New Yawk

Only in New York, you might say (Yawk, Yowhk, etc.), how a lone woman sitting on the stoop in Greenwich Village waiting for the restaurant to open reads intently from a large paperback book. She looks blessedly content. So much so that a stranger also hoping to get an early seat at the restaurant (the impeccably popular Pearl's Oyster Bar, even for people who don't do oysters), can't help but wonder at the title. Aha! It is the latest edition of Moss Hart's autobiography ("Act One"), the title of the dramatic adaptation that just closed at Lincoln Center, the very same book the stranger (myself) holds in her hand. Only my edition is dog-eared, decrepit, undoubtedly a 'first edition' paperback of the classic first published in 1959. "Have you got to the part yet where he joyfully escorts his family out of their old apartment, telling them to 'leave it all behind ...we're rich'"....? she asks me. We settle in together at the bar while she waits for a friend to join her.
Of course, this being The City, the woman could not help herself - she had given away the ending, something of a surprise, towards which Hart had been building throughout its 383 pages. Typically, too (generalization?), his final words: Intermission. Always another saga to come.

Always in this gem of a city, a labyrinthine metropolis, is a Next Best Thing. Sometimes the best is some of the oldest, most venerated - as in the 101-year-old Woolworth Building, sanctified now with landmark status and thus, presumably, a public monument. Only it is not. A developer has in mind to build fancy residences (yes, in that tower!) above the office space now let and the building these days is off limits to passersby. The only way to view its imposing interiors - lobby, basement and mezzanine  - is by signing up online for the Woolworth Building Lobby Tour WoolworthTours.com and pay $45. It's worth it just to see the sculpted face in limestone of Mr. Woolworth himself,  counting his money, just one of the many surprising features available to the quick of eye (though guides explain all this of course). The entrepreneurial merchant from Watertown, NY, grew up enamored of French Renaissance styles and strove to make his headquarters an epic recreation of the European art.

Down At the P.O.

A Post Office isn't just a service stop, it is now a convenience store. Buy that pretty picture envelope you never knew you needed or wanted; pick up a remembrance card of a kind you might like to receive  yourself. The variety of never-before-thought-necessary purchases is presumably to help keep the mighty mail distribution machine in operation.
What chance? I've yet to see many people actually buy the pretty colored things being offered. The sight of these accessory items fills me with guilt: maybe that's the point. Like looking at puppies for sale, alone without their mother in a store window. Buy Me, they cry out. Please help, find us a home, plunk down a few extra dollars so the P.O. can live. The items are no bargain, as far as I can tell.
And then there are all those picture stamps. Endless variations on topical themes. "But no global stamps at all!' says an exasperated friend, accustomed to sending mail across the oceans. "The round stamp you can find everywhere else but not here." Not here, as at that moment but the issue gives her an outlet for her frustration, this fury of such dimension as to seem life-shaking. Instead, she is given three different stamps to make up for the amount ($1.15 and growing, for Europe anyway) needed.  The global stamp was plentiful there the next day: Curiously enough, it is the image of a red ribbon bedecked pine wreath. Another enticement fairly new to these outposts of a redundant civilization: a customer service concierge, yes the very word.
Where detritus of a changing civilization is concerned: note, too, the existence on sidewalks virtually everywhere behind the walking postal delivery person is a trail of rubber bands. They are thrown to the ground helter skelter as soon as each delivery is made and left to rot. Would someone like to tally up the cost of these items - bought wholesale, one hopes - and estimate what a recycling program could do to defray further costs to the cash-pressed USPO? Male carriers do it more than female carriers, or so it can be deduced from a pointedly inauthentic survey when a young woman in uniform on a city street was asked 'why' so many are tossed away like this? 'I don't know. I don't do it. They can be recycled.'
PS The great MOMA in New York, I'm told, sells or has on display a round ball of multi-colored rubber bands for a nifty price cheerfully confident that it is a winning design.

City Treasures

of the mid-March week: the sun comes out, the wind dies down, and the inner city resident has a free afternoon thinking to join the two-hour long Drawing Workshop at the National Gallery of Art www.nga.gov, free for first comers. (offered monthly, several days at a time, through May, in the West Building, East Garden Court).
It was Friday in tourist season (spring break, etc.) the museum was alive with visitors. Alas, I arrived too late to sign, all 35 spaces had been taken earlier. They would become part of a class on "Point of View: Cezanne's Landscapes" using two kinds of charcoal, a chamois cloth, and large sheets of paper, under the instruction of a museum staffer and a practicing artist. The session began with an earnest lecture  on Cezanne in the busy noise-impacted gallery while participants adjusted to the portable stools supplied by the gallery, juggling drawing boards on their knees. Then artist Dan  did a brief illustration of how to look at the shadings of light in a typical quite visible and beautiful landscape - modulated planes, mostly pastels, a concentrated assembly of houses in Provence.  Next, the impromptu class of avid art aspirants - a mix of ages, mainly female - had 20 minutes to try to recreate on paper what they saw.
I grew tired of watching  - shunned by numbers, forced to standby position - and wandered off into the sunshine, finding myself stopped on Constitution Avenue by a Presidential motorcade making its way from Capitol Hill to the White House in  full regalia, ambulance included. All traffic in downtown Washington was arrested for at least one half hour though I hear not a single protesting horn; we natives may not be amused but we certainly are conditioned. And the procession, at least for visitors, is spectacular , with the gaggle of police cycles fore and aft the shrouded funereal black vehicles,  flags flying. It almost seems as though the Marine Band - 'the President's own"! - should be regular accompaniment on this ritual drive.
Headed down F Street, thinking to buy a pound of coffee beans from MS Swing's emporium a ways over at 17th and G NW, I duck into another local venue - one that tourists often miss. It is Fahrney's (www.farneyspens.com) famous pen shop, marked by an outsized green fountain pen suspended over the street. Within are some of the most exotic - and expensive - hand toys  anywhere. It's almost pornographic, so enticing the tools. I eyed celebrity-named versions of the MontBlanc (blue cartridges available for lawyers' needs when signing original documents, etc.) now 30 percent off its $900 price. What would Jonathan Swift say - the namesake on one of the sleek black and silver models? And with matching cuff links, a bit more. I settled instead for an slim $18 stylus ballpoint in purple, buying a second one in white (both useful when handling smartphones with greasy fingers) that the obliging clerk volunteered to wrap in either green striped or red paper. "It's a birthday present," I had mentioned. Back came a handsome package encased in a mountain of carefully arranged twirling ribbon. It slipped neatly into a green-on-white bag - "Fahrney's Pens: The Write Place Since 1929," noticeably bereft of the usual web site marker.
 Swing's was in full motion as usual: customers chatting over cups of various sizes at plain chairs and tables, the smell of fresh roasted coffee drawing people in like a drug. The pastry isn't much; besides good caffeine, the lure most days is Loraine, longtime employee dressed handsomely in glinting jewelry and TV-ready makeup. Such bliss, this sense of belonging in the bureaucratic kingdom and, then, the shock, a necessary one:
In front of the White House, outside the gates, two women with microphones call out   the names of all the Syrians killed to date in that country's ongoing civil war.
The world is always with us in this town.

More Metro Soundings

 Abroad underground: That was the lot of a group of British tourists encountered at Metro's Metro stop during the  latest snow day to stop Washington in its tracks. But not, fortunately, the subway tracks. (The trains have to be kept running in bad weather to keep tracks from freezing.) Buses were out of operation and no sensible car owner drove anywhere except on 'urgent business' - i.e. subway and hospital personnel. This high-spirited troop of visitors were on their way to the only museum open in the city - by a fluke, or perhaps because security guards made it in - the Air & Space Museum. With a guide's help, they had figured their chances of actually seeing something other than their Roslyn hotel room. Escaping the last weeks of steady rain at home may have contributed to their giddiness and make snow seem a blessing.
 That's when their Metro train got stuck; it would not, could not move. A joke of the transportation gods, perhaps. They were on their way to a quilting exhibit at the Lancaster County Convention Center - by way of whatever diversions Washington and Philadelphia offer. The women were quilters (cotton only, three layers) who entice husbands to go everywhere with them for quilt manifestations. A D.C. native popped into their locked Metro car when a trainman had manually opened half a door for a few minutes. Loud guffaws ensued: this local woman trying to be clever by jumping aboard   found herself a prisoner, just as they were. 

Two Super Photo Shows

Go quickly before the spring rush to the National Gallery of Art www.nga.gov where a splendid eye-popping new exhibit opens next week that is sure to warm the heart of all urbanophiles : A first-time ever - in terms of depth and content - of the black and white photographs of Garry Winogrand, late of New York, Texas, Arizona and California. Feast on the loving but often wicked eye of this 'street-smart' urbanite who could also put the soul of rural towns memorably in a viewer's head. There is little sentiment and a  lot of soul in his work. "An epic picture of American life" from the '50s until his death in 1984, in words of guest curator, Leo Rubinfien, a longtime friend of Winogrand.  He portrayed "the spirit of the nation"  and "a set of values that had to do with living itself." There was a love of the immediate experience, and a rejection of the idea of someone 'out to make good photos.' He probably invented the genre of street photography but not as a voyeur or exploiter. "The core theme is freedom itself," Rubinfein noted in a press preview. Don't miss either the long video of Winogrand teaching and smiling - but hardly "lecturing' -  included in the show.
Everything here is cool in the very best sense of the word - a word that has many dimensions and declensions.
Luckily, the National Portrait Gallery has recently mounted its own take on 'cool' with an exhibit of close-ups of Americans living and dead who best embody cool. (Credit goes to jazz musician Lester Young for coining the word in the context that most people seldom question today.) Jimi Hendrix is the poster 'boy' while Madonna is one of the first women portraits to catch the eye as you enter the building's upstairs hall. Who doesn't want to be cool or, at the very least, enjoy images of famous Americans whose very faces alone show us its meaning.

Winter's Discontent

Shakespeare's 'Richard III' - now in a splendid new production at Washington's Folger Shakespeare Theatre - www.folger.edu/theatre - says it best in his ominous opening lines about winter being the time of 'our discontent,' thereby labeling his own and England's (read you and the USA)  political and atmospheric situation as something less than ideal.
Indeed, we are now fully into the current season's unpredictable blasts of weather and woe. But why lose heart when there are such inventive and absorbing stagings of the classics to be seen locally? The staging of the play, which runs through March 9, 2014, is magnificent - on a par with the performance by New York actor Drew Cortese in the title role. For the first time in its history, the Folger is transformed into a theater-in-the-round with fantastic light and sound in an innovative design that gives Arena Stage a tough competitor. (It led one critic to state off-the-cuff, how Arena now looks "more suburban" than urban - ie a bit old-fashioned and staid.) Audiences should rally to this work to marvel at the scene while they ponder the grim moral of the gruesome tale. Do unto others as they would do unto you, at least in these historic royal precincts, and you end up quite dead.

NAPOLI AMORE

This city talks - constantly, rapidly, urgently. But considering all the bustle -  plus horrendous traffic due greatly to very long term road and subway construction projects - I'd wager that "anxiety" isn't much of a disease in these parts. This is Southern Italy, after all, where self-expression is the norm. Where letting it all out in voice and gesture is both therapy and entertainment. It was surprising on a single day's visit recently (October 2013) the paucity of honks, given chaotic driving and parking styles; how laid-back (relatively) were the taxi drivers, two of them relishing the chance to tell about their  trips to America  - one on a honeymoon that took him to New York and Key West - and then pointing with pride to parts of Naples where they grew up and where they still live.  Families. Groundedness. Government is a joke but who cares if your kids are cute and the trains run (mostly on time). "Two million inhabitants and six million cars, " said one driver, laughing. He didn't even mention multiple-million motorcycles. It's a fair guess to say that the best escapes are underground. An immense subterranean landscape exists, maybe more tunneling than anywhere outside of wartime Vietnam, available for tourists to admire. The still-evolving subway is a marvel, limited as it is - being only two lines, one of which runs for the moment on a single track. The vast corridors of brilliant blue tiles are a delight, mirroring the expansive Mediterranean seacoast outside. Like much else in Italy, style often substitutes for substance - a country's vast potential draining away in dramatics.