Memorial Day Manhattan

Forget New York at Christmas or autumn in New York. New York on Memorial Day is where it’s at.

Nobody is around. There is TONS of street parking. No lines at my favorite bustling restaurants. Museums empty.

I LOVE Manhattan on Memorial Day.

In fact, we left town this weekend, and headed to my parents’ place in the Jerse, for some masquerading as suburbanites. We filled up a little wading pool with the hose. We had bike races. We gardened. The children played with worms. We even played baseball in the front yard. And all of us HATE playing with balls – every single one of us, including David and Primo – but I guess having so much open space got us heady and we started slugging that shit out. Afterwards I felt wildly proud of all of us, like we were a model family, doing what families should, covering all our bases, so to speak, fulfilling a conventional notion of summer fun. It’s something that I, as the leader of a bunch of bizarre eccentrics, feel rarely, but when the sentiment strikes, I do enjoy it.

But we always like to end our three-day weekends in suburbia one day early so we can get back into NYC before everyone else and enjoy the emptiness for a bit.

Primo is in the throes of a serious Greek myth fever and just last night, we finished Part One of Tales from the Odyssey, by Mary Pope Osborne. The kid is OBSESSED with Odysseus and I am OBSESSED with him being obsessed with Odysseus. The level of pretention is so friggin’ high right now in our house, it would probably make you yak. But since he started this new monomania, he’s been begging to go back to the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, to check out (again) the exhibit on Gods, Myths and Mortals.

If you haven’t been to CMOM yet, go soon, because the exhibit will be coming down. And it is so fantastic. The exhibit basically takes kids on O’s odyssey from the Trojan Horse (there is a mammoth wooden horse with four levels of kid-climbing fun) to the Cyclops and the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis. It makes former-English-majors like me swoon.

So on the way home, we stopped by CMOM and – wonder of wonders – no one was there. It was like they’d closed the museum for a private event – no elbow-jabbing between the kids in the Dora the Explorer fruit stand, no throwing sand at each other in the sand table, no bogarting the Siren karaoke. I never get a taste of VIP but today I did. David and I decided we couldn’t go back until next Memorial Day.

Then we walked down to Zabar's and bought some fancy cheese and coffee and a bunch of imported black licorice for my grandmother since it’s her birthday and that’s the only gift she won’t complain about.

I even got to try the gelato at Grom which usually has a super-long line down the street. There was still a line but manageable so Primo and I ordered a gelato with nocciola, ciccolato fondente and coco (I let the kid choose the combo, what can I say?)

First authentic gelato I’ve tasted in New York. The nocciola was a dream of Rome.

Only trouble was the small – SMALL – cost $5.25 so I made us all share one and sent David went next door to Beard Papa to get a few mochi balls ($1 each) to supplement our ice cream fix.

Lovely day.

Dreamy dreaminess.

You just can't skimp on fundamentals

There comes a time in every woman’s life when she must stop everything and buy bras. You can make do with the old, stretched-out ones for a long time, longer really than you should, but at a certain point, you’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror or catch a glimpse of the offensive undergarment and think, “Enough is enough.”

When this time would arrive in the past, I’d pop into the nearest Victoria’s Secret. But now that I have children and spend virtually no money on myself, I have decided that when it comes to fundamentals I deserve to splurge. Plus, the rigors of bearing and nursing two children back-to-back has made it such that I benefit from expert assistance in the support area. So now I go to Town Shop. I went for the second time a few weekends ago, after leaving David with the kids at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan around the corner. Fun for the kids, fundamentals for the mama. Win/win.

Now, I don’t know how other bra-fitting establishments work, but at Town Shop, the service is pretty, um, comprehensive. Up close and personal.

You walk in and a bra-expert comes right over and ushers you to a small, private room in the back of the store. Then she closes the curtain behind you and tells you to take off your shirt so she can see what’s she’s working with.

That is, by the way, a direct quote: “Let’s see what we’re working with.”

It is not unlike what happens at The Bunny Ranch, according to HBO.

So you strip down and the bra-expert scrutinizes your goods, giving you a sudden and unexpected attack of performance anxiety. I mean, there’s nothing to perform but are the goods good enough? How do they compare with what she’s already seen today? Is she impressed or does she pity you? She squints her eyes and looks pensive, then tells you she’ll be right back with some choices.

And you are left to regard yourself topless in the mirror for a very long time. It’s not something one often has the time to do, when one has two young children at home. I, for one, have no idea what I look like anymore, and frankly, I don’t mind keeping it that way.

Then the bra-expert comes back in and things get really strange.

If you are a first-timer, you’ll probably reach out to take the bra and put it on yourself and you’ll get a gently reprimand.

“No, no, I’ll do it,” says the bra expert, “You just bend over.”

Bend over? you might wonder. Why in the name of all that is holy should you have to BEND OVER to put a bra on? I mean, you’re not in a zero-gravity chamber or under some other set of extenuating circumstances which would necessitate such Twister-esque maneuvers/ But you do what you’re told and bend over slightly, say about 45 degrees.

“A little more,” instructs the bra-expert. So you bend over ‘til you’re touching the ground and now you REALLY feel like you’re at the Bunny Ranch, with your ass in the air and your goods swinging around and all of it reflected in the mirror and you wonder, is this standard protocol? But then you remember that 80 % of women are wearing the wrong bra size, and you don’t want to be one of them.

The bra-expert clips the bra and tells you to straighten up. If you try to adjust anything, a strap or a cup, she says, “Oh no no, please don’t touch anything, I’ll do it.” And she does it all right, tucking in, straightening out and patting down and generally handling your mammaries. If they were smart, the people at Town Shop would advertise their bra-fitting as coming with a free breast exam, because, basically, that’s what you get.

The whole wild fiasco took about an hour and cost me just over $100 bucks. Sure, that’s dinner for two or five pairs of discount Rocket Dog sneakers at DSW but you can’t skimp on fundamentals, ladies, and besides, it’s cheaper than a trip to the Bunny Ranch.