A Long-overdue Visit
I recently spent a few days in New York City. I’ve been meaning to get there again—I hadn’t been since before the pandemic—but the timing never worked out. Then I joined the Board of Directors of a non-profit organization that just happened to be holding a meeting in the city, providing a perfect excuse to make the trip. (I could have attended by Zoom, but it was my first meeting with this Board, and I wanted to be there in person.)
For trips north along the East Coast, I prefer to take the train. From central Virginia to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York, it’s an easy trip and brings you into the center of those cities, rather than a distant airport. The trip to Penn Station in New York is a little over six hours, and with WiFi on board, the time passes quickly. Since my last trip to the city, the station’s Moynihan Arrival Hall has opened, and it is fantastic—a huge improvement.
My hotel on busy 42nd Street in the Hudson Yards area of Hell’s Kitchen was about a twenty-minute walk from the train station, but it was a nice day so I didn’t mind. After getting settled, I ventured out to the nearest subway station to make my way to the Upper West Side to meet some old friends (we hadn’t seen each other in 35 years) for dinner. Dinner was fantastic, and I even enjoyed the trip on the subway. One of my favorite things to do in a big city is explore public transportation, and New York’s new-ish “Tap and Go” payment system makes it much easier than it used to be for visitors.
The next day, I decided to camp out at a coffee shop to get some work done. I had printed some pages from my work-in-progress and planned to spend the morning editing. I found a small coffee shop on 42nd Street, got a large coffee, and began working on the pages. After a while, a man at the next table leaned over and asked if he could ask me something. He was curious whether the editing I was doing was on someone else’s work or my own, and did I prefer to edit by hand or on a computer? I explained that I was traveling and so editing by hand was a necessity, but indeed I do usually reach a point where I like to print out the work to see it on the page rather than the screen. I noted that he was writing in a journal, and he acknowledged that he was an actor and writer. I also noted that he was wearing a UVa sweater, and it turned out his family lived in Charlottesville, although he had gone to college “out West,” and had been in New York for sixteen years. He introduced himself as Chris and went on his way.
While in New York, I saw two plays, neither of which grabbed me. Art by Yasmin Reza was a revival of a play that first ran on Broadway in 1998. This production featured Neil Patrick Harris, Bobby Cannavale, and James Corden, so it was extremely well performed (Corden was especially funny). Oh, Mary!, which has gotten great reviews and was recommended to me by many people, was a disappointment. I thought it was silly and crude. I suppose I’m glad I saw it, since so many people were talking about it, but I don’t need to see it again.
I also managed to get to three museums. The first was the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side. It is a terrific small museum featuring Austrian art (including Klimt and Schiele paintings I admired) and currently has a special exhibit of German Expressionist paintings. Also, on the ground floor is a Viennese café where I met a friend for lunch, so that was fun. I was going to my Board meeting on Friday afternoon, so I squeezed in a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in the morning. I was at MoMA the year before the pandemic, when it was about to close for renovations, but it is stunning now. Then on Saturday morning, I was lucky enough to participate in a tour of a special exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibit was work by deaf artist Christine Sun Kim, most of which dealt with the experience of being deaf. Because the pieces were mostly black and white and resembled New Yorker cartoons, one painter among us noted that they didn’t seem particularly interesting visually. While that’s arguably true, I thought the works raised important questions.
One of the highlights of the trip for me was a fantastic dinner with a friend in Koreatown at Kunjip. We had an enormous meal of Korean BBQ, seafood pancakes, a bean paste stew I really like, and countless side dishes.
I really can’t let so much time go by before I get back to New York!
Reminder of Goodreads Giveaway
Please remember to visit Goodreads to register to win one of 100 free Kindle copies of my novel, The Last Bird of Paradise. The Giveaway closes on September 30 and winners will be announced shortly after that.
