Crazy Stable

Had a glorious Mother's Day outing to Green-Wood Cemetery...no, not to visit a deceased Maternal Unit, but to enjoy an outdoor performance/tour cooked up by the Aquinas Circle, an honors group at the Child's parochial school, Holy Name of Jesus in Windsor Terrace.  The show, called "The Stories Never End, The Love Never Dies," was a delight. Costumed middle-schoolers earnestly impersonated various historic personages interred amid Green-Wood's verdant hills, including DeWitt Clinton (who, although dead, was still running vigorously for President); gangster Johnny Torrio (a pint-sized fellow in chalk stripes, describing his takeover of Al Capone's speakeasies while chomping a chocolate cigar); Leonard Bernstein (reincarnated as a redheaded young lady who warbled a few bars of "Tonight"); and "ordinary" wife and mother Clara Ruppertz Koch, a portly frau whose monument proclaims her "the greatest woman who ever lived," and whose young interpreter, a dainty angel in a flowing gown, recited Emily Dickinson's "I'm nobody; who are you?"

In the course of our tour, I also stood for the first time at the statue of Minerva on Battle Hill, to witness her breathtaking (and very deliberate) eye match with the Statue of Liberty way out in the harbor. Just imagine--some cretinous condo developer wanted to block their locked gaze with a cheesy sliver building. He was stopped (although the fight against moronic and greedy overdevelopment in the so-called Greenwood neighborhood goes on).

Keeping up the theme of Brooklyn fabulousness, Spouse attended the "BKLYN Designs" ^TM  festival in Dumbo (or should that be DUMBO? An acronymonious debate!)  I went last year and found it a bit wearing--lots of painfully hip furniture made out of packing peanuts or recovered wood pallets or cat-food cans, and lighting fixtures made out of antlers and the like, with a few really nifty things that (like everything else) were hopelessly out of our price range. (Shouldn't at least the stuff that's made out of recycled garbage be, um, cheap?) But I wish I'd had the chance to see the newly restored carousel (working, but not ride-able yet in its indoor housing) and to visit the wonderful works of my favorite stained-glass artist, Nancy Nicholson, who makes moody compositions with pigeons and water towers seem as evocative as the lilies and saints in Green-Wood's mausoleums.

 Just for fun, here is one of (I was told) only two male angels in Green-Wood Cemetery, atop the monument of Edwin Litchfield--who was so peeved at the takeover of his turf by Prospect Park that he instructed that this fellow's back be turned upon the offending place.  Those are chestnut blossoms in the background. I like my angels, like my chefs, to be guys. This one reminds me of a young Dean Martin.