New Year's Day. Here's a photo of the cute dining area with the central coffee bar:

And here's a photo of my cute 'phews at the Queens Plaza subway stop, where we switched from the E to the R:

It had snowed a bit overnight but not enough to be too much of a pain in the ass. (And it snowed a little more on our way back to the subway after our museum visit.)

On the way out of the subway in Astoria, in the Steinway Street station, I snapped a photo of an ad for a Spanish-language TV show starring celebrity chef Aarón Sanchez, with a tooth blackened out by some wiseass. I knew Tony would get a kick out of the ad (and the fact that Sanchez has his own show on another network) because Sanchez and Alex Guarnaschelli are our favorite judges on Chopped. Sanchez comes across on Chopped as a guy who'd be too refined to have oodles of ink, so I was surprised to see the sleeve tattoos in the subway ad. And he's got them all over his torso, it turns out.

The guys really enjoyed the Jim Henson exhibit. And I enjoyed seeing it a second time.

Afterward, we played some arcade games:

Reflected in the Frogger screen in the photo of Matt is the marquee for the Tut's Fever Movie Palace, which was showing an episode of a Dick Tracy serial from 1941. We didn't catch that.

We had a surprisingly good macaroni and cheese for lunch at the museum.

M&M helped me cook dinner for the four of us. I had bought a sirloin from a stand at the Greenmarket that sells both beef and buffalo. I had thought I was getting beef, but as I discovered when I took it out of the freezer to thaw, it was buffalo. The guys had said on Friday that they would be up for trying it, so that's what we cooked. They liked it. And they also liked the oven fries and carrots roasted with minced ginger and orange juice that they helped prepare. And the next day, when Tracey was with us, Matt said, unprompted, that his favorite salad dressing is my kaffir lime dressing that I put on the salad that we ate before the buffalo. (Or, as Matt called it, the Gruffalo.)

For dessert, M&M and I had more of those mini pies from the Meredith's Bread stand at the Abingdon Square Greenmarket. I got the one shown below. Mike got pumpkin, and Matt got cherry.

After dinner, we watched Labyrinth, which was available via download on Netflix. I had asked whether they wanted to see that or The Dark Crystal, another of the movies that was discussed in the exhibit. I'm not sure now why it didn't occur to me at the time to ask them about seeing one of the older Muppet movies. I guess because M&M had just seen the new one. Which they very much liked. Tony and I haven't seen it. I'm sure we'll catch it when it's available on Netflix.

I hadn't seen Labyrinth either, but I remember loving The Dark Crystal, which was released when I was in 8th grade. I read the book too.

We all thought Labyrinth was a decent flick. The synth-heavy music made it seem dated to Tony and me. But the special effects were well done. And a young Jennifer Connelly did a fine job as the teenage girl who must navigate a labyrinth filled with unusual creatures to retrieve her half-brother from the Goblin King, who's played by David Bowie. Tony joked that the wardrobe people went with the clothes Bowie had on when he showed up. Ha! And I said the makeup people had to take a little off. Ha!

Here's a photo of Rudy snoozing on his bed with his nose near Mike's sneaker. M&M thought it was cute/funny that Rudy slept that way all night and didn't mind the sneaker smell:

The next morning, the guys and I had breakfast at Grounded. They got bagels, and I got oatmeal.

Then the guys helped me with my second attempt at gluten-free baking: We made Chips Ahoy! cookies from the BabyCakes Covers the Classics book. We couldn't follow the recipe to the letter, though, because it called for mostly oat flour, which, as I've noted before, my baby can't eat. Instead of 1 1/2 cups of oat flour and 1 cup of all-purpose gluten-free flour, I used 2 1/2 cups of the GF flour. This recipe also included ground flax meal, which I thought made the cookies seem downright healthy—even though I know they're still loaded with sugar.

Here are the guys working on the cookie dough:

And here's the finished product:

I thought these cookies were phenomenal. Tony liked them but said he preferred the Lace Cookies I made in my first attempt. I said, not in a bitter way, that that was so predictable: Because ours is a relationship of opposites, it figures that he would prefer the cookie I liked but didn't love to the cookie I could have eaten every single one of in a day, if it wouldn't have made me sick.

After Tracey arrived to pick up the guys, she, M&M, Tony, and I went first to Darling, a clothing store I thought she would enjoy checking out. I pass Darling every evening on the way home from work, and I've liked many of the things that I've seen in the big display window that has a concealed fan to playfully blow the clothing's fabric. Tracey thought the shop was cute but didn't see anything she had to buy.

Then we got lunch at Bee Desserts & Cafe. I had a grilled chicken sandwich with a side of yucca fries.

And then Tracey and the guys went home, after what had been a Muppets-based weekend in the city.

TITC Weekend 2011, Part I

Tony and I stayed at a B&B in New Hope this past weekend in anticipation of the Thanksgiving in the Country house tour on Sunday. The B&B wasn't as nice as the now-closed* one in Lambertville where we stayed last year, but I enjoyed the tour more this year than I ever had before. I thought every house was special in its own way, but the last one we saw blew Tony and me away.

We took a Trans-Bridge bus down to Pennsy after getting to the Port Authority Bus Terminal later than we'd wanted and buying tickets at the last minute. Next year, we're going to allow all kinds of extra time because I'm getting too old for this shit. It was my own fault we got a too-late-for-comfort start. In the cab on the way to the PABT, I discovered my phone wasn't in its case in my pocket. I realized immediately that I must have left it in the bathroom of our apartment. We had the cab driver turn around and take me back so I could grab my precious iPhone.

When we finally made it to the PABT, Tony got us a spot on the bus-passenger line while I waited in the ticket line. Inevitably, there's someone buying a ticket who's arguing about the price (the next line over) or has some other issue that makes the line grind to a hault (my line). I was too far back to know what the exact problem was, but it took waaay too long for this woman to complete her freaking transaction with the ticket agent at the window. Last year—or maybe it was earlier this year, when we took a bus to North Jersey for Hal and Stacy's wedding—a woman in my line argued with and swore at two different ticket agents about whether the place where she wanted to be let off was a legitimate stop.

After we checked in, Tony and I enjoyed some sunshine out on the balcony of our room. Then we went to the Naked in New Hope exhibit at Sidetracks Art Gallery. My friend Will Hübscher had three pieces in the show; I especially liked Together. I also enjoyed some cheeky artworks by McWillie Chambers—and I enjoy saying "McWillie." Yes, I do.

We also went to Gallery Piquel, where Tony was really taken in by the works of Judith Judy and Michael Curd. I enjoy looking at art with Tony. I don't always have the words to say what I like or don't like about something because I've never studied art or art history. He does. His father was a painter, and Tony dabbled in painting many years ago. The very knowledgeable and tasteful owner of the gallery really wanted to sell Tony something. But he didn't bite.

Tony posed for me in a parking lot right near the river with the bridge to Lambertville and that fair city in the background:

As we did last year, we ate dinner Friday evening at Hamilton's Grill Room in Lambertville. Tony had a very meaty meal: duck for an appetizer and the grilled lamb platter for his entree. Regarding the latter, he said, "I didn't need the bacon, but I'm glad it was there." He said the duck was the best he'd had in a while.

I really enjoyed my Radicchio, Pears and Walnuts Salad With Dijon Vinaigrette and the Seared Salmon Fillet With Pistachio Pesto, which came with rice and string beans.

Tony said he remembered that HGR was BYOB, but he didn't tell me that until after our waiter said there was no wine list when I asked him for one. Tony said he thought I must have known something he didn't. I didn't. I had totally forgotten that we'd bought a bottle of wine to take there last year. The waiter said bottles of wine were available at the Boat House, HGR's sister establishment within the Pork Yard. We both liked the red Burgundy I picked up there.

*The couple who ran the B&B had talked about it being time to move on and do something else for a change. The website is no longer active, but when I looked at it a little while back, IIRC, it said that they had closed down at the end of the year or the very beginning of this year.

A Relaxing Getaway to Washington

Tony and I took a quick trip to Washington from Tuesday to Thursday because he had a seminar on handling the media down there on Wednesday. I mean, he had a seminar on handling the media, down in DC. Not on handling the media down there. He was already quite good at handling this member of the media down there. *wink wink nudge nudge*

I think the last time I was in DC was for the Millennium March, in 2000. Back when Ellen was with Anne Heche. Tony's longtime friend Mark, who came to visit New York back in the fall, was sweet enough to take off work on Wednesday so he could show me around town.

I had decided the two places I most wanted to visit were the American Art Museum and the U.S. Botanic Garden.

Mark had never been to the AAM. It's part of the Smithsonian but is located a short distance from the Mall.

I wasn't captivated by the work of George Ault but I was quite taken with Andrew Wyeth's Night Hauling and Public Sale and Byron Thomas's Pine Trees from the exhibit titled To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America.

I thought it was a fun coincidence that in Thursday's New York Times, which Tony and I received at our hotel room, there was a review of another exhibit Mark and I saw at the AAM: The Great American Hall of Wonders.

Tony and I stayed at the Hay-Adams, which was pretty darn nice and right near the White House. And we got upgraded to a junior suite. Sweet! (Tony can write off half of the cost of our room as a business expense.) I joked that the Hay-Adams was swankier than the last place I stayed in DC, the Hey Hey Hey Hey Adams.*

Mark's partner, Mike—whom I hadn't met until the four of us had dinner together on Tuesday evening—is into orchids, so Mark took a lot of photos of them at the botanic garden. I did too. And of various cactuses and other flowering plants. That's a nong nooch vine at left.

Tony and I ate well, twice, at Teaism, a very gluten-free-friendly place that was just down the street from the hotel. For lunch the first day, he got Plum Ochazuke, a rice soup for which green tea acts as the broth.

We had two phenomenal dinners with Mark and Mike, with the first one, at The Oval Room, being particularly outstanding. Mike, Tony, and I all got the Baby Beets With Passion Fruit, Horseradish, and Ice Wine Dressing. It was an amazing melange of flavors that couldn't have been improved upon in any way. The same goes for Tony's entree, which was the favorite among all of ours: Lacquered Aged Beef Short Rib With Fennel, Tarragon, and Blood Orange. I clearly need to learn how to lacquer meat now. Hee hee. Even though I wished I had ordered the short rib, I enjoyed my vegetarian main course a great deal: Herb Buccatini With Cherry Tomatoes, Smoked Ricotta and Lemon Oil.

For dessert, I got an enjoyable riff on a caramel Twix bar, with a blob of chocolate pot de crème and a scoop of butterscotchy ice cream, among other things on the plate.

On Wednesday night, we dined at Equinox, which was not a gym. For my first course, I got the "Chopped" Salad, which was topped with Candied Walnuts, Roasted Baby Beets, and a Quail Egg Hole in a Wall. Everyone else got the Red Pepper–Tomato Gazpacho, which would have tempted me a lot more if it hadn't been served with crab meat on top. For my entree, I got the BBQ'd Scottish Salmon With Roasted Sweet Corn, Backyard Basil, and Pommes Gaufrette. I looked up that last component on my iPhone and learned it's a fancy way of saying "waffle fries." As I so often do, I got the trio of ice creams for dessert, and I'm embarrassed to say that, four days later, I can remember only one of the three flavors: mint. (I'm also embarrassed to say that yesterday I accidentally deleted the electronic page of notes I had made on my iPhone.)

I was pleased with my wine selections both nights—and, thankfully, so was everyone one. I had checked out Equinox's wine list online in advance and had settled on the 2009 Masciarelli Rosé d'Abruzzo because even though Mike had said the night before that he's a red-wine drinker and doesn't really drink rosé, I thought this one would appeal to him because it's rather dry. (He hadn't said he hated the very thought of rosé. If he had, I wouldn't have suggested one.) I wanted to go with a rosé (Tony's favorite) that night because I'd chosen a red the night before at The Oval Office Room: a Patricia Green pinot noir that I don't see on TOR's wine list on the Web.

Tony and I got cocktails at the hotel's bar, Off the Record, before going to bed Wednesday night. He had a delicious Knobby Sidecar, which consisted of Knob Creek Bourbon, Cointreau, and lemon juice. And I had a stupendous David's Washingtonian: Absolut Citron, Limoncello, Chambord, and housemade Frothy Sour Blend.

It was a very relaxing and enjoyable trip for me. I slept like a rock both nights and had fun hanging out with Mark and eating like a king.

Here are some more photos:

Those wonderful beets at TOR

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is located right near the Hay-Adams. I did not throw eggs at the building.

I loved the mottled coloring of the elephant yam's "trunk."

A spidery cactus

Mark at the USBG

Me, looking somewhat Curious George**-ish, at the USBG

And Mark and Mike at Equinox

*I loooved Dee. And Shirley too. Danielle Spencer, who played Dee, was born in Trenton and is now a veterinarian. Shirley Hemphill died in 1999, as did Mabel King, who played "Mama." Fred "Rerun" Berry died in 2003. He was married seven times, including three times to first (and third and fourth) wife Franchesska. Haywood Nelson (Dwayne) is about a decade younger than his male co-stars, Ernest Thomas ("Raj") and Berry.

**Tony has been comparing my facial expressions to that monkey's lately. He means it as a compliment, and I'm not offended at all.

A Rock-and-Roll Visit From Dad

Dad came for a visit on Saturday, and we took in Who Shot Rock and Roll at the Brooklyn Museum that afternoon. We enjoyed the exhibit a good deal but had a few reservations. (See also my review over at Queer New York.) One problem I had was that it seemed a little safe: I don't recall any images of drug use, and there wasn't much in the way of nudity. Dad wished there'd been more shots of the early pioneers of rock and roll.

I had fun watching a slide show that included, for whatever reason, a couple of hilarious photos of Richard Pryor. This one was the cover of his first, self-titled comedy album, from 1968. There was a chart on one wall that identified the rock stars shown in the slides, and I was eventually able to stand next to it, after the woman who'd been in that spot moved on. The presentation gave a family-vacation feel to these pictures of famous people, and that was really cool. Whoever compiled those images is apparently a big fan of the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, and John Sebastian. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Especially regarding Sebastian, who was a cute, fuzzy hippie guy who kept his looks over the years and still looks good.

Before the show, Dad and I had brunch at Sette because, to give credit where credit is due, he'd agreed to check out a different place other than the usual Sotto Voce; Dad had already requested that we go to La Villa for dinner. At Sette, Dad also tried and really enjoyed, as did I, the raisin-containing bread that came out before our main meals, even though he doesn't generally like raisins. Go, Dad!

I ordered Three Fried Eggs With Fennel Sausage and Grilled Polenta, which came with a surprise additional side of fried potatoes. Dad got the Poached Eggs "Benedict" on Focaccia Bread With Black Forest Ham; he requested that the Tomato Sabayon be left off. He also got fried potatoes with his entree, and we agreed that they were the highlight of a very good meal. Dad said, in fact, that it was one of the best breakfasts he'd ever had and "I enjoyed the hell out of that."

Dad not-so-fondly reminisced about the five-hour bus ride he took from Bridgeton to the Port Authority back when he was in the Coast Guard and separated from his first wife. And that didn't include the train ride from Grand Central to New London, Connecticut. Oy. You can't take the bus from Bridgeton into Manhattan anymore. You can get to Philadelphia from there, though, with stops in Shirley and Mantua and both Upper Deerfield and Upper Pittsgrove. It usually takes about two hours.

Bob and Zane joined us for our pizza at La Villa on a guys' night out. I told Bob that our group was two cute boys with their Dads. Ha!

Cute boys:

Dads:

TITC 2009, Part I

Last weekend, I visited my old neck of the woods once again for Thanksgiving in the Country weekend. Visiting Hunterdon and Bucks counties is always somewhat bittersweet. It reminds me how much I love that area and still miss my little house in Stockton and the farm outside Sergeantsville—and the B&B and dairy goats—that I had with my ex Steve. And how much I miss seeing my friends who live down that way as often as I used to. But I've got no regrets about moving to New York for my job. I love the countryside, but the city is where I'm supposed to be right now.

I kenneled the dogs on Friday and took the bus to Lambertville. When I reached the Port Authority Bus Terminal, I was a little anxious about getting a spot on the bus I'd planned to take, which was going to get into L'ville about 5:30. The terminal was crowded with Yankees fans who'd gone to the parade that day celebrating their "heroes" who'd won ... freedom for all of the oppressed peoples of the world? No. Universal health care for all Americans? No. Four baseball games? Yes! I know, I'm a killjoy cynic. But I just can't understand getting excited about a bunch of millionaires playing a sport in a billion-dollar stadium that's mostly financed by taxpayers, most of whom can't afford to take their family there to see a game.

Anyhow, I needn't have worried. There were plenty of seats on the bus, though the ticket line was a nightmare because a woman in front of me pissed off two different ticket sellers so much that one stormed off (after she called him an "asshole" and a "bastard") and the other looked like she wanted to break through the window and strangle her. This woman insisted that she was always sold a ticket for a particular route that ended up in a place where the ticket sellers said no buses ever went. Or at least no buses went to that place on the route whose number she gave them. After some people in my line and I started insisting that she should either buy a ticket for a real route or get the hell out of the way, she finally completed some type of transaction with the second ticket seller. She was not wearing any Yankees paraphernalia, btw.*

Friday evening, after we'd caught up, Pat and I went to dinner at Giuseppe's on Route 202 outside New Hope because I wanted to have some pizza, even though I knew it wouldn't be as good as my precious La Villa Siciliana. I enjoyed my personal-size white pizza with broccoli raab and sausage.

After dinner, we skimmed through A Muppet Family Christmas at Pat's apartment. Pat had gotten a stack of Muppet movies on VHS for cheap after a local video store had closed. She'd wanted to ask me if I was familiar with a certain Christmas song the Muppets sang toward the end of the show (I wasn't), but we ended up watching most of it anyhow because there were many scenes Pat said I just had to see. :-) One highlight was at the very end, when Jim Henson made a cameo appearance in the kitchen of Fozzie's mother's house to wash the dishes that were dirtied for Christmas dinner.

The movie was especially pertinent because I was all excited about seeing the Jim Henson exhibit, Jim Henson's Fantastic World, at the Michener Museum in Doylestown the next day. Pat had already seen it with a friend from the library—and loved it—so she was going to drop me off at the museum while she went to a previously scheduled reiki appointment.

First thing that morning, Pat and I met Carl and Russ, my buddies whom I used to eat breakfast with almost every weekend, for breakfast at Meil's in Stockton. Rafael, who was also a regular breakfaster back then, and their friends Rhoda and Al joined us. It was lots of fun catching up with my crotchety old pals. Carl has had several big shows since I last saw him, and an art gallery at Kean University, where he used to teach, was renamed after his parents, Karl and Helen. He's still as funny as ever. He loves to razz Margaret, a longtime waitress at Meil's, telling her she's "beautiful but surly."

And Russ, who's a retired teacher, is still raising his beloved German shepherds. And he said he's got 50 barn cats now, all of them spayed or neutered.

And now here's a cavalcade of photos from the breakfast:

A candid shot of Pat. Margaret is the woman over Pat's left shoulder.

My delicious breakfast: two eggs scrambled, sweet potato muffins, and fried potatoes

Meil's display case of goodies. Best almond croissants ever, among other delicious treats

A group shot taken by a friendly biker. Left to right: Pat, Al, Rhoda, Rafael, Russ, Carl, and me

There were three dogs outside Meil's waiting for their masters. In these photos, they seem very concerned with what's going on inside the restaurant but they were actually quite friendly and welcomed the attention we gave them.

Pat drove me past my old house so I could take a quick peek at it, and then we were off to Doylestown.

The Michener Art Museum really is a Bucks County treasure. The Transition sculpture in front of the museum ...

... used to be in Manhattan outside the J.C. Penney Building. The artist, Raymond Granville Barger, was also a poet, and he wrote a poem, also named Transition, for the sculpture's dedication ceremony at the museum.

The Henson exhibit was wonderful. Jim Henson was a creative genius and a humanitarian. And, I learned, he also had the gift of being able to lead other extremely talented people toward the fulfillment of his vision.

The exhibit spanned his career, from his early days making commercials, appearing with his Muppets on various local and national TV shows, and producing and starring in an Academy Award–nominated short film called Time Piece, to his later TV shows and movies that we all know and love. I remember enjoying The Dark Crystal but I never saw Labyrinth. The Muppet Show was always the fastest half hour on television for me growing up. It's such a shame he lived to only 53. Who knows how many more amazing stories he could have brought to life during these almost two decades he's been gone?

Because of legal issues involving Disney, Miss Piggy and some of the other Muppet characters weren't allowed to appear in the exhibit. *sigh* Pat has gotten very enamored of Miss Piggy's take-no-shit character while watching her Muppet tapes. I said our new mantra should be WWMPD: What would Miss Piggy do?

I also was captivated by the museum's Charles Ward exhibit. Ward, a native of Trenton, was a student of famed Bucks County impressionist Daniel Garber. His work was inspired by time spent in BC—specifically, Carversville—and Mexico. He created some wonderful murals for the Trenton Post Office and the PO in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, in the 1930s. The murals were commissioned under a New Deal arts program called the Public Works of Art Project.

Pat and I got lunch at Lilly's Gourmet in town. I had a very   satisfying shepherd's pie with a side salad. And after hitting a few stores, we stopped in at Let Them Eat Cupcakes. I went for the delicious Red Velvet. Next time I'm in D-town, I have to try the Banana Butterscotch, which Pat highly recommended.

*I'm not totally anti-Yankee. The Gerbers, George, and some other friends of mine are Yankee fans. I'm just annoyed that so much attention is paid to these guys who play a freakin' game for a living and so little is paid to, you know, stuff that really matters.

A Terrific Weekend in the City, Part II

After we finished our dinner at Da Rosina, Matt, Mike, and I boogied 10 blocks south to the National Comedy Theatre while Tracey, David, Dad, and Jean went a block south and a block east to the Golden Theater.

I had thought I'd take the boys to a movie while the other Gerbers and Hawleys were at Avenue Q, but there wasn't anything playing I thought was really worth seeing. Jen saw a mention of NCT's all-ages improv comedy show in Time Out New York Kids, and I thought that sounded like it'd be a lot of fun for all of us. I sent the theatre's link to my sister, and she said M&M were into it, so I reserved tickets for us for the 7:30 show.

We made it to the theatre with a couple of minutes to spare, and I have to give M&M credit for not complaining about the length of the walk. They're suburban kids who are used to being driven around in their Mommy's SUV, so they're not accustomed to having to hoof it anywhere. And when we're walking around Park Slope, they can get cranky about how far we have to walk to get to the restaurant or wherever we're heading. And they can try my patience by asking me how much farther it is even after I'd already told them how many blocks we'd have to go. (And they're certainly old enough to be able to keep track of how many blocks we've walked.) But I'm grousing for nothing now because they were very good boys in Manhattan.

The comedy group consisted of four guys and a gal. (The main dude who did most of the talking and setting up of sketches was a real cutey.) The format of the show was much like Whose Line Is It Anyway? As on that show, which I used to get a kick out of, the audience was asked to name various things or people, and they'd be incorporated into the bit. At one point, Matt yelled out "Bananas," and it became the thing a guy would water-ski on instead of skis in the last game they played.

That last game was the funniest thing they did. The gal was sent out of the room, and we audience members set up five bits for three of the guy players to perform after she came back. They couldn't speak except in nonsense language or sounds. She had to guess what they were doing, just like Greg Proops had to guess who his strange party guests were on WLIIA. The gal was very good at guessing the stuff, even when it was something ridiculous like "You're water-skiing, only the water is Jell-O and the skis are bananas and the Jell-O tastes like lacrosse." (The cute comic had asked for an activity rather than something that would actually have a recognizable flavor to make it harder for her to guess what the Jell-O tasted like.) Or "You're playing poker, but the cards are sausages and the dealer is Abe Lincoln." If the humor doesn't translate in this explanation (and I'm assuming it doesn't), it's because you had to be there.

The show wasn't consistently hilarious (some of the stuff fell flat because of what the audience gave them to work with, like lacrosse-flavored Jell-O), but the three of us had a good time. I think the boys were also impressed that they got to see a real New York comedy show—even an amateur one—at the age of 9.

We had some time to kill, so we went to Hershey's Time Square. I almost bought some of Hershey's single-source dark chocolate bars or the new-to-me Reese's Whipps bar, which looked like a Peanut Butter Cup crossed with a 3 Musketeers bar. But you could only get the Whipps bars in huge boxes, and the boys didn't want to buy anything, so I didn't bother either. (I'd gotten them some Skittles during the intermission of the comedy show, so maybe they were all sugared out.) They did get some free fast-food-restaurant-worker-type paper hats for having turned some cranks at the "factory" part of the store. They didn't cop any free candy, though. Not even a single Kiss!

Next, the boys wanted to go across the street to M&M's World. M&M had been to M&M's World before with their Mommy, but they hadn't gone to the third floor, so they wanted to remedy that situation. The M&M store is much larger than the Hershey's store even though, as far as I could see, it plugged none of M&M/Mars's other products, like the previously mentioned 3 Musketeers. It had tons of stuff branded with M&M's, though, including boxer shorts and leather jackets. Because nothing says "I'm cool" quite like an adult man wearing an M&M's jacket.

I'd told Tracey and David we'd meet them all outside the theater by 10:30. As we were walking on 48th having left the candy stores behind, Matt asked me if I could be on the lookout for a place with a bathroom. "You mean like the M&M's store, where we just were?" I asked. We backtracked up to the store's third-floor bathroom, which meant we were a little late getting to the Golden Theater. David called, and I told him we were on our way, delayed by a bathroom break.

Everyone said they loved Avenue Q, and, come on, how could they not have? It's got a closeted gay Republican puppet, a black woman in the role of Gary Coleman, puppet-on-puppet sex, and songs about Internet porn and schadenfreude.

Here's a photo I took with my iPhone of everyone outside the theater, with the adults having that post-Broadway-musical glow about them:

In honor of Avenue Q and because, well, it's actually a shorter train ride (though farther to walk from the station) than the 2/3, D, J, and I took the Q home.

The next morning Dad and Jean treated me to brunch at Dad's favorite Park Slope restaurant, Sotto Voce. We all got the French toast and sausage and enjoyed a refreshing mimosa since Dad wasn't going to be driving anytime soon.

Dad hung up a big photo of my boy Cody that I'd had framed and also some little cheapo art (read: postcards) I'd put in little standard-size frames to hang up in the bathroom. I got the one postcard matted, so as to amplify the classiness of the penis joke. :)

Here's Mr. Cody:

Here's the penis joke postcard, which I bought when I was in New Orleans in the summer. Naturally, it's hung (Hah! Hung! Get it?) over the toilet:

And here's one that's hanging to the right of my sink. The quote is by a woman named Sister Barbara Hance: "Show me a day when the world wasn't new."

After Dad did his handyman stuff, which also included fixing a hinge on my bedroom door, D&J went back to South Jersey. It had been a terrific weekend in the city.

A Visit From the Gerbers

The Gerbers came to visit on Saturday after they visited a friend of David's business partner who lives, coincidentally, in Chuck Schumer's building. It's a small world indeed. My sister told me in an e-mail that they were going to visit this guy prior to coming to my place. She told me this guy's address and asked me how far it was from me. I responded that regular readers of Hawleyblog know I'm quite familiar with 9 Prospect Park West because it was where I protested the Iraq war last month.

How could Tracey not keep up with my blog? It's stupendous, and it stars her favorite brother. Not to mention the fact that it frequently mentions her and her unshowered husband. And their adorable sons. If she read my blog religiously, she'd get to relive all of the Ho-Ho-Kus jokes, nod knowingly, and think, "I was there when Bill made up that stupid shit."

As I predicted, the boys broke down and got haircuts before the end of the school year—even sooner than I'd thought. It was a little more difficult than usual telling them apart this time because Matt's barber had left his hair longer than Mike's barber had cut his hair. Mike's hair has a tendency to stick up, so Matt's spikier hair looked more like Mike's usually does. I nonetheless managed to make it through the day without calling either of them the wrong name.

We walked to the Brooklyn Museum. We'd planned to go there specifically to see the Magic in Ancient Egypt exhibit, which turned out to be a bust. It featured only a handful of items on display in a small room. Everyone enjoyed the rest of the Egyptian stuff, though. I liked seeing my favorite ancient Egyptian object again: the beautiful ibis coffin, most of which is visible here if you scroll a little more than halfway down the page.

What made the visit absolutely worthwhile was an amazing exhibit called The Eye of the Artist: The Work of Devorah Sperber. Using spools of thread hanging in columns on chains, Sperber creates mosaics that when viewed through a crystal sphere emerge as famous paintings such as Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper and Mona Lisa. Here's a Flickr slide show of photos taken of Sperber and her helpers while they installed The Last Supper. The last two shots show the final artwork as seen through its viewing sphere. The Eye of the Artist is at the Brooklyn Museum through June 17.

Charles Harper

Last night, I went to the Todd Oldham by La-Z-Boy store in Soho for a visit by artist Charles Harper. I had bought one of his framed serigraphs at the store in February, and when I got a postcard in the mail saying he was going to be at the store in person, I knew I had to go.

When I bought the print this past winter, the saleswoman told me a story about how Todd Oldham had recently found a book from his childhood, The Golden Book of Biology, that was illustrated by Harper. Oldham loved the artwork and helped revive Harper's career. He got Harper his first gallery show—when the artist was in his 80s.

In the 1950s, after his work on the biology book and Betty Crocker's Dinner for Two cookbook, Harper began getting steady work creating illustrations—mostly of wildlife—for a magazine Ford Motor Co. used to put out called Ford Times. That's according to an article by Sam Grawe that appeared in the April issue of Dwell, which I picked up at the time. "Harper's work for Ford became so popular with readers that he started a silk-screening operation in his basement to fulfill mail-order demands for his prints of birds, fish, and Model Ts," Grawe writes in "The Minimal Realism of Charles Harper," which you can read by clicking here.

"In the late '60s," Grawe continues, "the Frame House Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, began to distribute larger-edition serigraphs, and Harper would reach an even greater audience with his iconic posters for the National Park Service."

Most of the article is a Q&A with Harper, whom Grawe interviewed at his home in Cincinnati. Harper says he started his signature two-dimensional style because "I started realizing that in order to get a whole bunch of stuff on a piece of paper, you had to simplify it. So a Rocky Mountain or something like that, you couldn't fit everything in, but you could get the impression by flattening it out. That appealed to me. I still have samples of superrealism from art school. But suddenly on this [cross-country] trip it came to me that this is silly. Nature did it better. I couldn't try to compete. [My wife] Edie happened to get into that at the same time and we progressed together and helped each other."

As you might expect, the online version of the article includes some clickable examples of Harper's work, including one of my favorites: a whimsical drawing, called The Last Aphid, of four ladybugs converging on an aphid that's trapped among their heads and shoulders. A quote (presumably of Harper) that accompanies that illustration in the print version of the article says, "Ladybugs are possibly the only noncontroversial subject left in the world; you can start a ladybug conversation with a total stranger without getting hit in the mouth."

Harper says his favorite illustration is Jesus Bugs, from 1969, of water striders, those bugs that can walk across the surface of a pond. You can see it in the print version of the article, but it's not included in the online version. There are only four serigraphs you can see online, and they aren't identified*: They are, from left to right, Bank Swallow, 1959; The Last Aphid, 1981; Best Dressed (a male wood duck), 1973; and Cardinal Courtship, 1992.

When I bought my first Harper serigraph, I debated which one to choose for almost an hour, I'd say. I ended up with Harper's take on the passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914 after having once been, most likely, the most numerous bird on Earth.

I was torn between that one and the flamingos, which, like most of the serigraphs I'll mention from here on out are viewable here, the Web site of, presumably, the gallery show the saleswoman told me about. This time, I was thinking about getting the flamingos or the spoonbills (which isn't on the Treadway Gallery Web site) or the scissor-tailed flycatcher (which is on the gallery Web site) or the kingbirds (that's there) or the large-mouthed bass (that's there, too). In the end, I went with another from Harper's series on America's vanishing and extinct birds: the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Biologists had thought the ivory-billed woodpecker was extinct, but (at least) one was spotted and heard in Arkansas in 2004 and 2005.

I had fun at the shindig for Harper. I saw Oldham, but I didn't speak with him because I didn't know what to say. In retrospect, I wish I had thanked him for reintroducing the world to Harper's work and had asked him more about how that all happened. (The same saleswoman waited on me again yesterday, and I was reminded that she seems like a ditz, so she may have goofed up the story.) I asked Harper to sign the back of my serigraph after a guy I met there said he was told Harper would be willing to do that. The guy (Did he say his name was Todd?) was cute, but, it turns out, he lives in Chicago and has a partner. Sigh. He came out to New York specifically to meet Harper. He was staying with friends (a gay couple) who were also at the store, and he ended up buying the brown creeper, a fine choice.

I thanked Harper for signing my artwork, and I congratulated him on his success. As I was walking away, I heard the guy sitting next to him say either "Your latest success" or "Your most recent success." I can't recall which now. I suppose I should have said some qualifier like that. But it seemed to me like his story was, He used to be an illustrator, and now he's a highly respected ARTIST.

Anyhow, I'm thrilled to have become acquainted with his work. Click here for the Web site of Fabulous Frames & Art, a gallery in Cincinnati that seems like it must have most every artwork Harper has done, including many not found on the Treadwell Gallery site, such as the adorable Cardinal Courtship from the Dwell article. It includes new works by Harper (he's still working at 83—or 84 if he's had a birthday since the article was written) as well as some very cool stuff by Edie Harper, much of which has a Biblical theme. This site also lists works by a Brett Harper, but it's not clear whether he's any relation, and the links to his creations weren't clickable. Hopefully, that'll get fixed.

And finally, here's another interview with Harper in which he talks about a bird-filled painting he made for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (the source for the ivory-billed woodpecker info I linked to above). The article mentions a forthcoming book (that was also plugged at the store) about Harper by Oldham. It's due out this winter and will contain almost all of Harper's works. I'll be getting it, for sure.

*Sheesh, let's get with the program, online editor of Dwell!