Some miscellaneous musings on NY and a visit to the Brooklyn museum

Last night I had just finished practicing, and the door to the harpsichord room opened, and there stood someone I had never seen before. Apparently the look on my face said it all. The woman facing me said, "Did Martha tell you I was coming?" Obviously not. She is Kate, another of Martha's nieces. Kate was only here overnight, having just arrived by plane from Uganda where she was working last week, wisely using our tax dollars to either prop up or deny banks. She was on her way out the door when I got up this morning, but will be back Monday night.
Martha is a lovely person who has an open door policy for all of her friends to drop by, stay the night, move in, whatever. It's a good way for us outsiders to meet people.

Today after a leisurely morning of bagels and coffee, and finally a bit of much-needed practice for me, we went off the the Brooklyn museum. You can see by our ghostly appearance how we are wasting away in NY. We went to see a show called Yinko Shonibare, MBE. It's an exhibit of Victorian costumes, reconstructed in "African" prints, which it turns out aren't African at all, but are trade prints manufactured in places like England & the Netherlands for sale in Africa.

It was an interesting show. The most bizarre part was an entire room showing people in various poses of copulating, but totally covered in the Victorian/African costumes. I saw it as a lot of rape scenes, but that didn't seem to be particularly the intention at least not according to the printed materials.

The Dinner Party is a permanent installation at the Brooklyn Museum, so we went and looked at that. For some reason, when Billie & I saw it there several years ago, I thought it was a traveling show. I know it traveled for many years. It's still a good show.

I didn't finish yesterday's post, or at least I didn't include the last picture I wanted, because this program is kind of touchy, and I couldn't get back to the place I wanted to edit the blog after I had once clicked on a picture. I did discover that if you're just reading it, you can click on any of the pictures and they will enlarge.

Anyway, the other entertaining picture I wanted to include yesterday was this one of Naked Guy riding down the street on top of a stretch hummer. Of course, he was pretty far past us by the time I dug my camera out of my purse.

And of course, here are the Times Square Obama Condom distributors. Don't know whether they are giving away or selling them.

And finally, we decided to walk down about two blocks from Martha's to a little park and watch the sunset. On the way there was ample opportunity for dumpster diving, but without the necessity of actually finding a dumpster because stuff is just out on the streets. This caught my eye. If you can't read the printing, it says something like, "Don't take, this is infested with bugs, chinchers." (whatever they are.) So I didn't take anything. And here's a last picture, just because I think it's a nice picture.