Forget Your Troubles

Post #60, and I'm back after a month on hiatus. My plan: 15 posts for June (every other day, i.e.). So keep tuning in!

I stopped by New York this weekend, took in some theater, won the Hair lottery, and regained my appetite after a week of stomach pain. They've started something new in Times Square. Behold the pedestrian plaza, a.k.a. greater swarms of tourists. A very European concept, but done on the cheap so far. The green chairs above, I will say, were the most comfortable that I tried... and there are enough options that you could probably color-coordinate your clothes.

Note how the chairs in each block-long section of seating space have been segregated by color and style. At least the boy and girl chairs above are allowed to mingle.

This traffic cop's keeping those rowdy street-sitting slackers in check.

And just think: a mere row of orange cones separates the sitting-pretty from a torrent of Red Bull-fueled, cologne-reeking, New York-talking, harangue-spewing cab drivers pissed about the rerouting of Broadway.

Naturally, the cones also make nice chairs.

Feeling young and spry? Try a wheelbarrow for your own personal comfort on 46th Street. But only the red ones here... the other colors are confined to the other side of the street, under the CNN news scroll and the Come See Phantom Before It Never Closes poster.

Happy days are here again. The skies are clear again.

Speaking of which (train of thought: Barbra Streisand, Democrat, the Obamas), the president and first lady were in town to see Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and I left just before they arrived with their entourage. Which is fine, because apparently 44th Street was entirely closed off unless you had a theater ticket.

I end this photo essay on 44th, though, with a different celebrity sighting. I was strolling thirty minutes before the Sunday matinee and found myself on my phone right next to Christine Ebersole at her stage door.