Summer Slices

It's a June evening so the air is warm but still cool enough to walk through without feeling a film of moisture develop on your skin. HanOre and I are walking from Town Hall, following the sound of salsa music to Bryant Park. It turns out there's a free salsa dance that night, with tons of people crowded onto a rectangular dance floor near the 6th Avenue edge of the park. The lawn of the park itself has lots of pockets of empty space for us to sit, so we plop ourselves down and remove our shoes, memories of our evening like programs and handbags scattered in front of us. The lights overlooking the park are so bright it doesn't feel quite like nighttime, rather some amorphous otherworldly time that doesn't exist on Earth as of yet. People sit on rust and crimson blankets provided by the park, but we sprawl out on the grass. It's cool under our feet, nice enough to rub my toes between.

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.

Whiskey-upon-Hudson

At 9:30 am this past Saturday, a white Mini Cooper rolled up to my apartment building. In the driver's seat was SE, Ray-Bans perched on his face, one hand perched confidently on the wheel. In the mere moments I was outside the steaming humidity swallowed me whole and I was relieved to plop myself in the rush of air conditioning inside the car. We plugged in our tunes--which would evolve throughout the day from The Black Keys Pandora radio station to a medley of Ben Folds and No Doubt anthems to yelping pop punk songs from our pseudo-emo youth--and made our way to upstate New York for the day.

Though we had to pass through the corporate suburban wasteland of New Jersey first, where Targets and Kohl's and Houlihan's and, yes, even TGI Friday's peppered the landscape instead of...anything else, we eventually arrived back in New York. Outside of the city by probably a little under an hour, New York is a curling highway running through mountains and rock and forest. It is green and spread through with country roads, the occasional log cabin, and the occasional Donald Trump sign. At one point, though, as if we turned some magical corner, the Trump signs evolved into gay pride flags and  I felt like we were back in Manhattan, but with far more trees and Grateful Dead paraphernalia.

We had gone upstate, to the New Paltz area, to visit the Hudson Whiskey Distillery at Tuthilltown Spirits. We were to arrive and take a tour of the facility, have a whiskey tasting, then lunch at the former Tuthilltown Grist Mill turned restaurant next door. But we arrived to the area a bit early and instead poked around an antiques store. Musty toys (like Barbie Paper Dolls from the 1960s and even an NSYNC marionette) and glassware and jewelry ran through the store, chaotically shelved together to fit as much as possible in the tiny space. I ended up with a copy of James Thurber's The Thurber Carnival from the 1940s and a Lake Placid Olympics pin with a tiny athletic raccoon printed on it, courtesy of SE, who also did not leave empty-handed, by way of a petite American flag pin.

Outside of the antiques store were signs for something called the Sunflower Arts Festival, which happened once a year. We resolved to check it out after our tour, but upon pulling up to the distillery we realized it was in the field mere steps away from the distillery's front door. We were still early when we arrived, though, so we decided to poke around. Tall, circular metal structures at the distillery were painted over in a splash of bold, colorful designs, and around the corner at the fair there was a music tent, an array of standalone "ghost" doors painted in an explosion of bright colors as if they were canvases. 

Next to those, artists spraypainted murals onto canvas (one of them later turned out to be the famed (Meres One, founder of the dearly departed 5 Pointz aerosol art project in Long Island City, Queens). In some tents nearby, local artists and children painted still lives of sunflowers, people sold handcrafted jewelry, baked goods, home-bottled hot sauces, dried lavender, and a host of other goodies. People sat on a sloping hill dotted with planted sunflowers and listened to the band, some young women hula-hooped to the strum of their guitars, running for shelter when a rather heavy sunshower reared its head. There were more piercings and tattoos and tie dye than I expected for upstate New York (I was more prepared for the Trump signs, quite frankly), but SE told me the area is known for its crunchy, granola spirit. Who knew?

Shortly after we went into the distillery for our tour, led by a man named Lion with a skull tattoo and several ear piercings. He walked us through the whiskey's development, from its history as a distillery to its beginnings as grain to a fermenting mash, to a boiling liquid to a cooled liquid to a barreled liquid to a labeled and sent off liquid. I marveled at the structures and containers used for everything and I felt like I was in a sort of steampunk factory fairyland, everything a hooting and churning or pumping brown or silver metal. My favorite part was seeing all the barrels used for the stuff, how each one is filled up with a gas station-like pump labeled with a date and was from a different cooperage in the country.

Post-tour, it was time for our tasting, where we were able to sample all the beverages produced at the distillery, whiskeys and ryes as well as a delectable cacao liqueur, blackberry cassis, and bourbon maple syrup. I slurped the latter out of a tiny plastic cup as if I were coaxing cough syrup onto my aching throat. I can still taste it.

Post-distillery, we made our way to the adjacent Tuthill House restaurant. As I mentioned, it's a former grist mill, so it was perched on top of a gorgeous waterfall flowing over shiny rocks. Inside I had one of the best cocktails I have ever had, called the "Beet Poet." It featured, I quote, "Walnut & Pistachio Infused Indigenous Empire Wheat Vodka, Beet, Black Peppercorn, Fresh Lemon, Ginger." Praise be to our lordess and savoir RuPaul, did that make the simmering heat outside feel like it had disappeared (the buzz it brought on was not unwelcome, either). We dove into burgers afterward and had another gander at the Sunflower Festival before driving home.

Well, not entirely "home" home, though we did head back to the five boroughs. We realized that since we had purchased the car for the entire day, we should really make use of it and go to a place for dinner we wouldn't normally be able to get to as easily without a car. We chose Arthur Avenue in the Bronx for Italian food, specifically the restaurant Mario's. My father had grown up going to eat Italian food with his family there and parts of The Godfather were filmed there. We dove into an herbed carrot salad and seeded bread and olive oil and caprese salad and chicken scarpariello and tiramisu and all of it was simply heavenly. Dessert still on our lips, we walked back to the car, lolling and sated, a day of whiskey and sun behind us.