Not far away, there are booths set up for local vendors, one of which is Moon Man, selling kue pancong, Indonesian coconut pancakes. I get one with a Java palm sugar and flaked coconut topping, which is then set aflame with a blowtorch. It's a bold caramel flavor, and the burnt sugar crunches in my teeth where it's been burnt. HanOre and I share the coaster-sized treat and sit down again, listening to salsa music while enjoying our dessert.
When we part ways, I walk down 42nd Street to catch a train, only to find a gaggle of vintage cars parked between 5th and 6th Avenues, bachata pouring out of their speakers and into the warm, crisp night. An orange Ford GTO, a lacquer red Chevrolet Bel Air are among them. Fuzzy dice hang from rearview mirrors, cars shine with a combination of glittering paint jobs and bright white streetlamps, children sleep in backseats. Men and women sit by their cars in plastic folding chairs, sipping beers and chatting in Spanish. Under their feet, neon light radiates from the cars' undercarriages and license plates onto the ground.
*
On June 28, the "Eloise at the Museum" exhibit opens at the New-York Historical Society. Having written about it for Town & Country, I am invited to the opening party with a guest. I bring HanOre, who named her beloved tuxedo cat after the wily Plaza resident. I was older when Eloise was re-released, but I fell in love with her anyway and ended up owning all four of the books in the series. She was both an aspiration and an inspiration, this petite troublemaker who just did whatever she wanted, and I found myself especially connecting to the books' drawings by illustrator Hilary Knight. I even found a book he had illustrated, Algonquin Cat, at a used bookstore and bought it without even thinking simply because he had drawn it. His drawings were also part of my life as the elegant paper dolls that came inside the thick Neiman Marcus catalogs my mother would get in the mail. I still have them tucked away in a Ziploc bag.
I had the opportunity to interview Knight, a spry 90 years old, at an exhibit of his theatre drawings (Hilary Knight's Stage Struck World, on view until September 1) at The New York Public Library's Performing Arts Library. He walked me through the entire exhibit, sharing anecdotes from his childhood, his favorite posters he's drawn (Dance Theatre of Harlem is among them), his hopes for projects in the future. If you had asked me at 12 if I would ever have the chance to do that, I would have leapt and cried with joy. Yet there I was, walking through the Performing Arts Library, my shoe taped to my foot--in a stunning fit of Murphy's Law, it had broken mere minutes earlier as I was crossing the Lincoln Center courtyard. Imagine me, on my way to meet an artist whose work I've admired for more of my life than not, with a sandal snapped in half, hobbling into The Metropolitan Opera's Gift Shop to ask if they sell shoes. Reader, if you are curious, they do not. But they do have Scotch tape, and if you tell them your shoe has broken before you are about to do an interview, they will let you use some to gather what little shreds of your dignity are left and tape the damned shoe to your foot like the lady that you are.
Hilary was kind and gracious, and I listened as he discussed the posters and dioramas and album covers and costumes he had made over the years. I knew the man had done more than just Eloise, but the breadth and depth of his other works I did not know. For as long as I live, I will consider it one of the greatest gifts I have been given to walk through the space with him, to have had the opportunity to hear him tell me himself.
At the exhibit, HanOre and I pose with Eloise. I still hope her rambunctious spirit courses through my veins even a little.
*
SE and I are in the Catskills for 4th of July weekend with our host for the weekend, J. We have driven up to Mountaindale, New York, not far from the now-mythical Borscht Belt Catskills of my parents' (and, incidentally, SE's) youth. The air is cool and clean and clear, trees for miles, the smell of oak and fir and birch in the air. I love New York, but it's nice to be somewhere else for a little while, too. Inside the cabin, we eat Italian breads and meats and cheeses at the dining room table over a table covering that looks like a knit doily. Nearby a photo of the Pope sits in a red glass. There are pictures of J and his sister as children around the house, yellowed with age even though J is not so old.
Later, we drive around the area and see the overgrown golf courses and abandoned homes that punctuate each road. It makes my heart sad for the Catskills my parents knew, the summers they spent in Sullivan and Ulster counties that by their own admission made them who they are now. Why doesn't someone redevelop the area, rescue all of the decay from itself and give the area new life?
After dinner, we sit outside and listen to the local radio station play blocks of artists like Smashing Pumpkins and All-American Rejects on repeat. I forget to wear bug spray and pay for it later.
We wake up the next day and head to a diner then to a Walmart next door in search of sparklers and s'mores fixins for that evening's festivities. We'll also head to an auction at which boxes of tools are going for mere dollars to an enthusiastic crowd. The tools are followed by vintage or just old goods, like an armchair worth $3000 or a box of dolls. I'm surprised to find the adrenaline of bidding pulsing from the center of my chest. I win a hand-etched Sherry bottle.
That evening I remember to put on bug spray but I eat too many s'mores.
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