6/1/02

It's not every weekend that I find myself eating white chocolate mousse at the Yale Club and lying naked in an alley in Chinatown within the space of seven hours, but this has been one of those weekends.

The mousse was the dessert at my cousin Jennie's graduation-from-Yale party. I'd never been to the Yale Club before, and my uncle took me around to show me the big common room where they have portraits of Clinton and of G.W. Bush kitty-corner from each other. "This club's nicer," he said, "but I think the Harvard Club has better food." At the party, I was seated at the "young people's table" (Lisa and I were 10 years older than any of them, but still of a different generation from most of the people there); ended up talking to a childhood friend of Jennie's about the glories of the Star Wars Holiday Special for a while.

The alley in Chinatown was, of course, Spencer Tunick's latest mass nude photo shoot, an on-the-fly sort of thing for a gallery called Art In General. Lisa and I hauled ourselves out of bed at 3:30 AM to get there by 5; a couple of friends who'd mentioned they'd probably be there weren't--casualties of the hour. As usual, the whole thing was a blast--there were musicians playing cartoonish flute-and-cello music, and a woman who had a huge bin of tasty scones she was handing out to people, and everyone was giggling. 300 of us crowded into A.I.G.'s office for the first part of the shoot, which was fairly leisurely and genial: he didn't have to worry about cops turning up, etc. Then we all re-dressed, headed to the alleyway outside, stripped down again and did a much more organized, all-business pose. Apparently, this is for a fundraiser for A.I.G.'s educational programs--cool!

For dinner tonight, Lisa & Naomi & I hit another Sietsema pick, #8 this time: Borobudur, an Indonesian place on E. 4th St. Really pretty good, if not the revelation that my favorites from the list have been. Lisa & I went on to meet Trent at P.S. 122 for Popera, a more-or-less-one-person show by a very tall drag queen named Shequida who's an opera singer with a 3-octave range. The highlight was the first thing she did: the Star Trek theme as it would be sung by Jessye Norman. But I associate P.S. 122 with having seen Kiki & Herb there, and this really didn't quite compare.

Douglas

 

previously