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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
Vita Nova 2 Walking south from the Whitney Museum in the rain, the most amazing thing happened, and I will tell you about this before I tell you about the food we found. Oh the food…
But first:
Fran
Lebowitz
Yes THE Fran Lebowitz, she of the cackle-inducing, fine-dudded oh my god to grow up to be her infamy Fran Lebowitz’s. The one and only. In a very nice outfit [surprise] and with her umbrella just so on Park Avenue, of course: the author of Social Studies nevermind, right there walking past me and me gasping and she
Walked
Right
Past
Us
In the rain on a Friday night.
She did. I died a little in the best way. My wife had no idea why I was gasping and when you travel with an Epipen your relatives can be forgiven for wondering what this new avenue of choking is the result of. Because there had been no salmon or Kraft dressings in our recent digestive history, she could only interpret my passionate arm-smackings as the gestures of a star-struck someone in the rain. But even then, no, my wife expects higher things of me and so she assumed anaphylaxis as the better source of euphoria. But no, sez I with eye-bulged excitement, it was a sighting of FRAN LEBOWITZ, humourist and lady-dandy.
And she disappeared into the night and I too was as satisfied to walk on.
Now before I tell about the food, which may have to be a Part Three of this blog which means it will appear before the first two installments and therefore will be seen as Part One even though it’s part Three and that’s like watching the Godfather out of order, or out of whack, so to speak: it won’t make sense….no, I’m going to hold back on the food bit.
The rainy Tuesday night before I left for New York City, I taught a really fun workshop called Event Full Fiction at Toronto Writers Centre. Just happens that the New York Times gave me a gift in the form of an article about one Ms. Kamila Myzel, a woman who runs a candy shop at 140 West 55th Street in Manhattan. My prep work for workshops is passionate and far-reaching, and completely intuitive. I go with my gut, as the ugly little saying goes. The source of inspiration about which I am blabbing now was an interview by Times writer Ralph Blumenthal with Ms. Kamila Myzel, 50, a Polish immigrant who fled the martial crackdown of her native land before communism collapsed completely. Something about it moved me deeply, so I decided to share it with my students the night before my trip. And then it dawned on me, right in the middle of teaching, that there was no reason not to meet this woman, since I happened to be leaving for New York City the very next morning.
And we did meet her. After a full day of viewing the photographs of my personal image hero, Robert Frank and the abstract paintings and drawings of Georgia O’Keefe, admired by us both, we walked down to West 55th Street and over and over till we found the little shop belonging to Kamila Myzel and were served by a very sweet young woman who was not fifty but who was obviously becoming accustomed to the recent celebrity of her boss, who stood some few feet away chatting up a handsome young fellow who may or may not have been a licorice addict or perhaps the world’s most attentive truffle buyer. Eventually we did manage a hello and a nod to the New York Times piece that had drawn us to the tiny shop and it was as thrilling as seeing FRAN LEBOWITZ walking past in the rain oblivious [or not, can one ever assume the oblivion of another, especially of someone known to be a writer?]. And then we headed for the subway to a restaurant with the best hot pickled veggies and hot and sour soup and the veggie dumplings which are now, for both of us, like some kind of gustatory crack…
The full food description may have to wait until either a 3rd installment of this epic blog, or it may just find its way into the revised In The Spice House. In any case I would like to thank my pals at www.chowhound.com for excellent recommendations that meant we ate well in New York for 4 solid days and darlings, that is a miracle when you think of just how many bad restaurants there are to be stumbled into in the wild wide world…
Listening to: Hold On My Heart, Genesis
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