Lemonade

On the way to Paris Lindsay and I spent almost as much time in airports as in the air. From Jacksonville we had a three hour delay causing us to miss our connection to Paris, which put us a day behind. Continental’s flights leave at night so we had a day to kill. We took the train into NYC, found a place to stay, and made a few calls.

I stopped at Viand, my favorite 10 minute breakfast spot, with my cousin to catch up on his recent departure from a family business.

Almost everyone I know in NY has a day job so finding people to visit proved interesting. After being totally moved by the Richard Serra pieces I saw with Matt at DIA:Beacon and with Andrew in Seattle, I knew I was going to see his solo MoMA exhibition by hook or crook. I called my aunt with whom I regularly visit the museum to see if she could break away. She found an hour in her schedule and met us there to catch up in an ever-changing, unique, beautiful, pristine space.

In my usual compressed time fashion we bolted downtown to meet Zach and Nina for a coffee before they disappeared into the kitchen working on the city’s best meals of the night. Zach described the heat of working in on of the top rated restaurants. Even with a professional culinary degree and amazing talent he makes less than two times minimum wage in one of the countries most expensive cities. Along side him are a number of volunteers who work for free just to be able to add this restaurant to their resume. Talk about supply and demand, with free workers it’s easy to pay the ones who need to eat peanuts.

Continuing the art experience we followed the High Line (which will be a beautiful park in a few years) from the start up through Chelsea stopping in the high-tech, new-media gallery Eye Beam. I played a reprogrammed original Nintendo with a game called I Shot Andy Warhol, you can guess why it had the Duck Hunt gun. We walked into a few more galleries before stopping to see a fellow CC alumnus at the James Cohan Gallery. They were taking down an old show and putting up a new one, so the gallery wasn’t in its usual state. In the back Laurie showed us several binders with photos of works that had passed through since I last visited. She suggested we visited the Roxy Paine tree in Madison Square garden on 25th, so we let her finish her lunch and walked cross town to see the life-sized stainless steel trees. The sculpture garden I mentioned above in Seattle with Andrew also had one of these trees, so I knew it was worth the walk.

We worked our way back to the airport only to find our flight to France delayed an hour to start. After the delay put the pushback later than the next flight out, we decided to take our carry-on only luggage and jump ship. We had to wait as Standby passengers which I thought meant they’d be happy to give us two middle seats between either fat people or babies, maybe both, after everyone else got on. Once the waiting area cleared we got our seats to my surprise, A and B, and aisle and window. When we got to the exit row bulkhead, I thought it was too good to be true. Not only did we have an aisle and a window, but we also had extra legroom and no one in front of us.

All-in-all we squeezed the lemons of the delay into lemonade.