My TV debut

When I visited Mumbai for a weekend in the summer of 2007, I did so with the hope — albeit slim — of being picked up at the Gate of India by a Bollywood lackey casting extras. Though I was asked to be the token whitey in a few Indian family pics (standard occurrence when visiting monuments in India), I sadly did not get whisked off to the extravagant sets of Bollywood and lasting fame.

But two years later, I finally got my go as an extra…on the set of the last episode of the first season of ”Bartender Wars” – coming soon to the Fine Living Network.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. What’s the point of being an extra if no one’s ever going to see the show? Fine Living Network? Nope, I hadn’t heard of it either.

So the point? [a] to get behind the scenes and see how it’s done, and [b] free drinks. all night. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right?

Our filming time was 7:30 to 10pm. We showed up right on time, but the crew was running late and we didn’t actually get into the holding dock (bare bones bar, snacks: cheese balls, almonds, some sort of strange dorito mix and hot dogs…mmm…) until 9ish. An hour and some later, our numbers finally get called and we’re ushered up the stairs and onto the bar set. Light, cameras, action!

A slim, tanned girl in a slinky white dress and fashion-conscious cork wedges spins the bartender wars challenge wheel, and we all cheer (as instructed) for a pre-determined outcome. Her flash of a smile is awkward but the show moves right along (she’s only a pretty extra, can’t expect perfection).

Take-aways: It’s all fake. The female bartenders’ boobs included. Ok fine, that you already knew. But the extras are actually drunk. You can’t fake that sh*t. You will be made to do stupid stuff. Especially if you’re an extra in a show devoted to drinking. We all (that would be six of us, sitting on stools lining the bar) were conned into doing lemon drop shots whose main (and by main I mean only) ingredient was pickle juice. (It’s ok, we’re New Yorkers, we heart pickle juice, but we did feel rather silly falling for Lisa’s trickery…first a round of jack to mask that briny-sour pickly smell).

When not competing, Lisa mixes at the W Hotel in Hoboken and apparently makes killer Mango mojitos. W Hotel patrons who favor their drinks ‘dirty,’ beware.

Missed connections

Everyone’s got their ‘I need a 10-minute break’ websites. The New York Times, Gawker, ESPN, the BBC, Facebook, Gothamist. The list, of course, goes on. One of my personal internet-abetted procrastination favorites used to be Craigslist NYC missed connections…until someone emphasized the ‘missed’ bit.

For the most part, the posts are really sweet (e.g. Brunette with parrot umbrella, reading Anna Karenina on the downtown 6 Saturday night; we had a moment – want to meet for coffee? or Indian girl with sweet smile at the laundromat on the corner of Meserole and Leonard last Sunday…your keds were soaked from the rain). The posts strike a chord with me because they embody what I’ve always imagined must be the most romantic way to meet a lover: Someone singles you out of a crowd when you’re not doing anything out of the ordinary (just reading a book on the subway, say), and thinks to him/herself There’s something special about that one.

In the ‘most romantic way to meet a lover’ scenario, though, the person doing the noticing has the balls to approach the one he’s singled out as special, and make a move. Missed connections is all about dropping the ball, meeting your ‘love at first sight,’ and letting her (or him) slip through your fingers. Which is, admittedly, rather deflating. The posts I had originally scrolled through with a smile on my face, because they suggested that my ‘most romantic way to meet a lover’ scenario actually happens, are in actuality indicative of just the opposite.

Because, who, in reality, scrolls through missed connections searching for a reference to themselves? A friend’s friend told me a little while ago of a friend who had had a missed connection with a TV repair man, found him via Craigslist missed connections, and proceeded to engage him in a casual encounter. Not exactly the romantic lover scenario I had been envisioning, nor terribly reliable…everyone knows someone who knows someone who…

The good news is that – and this I share with utmost confidence in my sources – sometimes, on rare occasion, the subway connection ball does not get dropped.

Two female friends have picked up men on the subway – for one, the connection was speaking French; for the other, I forget, but later that night, a connection was certainly made

More recently, a male friend was approached while he was on the platform waiting for the train, just standing there with his earphones in. He’s a bit spacey at the best of times, so I can imagine that when he’s waiting for the subway on his own, tunes in, he’s probably oblivious to the world.

So he’s waiting for the train, and a girl taps him on the shoulder, out of his underground reverie, and he takes out his earphones and turns to her. She’s noticed him around, she says, at school (graduate) and just wanted to say hello. He says oh, hey, nice to meet you. They chat for a bit, and he’s about to bid her farewell, when she decides she has the balls to say, “Do you mind if I call you sometime? Can I have your number?”

He’s shocked – not because he doesn’t get any – but because he’s being picked up on the subway. By a random girl. Who noticed him when he was just standing there, doing nothing out of the ordinary. He’s flattered and impressed – the girl’s got guts. He doesn’t think he’s interested, but he does meet up with her for drink. He seemed to think she had earned it.

None of these stories are perfect — no subway pick ups turned happily ever afters yet, but it’s a start. If you — lusting after the same guy you’ve been noticing on your commute for the last three years — don’t say anything, it’s just another missed connection (writes the girl who would never ever approach a random guy on the subway).

Point being though, missed connections is no longer on my procrastination list. I’ve found it’s preferable to ask folks about their subway pick up stories rather than read all the subway i-wanted-to-pick-you-up-but-didn’t stories that go down in this town.

(Mis)placed lettuce

Some people are talking about the two-part Siberia piece in The New Yorker. The vast tract of land isn’t exactly on the must-see list of the average New Yorker, nor the particularly well-travelled one, but the tale of someone who’s traversed it from one end to the other certainly appeals to those curious about the unknown.

I would like to point out, however, that in the various conversations I’ve had and overheard about the two-part Siberia article (clearly ‘various’ is a poetic exaggeration employed here for effect), no one seems to have found the inclusion of this photograph somewhat incongruous. Not exactly offensive, but nonetheless, a little out of place in a story of a harsh, uninviting land, rich both in minerals and refuse.

A little too Austin Powers, if you will.

I’m genuinely surprised that none of the editors chose to nix it; I have to assume someone thought to. Perhaps they figured the exact size and positioning of the icebergs would go unnoticed given the engaging text. Or that readers would read this photo as they do the cartoons – quick glance, inside smile, back to the meaty body of text.

Folks, am I reading too much into this? Surely not. It’s just too obvious to be unintentional…

Keeping it together

About six years ago, I went to Six Flags St. Louis with a friend who adores roller coasters. Growing up, she used to pour over roller coaster books and memorize roller coaster stats. She would spend time thinking about whether, physics-wise, it was more thrilling for one’s body to sit in the very first car or the very last. I like roller coasters ok, but I’m definitely not into sitting in the most thrilling car, whichever it happens to be.

As a kid, it was all about bravado. I remember pretending I wasn’t scared at all because I didn’t want to be the type of girl who would be. I genuinely did want to go on the rides — for the rush, the unfettered screaming (as the only girl born between two brothers I was exceptionally good at screaming, a skill my parents could have done without) — but I was still terrified, although I never let on. I reasoned, if I don’t like it, all I have to do is shut my eyes real tight and it’ll be over in 2 seconds anyhow.

Not surprisingly, by the time I got to Six Flags St. Louis, my roller coaster approach had changed. Not only had my risk radar made some progress over the course of a decade, but I’d spent part of a summer internship at Child magazine researching the U.S.’s shocking lack of standard safety regulations for amusement parks. Sure, the ride could be over in 2 seconds, but it could also all be over in 2 seconds. The odds of dying on the highway on the way over were heaps greater, but theme park accidents did happen. I’d done the research.

As a result, what I enjoyed most about our big day out at Six Flags — well maybe after the pirate boat and mint skittles — was the old-school photo booth.  The traditional ones were hard to find at the time, at least in Manhattan. Urban Outfitters had a sticker booth (think your friends on a shiny adhesive surrounded by floating hello kitty heads) and passport photo booths spat out a square of 4 (all identical) instead of a progressive strip. That evening, my roller-coaster crazy friend and I drove home, dodging 18-wheelers, very pleased with our take-away: a little souvenir strip of four happy, sepia-toned snaps, somewhat frizzy hair/sun-blushed cheeks, to remind us of the day’s amusements. A brief, but satisfying, 4-frame story.

We thought about snipping the strip in two (we weren’t roommates at the time and would be heading to different cities post-graduation), but after much deliberation, decided against it. Not quite on the level of wise King Solomon’s maternity test, but as a baby cut in two is no baby, a 4-photo strip cut in two is well, no 4-photo strip.

In a sweet, spontaneous (and soon forgotten) gesture between two good college friends, we agreed to pass the souvenir back and forth — we assumed perhaps once a year, once every couple of years, depending on how often our paths would cross after St. Louis ceased to be the physical anchor of our friendship. The baton may have exchanged hands once or twice — I remember keeping it tucked safely inside a red notebook for a while. But I don’t believe it’s still in my possession. In any case, it hasn’t swapped hands in years — not for lack of opportunities; there have been meet ups in Italy, the Greek Islands, Thailand and more recently — Boston and New York.

To be honest, I’d forgotten the photo souvenir (along with the day it recalled) even existed until last weekend, when, after roasting my very first whole chicken for friends willing to indulge me in my quest for test subjects, we headed over to Union Pool for après-dinner drinks. Time flew by a rather intricate conversation about dreams, and before we knew it, we were all being herded out of the courtyard, towards the exit. We, however, slipped into the old-school photo booth, typically obstructed by a long line of bathroom goers. It bought us an extra 4 minutes at Union Pool (1 for maneuvering us all in, inserting money and clicking, and 3 waiting for the pics). When, after what seemed an eternity, with every Union Pool employee asking us to leave at least once, we had the photos in hand — I remembered!

Where was that strip from Six Flags?

I immediately suggested a similar rotation arrangement (we all live in Williamsburg/Greenpoint, so no probs), but Meredith – a woman of the times – had us over for a 4am nightcap, scanned the strip and voilà, now we all have it. Instant gratification. No sharing, no waiting. But also, unlike the Six Flags strip, something that will likely never come up again in conversation.

Do you have it?

Do I have it?

That was a fun night.

A photo of a baby is no baby, but a photo of a photo, well it’s still a photo. But is a clone of a baby still the same baby? I do realize this parallel continues to be absurd, but my point is that scan or no scan, there’s still value to the rotation. To the sharing of tangible items (items in the cloud don’t count even if you can print them out) that come to represent experiences. I didn’t take any photos of my first roast chicken dinner (a veritable rite of passage in my family – check out the pic my brother took of his), so these are effectively, my chicken dinner pics. And my apartment definitely wants some face time with the originals.

Same with the Six Flags ones. Laura, where are they? It’s my turn. That was a fun day. And I am still a little apprehensive about roller coasters.

Dog-eared

Some folks always read with a pen at the ready to underline, circle, square and star, scribble notes in the column, question mark and even cross out. Not me. But every so often I do dog-ear (tsk, tsk).

Some folks record the especially moving/touching/thought-provoking/well put phrases in hardcover notebooks. Others type them up, print them out and tack them to their bedside walls. I (when I remember to) write them here:

Edith Wharton was born in the century before last; she spent much of her youth in Europe and then her teen/young adult years in New York. As an adult she heads dreamily back to Europe, but ultimately returns home to the United States. I don’t know about my ‘ultimately’ yet, but thus far our trajectories (insofar as continental geographic location is concerned) are similar. It turns out, so were our feelings about returning to the U.S. as adults – strikingly similar:

“In 1896, she spoke with resignation of their planned return to the United States: ‘Time was, as you know, when I should have been glad to make my home in Europe, but it was made in America, & I have fitted myself into it tant bien que mal, & taken its creases more than I realized until I left it again.”

(From “The Age of Innocence” by Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker)

Another gem that struck me as reassurance to anyone trying to figure out what is up with guys (er, besides that) in their 20s and early 30s – ok, fine, all the 30s, and maybe some of their 40s too:

“‘It’s interesting when you have boys,’ she said. ‘Because boys are so sweet. Little boys, they are just great, and it was completely fascinating to me to see that. But the problem with men is not whether they’re nice or not. It’s that it’s hard for them at a certain point in their lives to stay true. It just is. It’s almost not their fault. But it feels like it’s their fault if you are involved with any of them. And then you get older and almost all of the men I know just seem as sweet as the boys I once had.’”

(From “Nora Knows What to Do” by Ariel Levy, The New Yorker)

For a woman whose 1st husband cheated on her when she was 7 months pregnant with their second child, Nora Ephron really seems to have made her peace. Guess there’s been a lot of public venting. I’m not crazy about the fact that she (almost) lets them off the hook, but I like the cyclicality. There’s more depth here (not to mention uplift) than the standard “Men are pigs!”

“Such a New Yorker”

It has been said that New Yorkers are rude. For the most part we’re not so bad (respond well to good gossip, good deals, gratuitous smiles and the summer), but every so often I run into a situation that makes me think, huh, these are the people who are giving us a bad name, perpetuating the mostly-myth.

A couple weekends ago I was on the Metro North, heading to a friend’s poolside do (suburban parents away in the Caribbean for the week). There were three of us taking the train and we sat facing each other on the aisle end of a six-seater. There was a middle-aged woman by the window with a duffel bag on the seat beside her. If that set-up means nothing to you, this little diagram may help with story orientation:

Danielle, Emily and I settle in and start to chat (as one does when travelling on the Metro North with companions). We’re happy to have found seats facing each other as the train is rather full of people ditching the city for greener weekend pastures. But we’re not much more than a couple sentences in, when the Woman turns her head slowly to face Danielle, and says, in a gritty voice and an I’m-so-fed-up-with-your-nonsense tone:

“Are you going to talk the whole ride?”

Danielle is – understandably – a little taken aback by the question, but after a brief pause during which she considers how best to respond, says:

“Yes, probably.”

Woman: Well, then can you move? I want to read-

Woman points to a glossy fashion mag

-and I just can’t do that if you’re going to sit here and talk the whole ride.

Emily turns her head towards the aisle (disengage!), Danielle looks straight ahead, eyes wide open in disbelief.

Me: Well, would you mind moving seeing as there’s only one of you and three of us?

Woman (emphatically) : I was here first.

Me (trying to appeal to reason): I understand that, but it’s a six-seater, and the train’s already quite full – we’d like to sit facing each other – that’s what these seats are for.

Woman (getting angry): This is not a discussion. You have no right on your side. I’ve seen plenty of people sitting on their own in six-seaters. And I’ve asked you nicely to move.

Me: To be fair, you didn’t ask particularly nicely at all.

Pause.

Emily, who’s still midway through her morning coffee, is completely put off. Suggesting we relocate – “Let’s just go, I can’t handle bad New York energy right now” – she gets up to leave.

Resigned to sitting all in a row, we find a three-seater, but our high weekend spirits are somewhat dampened by the incident. We are a little shell-shocked. We cannot believe it. It’s the freakin’ Metro North, not the Amtrak quiet car. Plus this is New York. The noise of people is inescapable.

We imagine she just really needs to get laid. A good screw would sort her out. Danielle says her first instinct was to look for a ring.

If it had been up to me, I would have stayed and talked at high volume about a host of inappropriate topics. But Emily’s too nice. Not such a New Yorker, perhaps?

Summer in the City

Yes. This is the right time to figure out how to embed a slide show into my blog. But wouldn’t you much rather scroll down, then click through?

Thought so.

It’s officially summer (in fact it has been for almost two weeks),

but it’s still raining an awful lot…

Luckily, even rain has its advantages.

To be fair, we have had some sticky-thigh sunny days,

but we are looking forward to a whole lot more.

Not your average bathroom experience

It’s hard to find the bathrooms in The [new] Cooper Square Hotel.

If you’re hanging out in the hotel bar (floor-to-ceiling glass walls on 1.5 sides), walk outside (through the glass door), and back into the hotel through the door just ahead of you. You’ll enter a boxy room with an overstuffed black leather sofa that looks more like a few sizable coffee tables placed one beside the other. You will be tempted to sit down, to enjoy the subtle black and white motif of your surroundings, but remember – you are looking for the bathroom.

At the end of the room (before you enter the lounge, which may also have been the lobby) make a left, and then another immediate left.

Down a long, dimly-lit  stairway, you’ll reach a T-junction; right or left? A bathroom attendant dressed like a cocktail waitress will motion left. Pass through the room with the oversized, wood-rimmed mirror propped against the wall. Although the long, dark-wood corridor before you may not seem much like a row of stalls – that’s exactly what it is.

You are advised (by me not the attendant) to enter your chosen cubicle cautiously – the chances of walking in on someone, male or female, are higher than usual because [a] the bathroom’s unisex and [b] the doors don’t lock until the light goes on (which requires an extra few revolutions than is reasonable, but how were we to know?).

Of course, you are also advised to lock until the light goes on – lest you fancy being interrupted mid-stream. If that’s how you get your kicks, these bathrooms may just be your new favorite place.

On the way out, the bathroom attendant slash cocktail waitress may offer you a glass of champagne. (I say ‘may’ because we weren’t about to strike bubbly until my friend launched into her tale of the faulty toilet lock. The attendant promptly offered us a “consultation” prize of champers. We didn’t find her the most generous of pourers – what? complaining when you’re gulping down free champagne in the loo? yes, of course – we drank up and asked for a cheeky top-up before taking on the dark stairs. She didn’t say no.)

The evening was destined to be a bathroom-oriented one, as at our next stop – The Crooked Tree on St. Marks Place (mediocre but cheap sangria, decent crepes, cash only) – we sat at one of two outdoor tables and couldn’t help but overhear the albeit sottovoce divorce unfolding beside us.

The couple sounded foreign – perhaps Australian – older, but rather thoughtlessly dressed. She – a girthy woman with mousy, unkempt hair and damaged skin – was repeatedly accusing him – a smaller man with an orange beard, hiding behind a rather outlandish pair of green-framed sunglasses (think boozed up, somewhat gritty Lucky Charms leprechaun) – of exiting a bathroom stall with another woman. She said – again and again – “…but I saw you, but I caught you, you came out together, what were you doing in there? What did you do together in there?” and he simply blew her off, trivializing her insinuations, “You’re being ridiculous, this is absurd, I’m not listening anymore.”

We heard snippets of this roundabout going nowhere for a full half hour before she threw the threat of divorce into the mix, “Do you want me to divorce you? I’ll divorce you…this is going to lead to our divorce.” This didn’t have the desired effect on his share of the dialogue, and – perhaps realizing it never would – she got up and walked off.

He followed shortly after.

This time, I didn’t get a text later, telling me they were still together.

The Elevator Couple

Birthday weekends are better if you start them off with posh cocktails on The Peninsula hotel’s sun-drenched rooftop. The lift expresses you to Manhattan’s concrete canopy, and within moments you’re surrounded by its forbidden fruit. You’ll find the sunglasses a touch on the large side; it’s getting hard to tell if the object of your wandering eye deserves your attention. The linen draped oh so trendily over a central Moroccan-style tent may flap away in the breeze, but it will be restored in no time – the illusion of easy breezy perfection back in tact.

You may have to battle with the condensation dripping off the dainty base of your champagne flute onto your summer-white dress (mine was black in prep for the promised rain), and you may have to drink up in a hurry  if you expect to be on time for that Broadway play. You may even have to squint (wrinkle-encouraging) if you’re still wearing prescription glasses (passe?), but it’ll all be worth it for the scene you may encounter on your express lift trip back down to earth.

We’re waiting for the elevator. It arrives with a ding. Doors part open, revealing an eager (but not too eager) crowd. The leggy blonde standing in front of me – also awaiting the lift – pretends it’s empty and promptly pushes her way to the back of it, turns around, and glares out. The crowd of people she has just barged into start to shuffle out, a little stunned at this less than pleasant introduction to the rooftop, and one girl – a particularly miffed brunette – shakes her head and mutters “braindead” as she passes by.

As we start our descent, it immediately becomes clear that the blonde – long, healthy hair tied up in a medium-high ponytail, thickly mascaraed eyes brimming with suspended tears, and a tasteful – though short – patterned dress with bell sleeves and gold trim – is very upset. She is glaring at a guy – taller than she, great body, running pants and a faded Princeton T, maybe holding a bottle of water – and saying, across the space, “This is the lowest you’ve ever sunk. I can’t believe it. This is the lowest.”

He’s a little embarrassed, but keeps it cool, “I’ll make it up to you, baby,” he offers flippantly with a sly grin, which enervates her even further, and she crosses the lift, so she is directly across from him, and we are no longer in the crossfire. “I’ll come,” he says.

She, angrily – “I don’t even want you to come anymore.”

“I’ll come,” he says again, shrugging his shoulders and reaching out to her at the same time.

She crosses her arms, “No. I don’t want you to come.”

We hit ground, the doors open, and she sashays out, turning her head over her shoulder with the dagger, piercing: “Don’t forget you’re forty-five.”

She walks quickly – rushing the alluring sway granted by her heels – towards the hotel’s revolving door. He catches up to her, reaches out, says, “Come on, babe, wait” and she, “No, I’m going,” is out the door, presumably into a cab. He raises his hands in a half-hearted gesture of what the fuck? but does not continue to follow.

Too busy observing to talk, we make our way to the room-bound elevator lobby (yes, a little ways from the rooftop lift – The Peninsula likes a little distinction between the haves and the want-to-haves). We’re heading to the 20th to pick up a forgotten umbrella, and Princeton-T guy steps in after us, hits 10, and says, in somewhat sheepish acknowledgment  “Hey, it’s me again.”

We smile politely. I ask if he went to Princeton (in lieu of asking exactly what level he had sunk to, which of course is the question dancing on the tip of my tongue). He says no. We reach the 10th floor, he gets out, nods goodbye and that’s that.

5-minute incident. A night’s worth of conversation fodder.

Did he sleep with a younger girl? Or did she just catch him flirting with one when he was supposed to be grooming for a big night out? The 45 comment was a big clue, the difference in how they were dressed, the absence of a ring. The fact that he had a room at the hotel – was she staying with him? Was he visiting her?

Fast-forward to Sunday afternoon. I get a text from my friend:

Elevator couple (yes together) just checked out in front of me

She wasn’t saying anything but she was giving off a major bitch vibe…normal mode for her?

Ok, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been so entertained by what – at the end of the day – was just another lovers’ spat, but the drama of it – the opening and closing of small spaces, the urgent need to flee from the rooftop, the raw emotion (only hers) and brazen public-ness (she didn’t care to be discreet) lent itself to dissection. Like seeing a very short snippet of a play, where the game is to figure out what precedes and follows the action.

We saw two plays my birthday weekend – August Osage County and Waiting for Godot – both ultimately about human relationships and the human condition. One could argue that we saw a third (if briefer) – The Elevator Couple. Just because it wasn’t scripted and produced, doesn’t make it any less a commentary on being human, if viewed through the lens in which all the world’s a play, and all the men and women merely players. Art is supposed to be, after all, a mirror on life. And in some ways, the quarrel was extremely scripted – by societal convention, by gender roles, by biological drivers. Who wouldn’t want to spend a summer’s eve analyzing it? Or am I just making excuses for my voyeuristic (read: human) tendencies?

Snapshots

A couple weeks ago, I went down under the Manhattan Bridge – I just recently learned that DUMBO escaped a fate as DUMB – in search of the polaroid party. Lots of chatter of late about discontinued polaroid cameras and the release of an iPhone app to pick up the slack – one that simulates the size/frame/coloring of old school polaroid pics. The shake it like a polaroid party promised to be an interactive art exhibit with polaroid cams on hand for an attendee-created polaroid wall, to be donated after the event to Housingworks. A couple of the featured artists had compiled their own polaroid walls, mostly packed with sexual overtones and crytpic messages, seemingly about life. Unfortunately, the polaroid wall-in-progress was shaping up to be more a collection of bad headshots with a backdrop of gallery white walls than anything inspired. Nice idea though.

I quite liked this photo by Fabrice Mabillot. I call it polar bear angry.

What makes you polar bear angry?

(Polar bears are not territorial so when they get aggressive, it tends to be in reaction to intense provocation. They often opt flight instead of fight, but they have been known to attack and even eat humans when very hungry. A fellow raising money for Greenpeace recently told me that polar bears are in some cases resorting to cannibalism due to diminishing natural food supplies by way of global warming.)

I thought about how best to popularize the expression ‘polar bear angry’ and then wondered whether ‘polar bear hungry’ would be a good descriptor for people who get really grumpy when they’re hungry (like me).

Continued gallery hopping (the polaroid show was part of a larger gallery walk) and musing brought me to an oversized 2-D piece that alphabetically displayed 4-letter words – all found on Broadway. I immediately zoomed in on my name (in Hebrew) and to my delight found that tivo and tofu (both nicknames) were close by. Tina was somewhere in there too (which slips out amongst those who think I have a striking resemblace to Tina Fey).

Priced at $4000, the piece was a bargain compared to the Chuck Close tapestries I saw today in Chelsea, each going for $120 thou.

Luckily, I’m quite content with my snapshots (polaroid or otherwise).