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Just dialing in my old new york lady bona fides

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Incident #1: Wednesday evening, I was sitting in a lovely venue with blond wood paneling watching this big gala presentation. They were presenting some very heartfelt awards. It really was lovely don't get me wrong but just suddenly I was like... I gotta go.  I'm cranky and tired and surrounded by just too many part-time real estate agents and cliques of longtime friends all hugging and squealing and yeah. I was suddenly hit by a solid wave of longing to be in my own home in a pair of more comfortable pants. But: Colossal Problem. I had seen the gift bags they were planning to hand out after the event that included a fancy little box of non pareil chocolates. Non Pareil chocolates. You see the obvious allure. So I sat in my seat for an extra ten minutes trying to puzzle out how to both leave immediately and also get the chocolates you were only supposed to get at the very end when all the normal polite people left en mass. They didn't even have the bags out on the table by ...
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The Print Show at PowerHouse Arts

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We wound up going to the Print Show at PowerHouse Arts even though the last time I was at PowerHouse Arts, and I could be wrong about this however I didn't bother to look it up as usual, but I'm pretty sure last time I was there, the entire PowerHouse Arts premises were about as big as a not-so-big book shop.   So yeah, I was totally worried about going the whole way out to god knows where in Brooklyn to a show we paid in advance to get into, and then have it be like five sad vendors jammed in a not-so-big bookshop, and maybe one of them is selling home remodeling and another other one is chasing you around with perfume samples.  Heads up: Powerhouse Arts has moved. And it's an upgrade.  Now they have a huge warehouse-ish building and therefore this print show was impressively large and well curated. Worth the trip and the price of admission in other words. After a lot of thinking and circling back, we purchased two prints. One of them was fairly gigantic and in a fr...
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Location: 322 3rd Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11215, USA
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Every Brilliant Thing: Now and A Decade Ago

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A play called "Every Brilliant Thing" is currently on Broadway. Matt and Helen went to see it. Playbill from Every Brilliant Thing on Broadway. So look, I'm only mentioning this so I can be one of the cool crowd who talks very knowledgeably about some show currently on Broadway  because they also saw the original and/or earlier revivals. My friend Danielle from book club and her cousin Greg do this. They hammer through a detailed critique like it's a dereliction of duty not to give excellent notes. For example, out front the theater after we all saw Gypsy last year, both of them launched into comparing and contrasting Audrey whatserface with all the prior leading ladies they'd seen portray Mama Rose using words like "vibrato" and "mezzo soprano."  I think Danielle said she'd seen nine (9) different Gypsy productions. NINE! Her dad was on the Tony committee so she got an early start.  So anyway, this is my one (1) time to shine and I'm t...
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Location: 15 Barrow St, New York, NY 10014, USA
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Spring 2026. Phoning it in.

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 Look. I don't know if Spring 2026 deserves a blog post more than any other season of any other year. I just started to get antsy after not having written a post in over a month. I have discovered there's this weird out of kilter sensibility when one has had a blog for 20 years and then one ignores said blog for a time period that is longer than the normal cadence. A vague sense of unease sets in. Now, don't get me wrong:  This does not, dear reader, constitute any sense of obligation to any of you, or even all 7 of you. I don't flatter myself for one major reason. 99% of this blog's visitors STILL arrive because they clicked over here hoping to determine if Cher is really an Indian (as she claims in the maybe or maybe not eponymous song "Half Breed.")  Then they encounter this blog post . The Cher blog post from 2013 that STILL gets hundreds of hits a week. One of two things happens when the unwary scour the world wide web and wind up over on this decade ...
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Location: 7th Ave & W 57th St, New York, NY 10019, USA
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Having a chat with Swedes in Minnesota about a missing head (of a statue)

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  A photo of an example of a bust on a pedestal in a park.  I edited it so you can see what it would look like without the bust statue on top On the second Monday every month, there's this so-called "Pratstund" where a group of Minnesota Swedes and folks of Swedish descent have a Zoom where everyone speaks Swedish at wildly variant levels of fluency.  Somehow I got invited a year ago and I show up periodically. Meaning twice in total. The second time I made an appearance was last week. So I get on the video chat and the main Swede is talking about a BFD that recently transpired in their little town. It was front page news. It went down like this: The town had been founded by Swedish immigrants in the 1800s or whenever the Swedes were in the business of founding towns. There was one gentleman in particular who idk did a lot of founding-type work and so to honor him in the early 2000's, the town erected a bust of the guy and put it in the town square.  Five years later...
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Location: Lindstrom, MN, USA
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I'm convinced the Frick reads this blog, that's all I'm gonna say

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  Headed out into the tundra to go to the Frick Museum As per my last post, it was cold AF in New York City. I decided this might be a rare occasion to break out my grandmother's "knee length" blond mink coat. *For anyone stymied right now, let it be known that while my grandmother had an aggressively large personality, she was really really short. But yeah it's still a gorgeous coat that was made by my great grandfather for his daughter... my great grandfather being a furrier and all. My plan was to wear this coat so as not to freeze my ass off on the way up to the Frick, the perfect gilded age destination for a person in such a coat. So on brand.  I get up there, I meet my friend Anna and together we go inside. And here's how I know the Frick reads this blog, specifically the earlier post here , where i rant specifically about four things at the newly remodeled Frick: 1) Somehow, you keep winding up in the Frick lobby and then you have to dig out your tickets ag...
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Location: 1 E 70th St, New York, NY 10021, USA
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It's f*ing cold outside in NYC, there's snow and also Tom took a photo frame out of the neighbor's trash

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 First of all, it's ridiculously cold outside. I never wear long underwear and I've been wearing long underwear. In fact, I wore a pair to a big business meeting in midtown last week. At the outset, this seemed like a great idea, but about half way through the meeting, I got really hot.  Originally, my plan had a hukana matada vibe. Like, I thought to myself as I got dressed, stuffing myself into my long johns and my dress pants... if I get hot, i'll just go to the bathroom and take them off and jam them in my handbag. I want to just say that this plan falls into the category of "great on paper, doesn't hold up irl." Like there's logistics involved. You have to take off all your pants in the ladies room balancing in one shoe due to the gross floor, and then come back to the meeting with a giant undergarment in your handbag. It's a challenge of both balance and storage capacity. I say all this to say, we've been spending a lot of time indoors. Appar...
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Location: 435 W 23rd St, New York, NY 10011, USA
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