I never seem to get around to making a bucket list, which is a shame, because I’m forever doing stuff and realizing later, “Hey, that would be a great thing to have on a bucket list!” Related, of course, is that it would never occur to me to put, say, “witnessing the breaking of a world record” or “eat the world’s cutest sushi” on there in the first place.
In bold defiance of the Dropping of the Economic Sword of Damocles, we took a wee vacation this weekend. All parties appear to have enjoyed themselves, and I got to tend to my non-existent bucket list and ever so briefly meet musician/blogger the Saw Lady.
Herewith, my account.
Part A of the master plan was dropping Eliza off with her great-aunt and -uncle and cousin-once-removed (I can NEVER keep these things straight, but the young woman in question is Jim’s first cousin) for a sleepover. This, she was just fine with, because Jim had spelled out to me at breakfast before our departure, “I think they have plans to take her for I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M,” whereupon Eliza said, “Ice cream?!! Did you say ice cream, Daddy?!”
I guess the spelling thing is over.
We packed her bikini, the top of which she decided during the car ride would also work as a hat:

We left the girl and headed city-wards and if you don’t mind sharing a bathroom European-style, you can get some shockingly good deals on nice hotel rooms, my friends.
Nearby, we found a sushi place where I had the cutest handroll ever:

Look at it! It has a little red caviar nose and almond eyes and leaf ears! I had to eat the head last and felt a little guilty.
Then, we went to Queens, where I had my one real I-miss-my-kid moment (not that we didn’t talk about her constantly, but mostly with a tone of “whooo, we’re vacation from the creature who wakes us at 6 and hangs off our limbs and puts tape on the cats and will only eat fruit when the moon is in the eighth house of Mars god I’m tired”). We took the train out to Citifield Stadium and as we approached, I could see the Unisphere, which would be on Eliza’s bucket list — if she were an exceptionally morbid 4-year-old, that is.
The reason for the train was that Jim scored us some cheap tickets (eBay FTW!) to see Paul McCartney, one of his long-time musical heroes. I am mostly eh about him (I know: BLASPHEMER!), but he does know how to put on a show. During Live and Let Die, the stage erupted in flashpots and fireworks, a move so grotesquely over-the-top that it came full circle to being awesome. If you watch the clips of the moment on youTube, you can actually hear people in the audience cracking up.
The woman next to me lost her mind at this point and just screamed, “FIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRR!”
We staggered back to the hotel via a greasy spoon diner. We woke up much too early the next morning, and I found a restaurant that had as its gimmick that everything was made with chocolate.
Here is all the food we had, and that photo also marks the official publication of Jim’s latest project, a full beard. He reports that it is “itchy”:

Jim had coffee and chocolate blintzes. I had white chocolate chai and “granola” and we split some bacon to take the edge off all the sugar.
Here I am taking core samples of my granola and going, holy crap, what the hell is this?!

There was a layer of chocolate pudding, then a layer of vanilla, then some bananas, strawberries and blueberries, some praline crumbles, some candied macadamia nuts, some chocolate flakes, some rice krispies and some more praline crumbles. The whole thing was drizzled with honey. The part that made Jim laugh was that it came with a side of honey and teeny chocolate malt balls. “In case it wasn’t sweet enough?” he wondered.
He helped me eat it, and then we but had sugar headaches and walked for about 2 hours. Very energetically.
Then we got lost for an hour under New York city due to a combination of user error (ours) and system clusterfuck (the subway) after which we were eventually disgorged onto the sidewalks of Astoria. We were there to attend the Musical Saw Festival and see, this is one of those thing that would never occur to me as an activity. I mean, until Natalia, AKA Saw Lady, started commenting on my blog last fall, I was barely aware such a thing as a musical saw even existed, but now I am On Board.
First of all, the church where it was held was PACKED. That’s why you must go to New York — there are actually enough people who are either into the musical saw, or up for something new, to fill a church.
The Saw Lady did something like triple duty, emcee-ing, organizing, and oh, yeah, performing. If you go to her site you can hear a snippet of what the saw sounds like, sort of a shivery, ghostly, wailing version of a violin, and one of the amazing things about the festival was the many genres that sound could cross.
There were adaptations of classical pieces, as well as a band that sounded straight off the soundtrack for O Brother Where Art Thou? (We really, really liked these guys.) One of the most striking pieces was a modern piece with an opera singer. Not at ALL my usual cup of tea, but the soprano voice melding with the saw made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Then somehow 53 saw players squished into the front of the church where they played, I’m guessing without rehearsal because some of them appeared to be meeting each other right there, a version of Ave Maria to break the previous world record for the number of saw players assembled and playing together at one time. It was gorgeous and spooky, and oh, yeah, very moving shutupI’mnottearingupatall.
And then it was intermission and I said hi to Natalia, who was carrying off both silver glitter eyeshadow and some serious goth pants, which means she is officially made of win:

Sadly, we had to leave the festival after intermission to go retrieve Eliza, but I like to hope we caught the best parts.
And then we went to pick up our the kid who had spent the day on the trampoline and in the pool at another cousin’s house and was consequently experiencing serious brain-is-full syndrome but I didn’t care because I was happy to see her.