Life, Trust, Subways, & the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Birthday trip was fabulous.

Rendezvoused with the BoyZ on Stone Street, which, back in 1658, became the first cobblestoned avenue in New Amsterdam:



Had dinner at a Cuban salsa bar & RTT paid! (An exciting new development. 😀) I was expecting the food to be touristy & pedestrian, but in fact, it was very tasty:



Our fourth at table was Brian, Madeleine's very pleasant BF. (Madeleine herself is in Tustin.)

Brian was exceedingly impressed that I play D&D! Amusingly so. I could have told him, Why, yes, I did cure cancer, and last year when I was in Oslo accepting the Nobel Prize for literature... and still the most impressive thing about me would be that I play D&D!

After dinner, we went to NYC's hottest production, Life and Trust, which is an immersive event that takes place in a bank, one block away from Wall Street. The bank was originally built in 1931—a bad time for building banks—and subsequently overlaid by a 59-story skyscraper so that the original bank is now underground.

Now, I ❤️LUV❤️ immersive events because they combine all the best elements of theater and museums.

And Life and Trust did not disappoint—although I will say my ❤️LUV❤️ was not entirely unreserved.



Life and Trust centers on a Faustian deal. The action itself takes place on October 23, 1929—the day before the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression.

At some indeterminate point in the past, a man named J.G. Conway sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a recipe for some kind of magical green and highly addictive liquid, which he then mass markets as cough medicine. (This segued into a private Family Joke: I have been telling the BoyZ since they were kids that they were heirs to the DiLucchio Cough Drop Millions.)

Then, in the only spoken part of the show, the devil invites the paying audience to travel back into the Past and watch Bad Things transpire.

Since the paying audience are wraiths in that past, we had to wear these incredibly uncomfortable masks. Mine gave me a headache! Plus it was impossible for me to fit my glasses under it! Plus it was really fuckin' hot and my face sweated buckets!

We also had to do an incredible amount of running around—my FitBit logged more than 10,000 steps—including up and down an incredible number of stairs. My 73-year-old body was barely up to the challenge. (Pretend Nazis are chasing you, I counseled myself at the two-and-a-half hour mark.)

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The sets were unbelievably wonderful! Bedrooms, parlors, business offices, bank vaults, Dr. Caligari-like labs filled with vials of sinister green liquid & Weird Science specimens, ballrooms, secret gardens, a forest, a lake, a livery stable, a movie theater, a burlesque stage, a boxing ring! All of them meticulously designed and outfitted in the most amazing detail. Dreamlike! You could pick every object up and study it. You could sit in the chairs and lie in the beds. You could work out with the boxing bag! This was my favorite part.

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I don't know how many characters there were that you could follow around. Dozens & dozens. J.G. Conway. His sister (who is having a Lesbian affair with her maid.) A mad scientist. Many Bohemians, bankers, politicians. A tarot card reader. Several clowns. Cameo appearances from Gilded Age celebrities like Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit. Mephisto and his various demonic adjutants.

But here's the thing: The characters didn't talk. They danced.

And I'm not that into dance.

And the dance was pretty repetitive. I mean, none of the individual Life and Trust characters had an individual mode of dancing that distinguished their unique personalities or backstories. It was all your basic Martha Graham arm-flinging and back-bending.

And I got—well. Bored. Philistine that I am.

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Our airbnb was in Brooklyn, and Ichabod had to go back to Brian-and-Madeleine's place in Queens to pick up a suitcase he'd left there (long story), so RTT and I subway-ed alone and got into the Customary Big Fight ('nother long story), which we always seem to get into at least once on every family vacay.

I always forget that as innocuous & defenseless as I seem to myself, in RTT's eyes, I am the Loch Ness Monster, dripping with the kind of deep-water archetypal power that only parents possess!

Anyway.

We resolved the fight, but before we did, we were treated to one of those awful late-night-NYC-subway vignettes that are so massively depressing—namely a homeless guy, crawling with lice, sprawled on one of the hard, fused-plastic subway seats, ostensibly trying to sleep but unable to sleep—the subway car was brightly lit—so he reached down into the crotch of his pants and began to masturbate—

"How's that for immersive theater?" I murmured to RTT.

And we began to laugh.

This guy was once somebody's little pink innocent baby, I reminded myself.

But it was a hard sell.

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RTT had to leave at the crack of dawn to accept the Working Families Party endorsement back in Ithaca on the Day itself. It meant so much to me that he went to all that trouble to make the trip down for such a short time!

"What do you want to do on your birthday?" Ichabod asked.

What I wanted to do on my birthday was visit the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which is a touchstone in my personal mythology, a place where I spent many happy, happy hours when I was a kid.

So, that was what we did.









We had lunch at a Jamaican restaurant that had the best mac 'n' cheese I have ever tasted. It had a texture like kugel! Except... It was mac 'n' cheese!



And absolutely amazing banana pudding ice cream at the Ample Hills Creamery.

And then went back to the airbnb and watched all six episodes of the just-dropped seventh season of Black Mirror.

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Yesterday was hard, hard, hard because saying good-bye to my kids is always so hard. I love them both so much! Not just because they're my kids but because of the people they are. It's like when I'm with them, the world is in color.

There are other people who turn on color for me, too (one or two of whom may actually be reading this.) But I have to say, most of the time, I float in a world that, if not exactly grey, is deeply unsaturated.

And also—WT-fuckin'-F???—it was snowing in the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley! Hideous White Stuff From the Sky!!! I passed six accidents on the country roads as I wended my way home. The roads in Ulster County were unplowed and covered with about three inches of slippery slush. I drove with my knuckles in my mouth, absolutely convinced I was gonna end up in a ditch.

But I didn't.

And today, I have an enormous amount of work to do and very little interest in doing any of it.

What else is new?