East Side-West Side All Around the Town

Greetings from the soggy Sidewalks of New York.  This weekend our good friends, Wendy Wilkes and Jim Krier, joined us for the New York experience and we traveled to the east side, west side, uptown and downtown all in the midst of torrential rain and wind.  Saturday night we went to one of Zagat's top rated restaurants, Daniel, for our fanciest New York meal.  It was exquisite, but also edible, "small and fancy" food.  I say "edible" because some of the menus of the top rated restaurants don't even appeal to me any more but we all were happy with our choices at Daniel. I can tell I'm getting old because my palate has stayed in the late 60's early 70's for what I consider haute cuisine.  Daniel is located in a beautiful, intimate room on the upper East Side. A sign of the times was the large, expensive painting downstairs outside the lounges.  It was of a young man looking at his Blackberry.  I came out from the ladies room to encounter a young man looking at his Blackberry standing next to the painting and he could have been the model. 
Jim grabbed a cab in the downpour and we headed down to the trendy new midtown apartment of his son, Andrew, on the 39th floor across from the Empire State Building.  Many of you know I've been "burned" by Google and I've learned my lesson.  Don't put the names of real people who might get googled in this blog.  So I have to be cryptic about Andrew.  Andrew is a very well known celebrity the "late-nineties-party-starter turned record-producer/motivational-speaker/ general-jack-of-all-trades" to quote New York Magazine  His stage name is Andrew followed by the initials of his hyphenated surname (Wendy's surname-Jim's Surname).  But if I put his real name in this blog it might come up when fans are searching and Andrew would not like for them to read the observations of a 61 year old lady who remembers him from when he was an adorable boy playing with Beth in the swimming pool.  Andrew is a singer, songwriter, performer, nightclub owner, motivational speaker and an ever-evolving art form.  So getting to visit with him fit in with all my recent performance art experiences.  He and his lovely wife, Cherie, shared their fantastic view with us and gave us a tour of his apartment (with Andrew's studio in the center of the living room).  Cherie is also a performer and the two of them appeared in a photo layout in the February issue of Elle.  Then Andrew hailed two cabs (now that there were five of us we couldn't take one) and we went downtown to the outskirts of Chinatown to his club (which I also won't name to avoid a Google link).  There are over 300 live music Clubs in New York and we always see the under 30 crowd on the subway going downtown at 11:00 p.m. just when we are heading home from the opera to go to bed.  So I was thrilled to have the opportunity to head into one of these secret societies and learn how about the next wave of avant garde (?!) culture. We were able to bypass the rope line, pass the bouncers, and enter a very dark room with 100,000 watts of sound (that's what the website says).  Your body moved just from the sound and since Greg had been fighting migraines all day we did not last long and quickly left.  Next time I'll wear earplugs so I can last longer and actually see more dancing.  We returned home to the bad news we had been dreading:  before we left for dinner Jim notice that the elevator was leaking water.  When we left the elevator didn't work and when we returned we learned both elevators were water damaged.  So after our night on the town it was 11 flights up to the apartment.  Not a great way to host one's guests.

Sunday it was uptown, upper West Side for a trip to the Museum of Natural History and their Silk Road exhibit.  This was an interesting, but not great, exhibit that walked you through the route from Xi'an China (which Greg and I visited in 2008) to Baghdad via the silk road of the middle ages.  Highlights included a demonstration of how silk is made, Arabic writing and scientific instruments, spices and dyes and perfumes, and the spread of religion. There was an interesting article in yesterday's New York Times about European mummies found in the Taklimakan Desert.  I never heard of the Taklimakan Desert until Sunday so this obviously widened my horizons.  We next wearily meandered through the  dinosaurs and we were through for the day.

You know you have good friends when the real highlights of the visit were sitting around the living room, reading the Sunday New York Times, eating pizza and watching The Pacific.  We were sorry to see Jim and Wendy go on Monday, but I suspect they were happy to leave the 11 story walk-up.