i hope that milk and honey is ok for your tea, that's how i'm having mine.....don't worry, i didn't go out and buy those gorgeous lilies just for our visit on here today...they're left over from mom's visit last monday, tuesday and wednesday....wow, they were absolutely the freshest, most gorgeous, un-stank lilies i've ever bought! i was a little worried when i bought them since i only bought four stems of them and not a single bud was opened yet...by the time mom and i returned to my apartment from the port authority bus terminal and a few bead shops in the garment district several had started to burst open.
you should have seen mom's eyes pop out of her head when she saw the first bead shop one - picture cartoon creature with eyes popping out in surprise, add the boing-oing-oing noise and you almost have the right picture of that moment....there are about 14 beadshops around a single city block (seventh avenue, 37th street, 8th avenue and 36th street). by the time we left the bead shops, after being thrown out with bags and bags and bags of beads (and might i add tons and tons of luggage), it was raining, and i of course, once again, could barely stand up, yet alone walk.
it was suddenly pouring buckets on us and it was hot for a combined effect of misery on my part - sorry mom! - we managed to walk around the block - AGAIN - towards the east side subway (the green one - you know, the 4/5/6 line) at grand central station. we only made it as far as bryant park which is the beautifully maintained jewel of midtown's busiest commuter crossroads...directly behind the new york public library, the famous one with the lions, it has a terraced garden that comes down from the back entrance to the library for 4 small flights of ornately carved marble steps and lands in a great lawn, the size of an entire huge city block. the great lawn is surrounded with an italiante garden fence, a leaning fence if you will (you can sit on, or lean on it for hours taking in the beautiful people and the busy streets around the park). the far end has a great fountain that has been repaired and is once again spraying anyone that dares too close. they've put in a restaurant and a bar on the terraces all with huge tables and giant umbrellas. it's great. it's also a wi-fi hot spot sponsored by AMEX so you can sit there with a laptop and be connected, the best part is it's free....they've also got a garden "reading room" which was new to me...it's sponsored by the HSBC banking company. you can give them a piece of i.d., choose a book, newspaper, or magazine and take it anywhere you like to read it (i'd say in the park since you want your i.d. back and why would you want to leave?)
across the park, on the south side which is 41st street, they have installed an antique, hand carved, wooden carousel which if i recall correctly was originally built for children in the city of Paris. it has been totally restored, right down to the calliope pipes that jut from the center of the vaulted roof over the carousel....
by the time we got this far into our visit, it was about 7:30pm monday night. you can see it was dark out. mom isn't a huge fan of the city at night. i can understand her fears, since she's not used to constantly being swarmed by droning children rushing too and from school or soccer or whatever...and when you're rushed by the clackers, (the beautiful women, career girls if you will, all wearing huge stilleto heeled shoes, and tightly fitted business suits) it can feel a bit like an attack of the amazon women....especially as you try to navigate the cityscape with a rollaboard suitcase as they pelt you with umbrellas and laptops in oversized fashionable tote bags, or worse, their own luggage on wheels...sometimes, the crush of tourists and businessmen in is tantamount to swimming upstream against a very strong rushing current, and it feels like you're going to hit rapids any minute...frequently, you do, as most people don't pay attention to who they run over with their luggage....i try to be more conscientious than that myself...but that's me....sometimes, when there's construction on the street, particularly near port authority, along 42nd street, the sidewalk is narrowed due to scaffolds and safety fences...often, they've got concrete jersey barriers up blocking a lane of the street from traffic and redesignated as "sidewalk" while the sidewalk is completely lost behind a wall of boards while they erect yet another concrete and glass monolith as a tribute to man's ego and his need to reach ever higher heavenward, all while maintaining firm footing in the bedrock....these sidewalks are the worst to navigate. in fact, they have given me panic attacks, and that means i am forced to climb the barrier and walk in the on coming traffic lane which is really a menace and a dangerous endeavor....
for those trapped between the scaffolding, the boarded wall and the jersey barrier, it is down to single file foot traffic in each direction. if you're the unfortunate one dragging luggage, it becomes the slapstick re-interpretation of the classic western battle, good versus evil, as you go along your direction with your competitor coming right at you...bags down and guns blazing...it's a shootout to the death....you steady your resolve, take aim and propel 10 paces forward and suddenly, face to face, breath smoking from the humidity and lungs chugging from the effort, heart pounding with uncertainty and hands gripping luggage for dear life, you find only one of you can make it thru alive and with luggage in tact...the loser of this shootout is the one who steps over to let the victor pass...unfortuntately, the loser now has found his or her luggaage flipped over sideways/upside down/on it's back or worse, face first in the grime puddles that riddle such western outposts (west side of manhattan atleast). the victor rushes onward to either port authority and climbs with pride into his bus and gets home clean and on time for dinner, or rushes back to grand central where she can mount her train towards the place where all victors go (no, not heaven, but west chester county, which i'm told is sort of like achieving nirvana.)
we had no such drama, or luck, if you will...with a strong knack for avoiding showdowns at the cross-town-corral, we followed the narrow, winding paths left by the early rising workers of the garment districts' concrete and glass tee-pees towards the interior of grand central station, here, once again, i was forced to complain, an admission really, that i was having such severe pain in my legs and feet that i couldn't stand any longer, yet alone keep walking....we were so close to getting home by now and yet 100 paces to the train were out of my range of motion and we had to sit in the midst of all the hubbab. mom enjoyed sitting and staring up into the bright blue cerulean sky of the vaulted ceilings in the station...there, she tried to identify each of the constellations that were clearly outlined and sparkling in the early evening darkness. i found less consolation in the 10 story high "heavens" since i had the great good fortune to have worked on the renovations that rediscovered and recreated the original ceiling fresco....i sat there trying to stretch out my cramped and screaming feet...the only thought that even remotely passed through my mind was when i asked mom if she remembered that i had worked on this project when i worked with LaSalle Partners (the 3rd largest corporate real estate company in the u.s.a., the merged with jones lang woonton, a london firm, the largest in europe, about 7 or 8 years ago now, and combined they are the largest owner/manager/retailer and renter of property in the world, under the name of Jones Lang LaSalle). hard to believe i worked with them 12 and 13 years ago already! i loved that job. not only did i work on the renovations at grand central station, but i also was on the core team for the top secret disney project (project simba - no longer a secret,) to find a pre-existing historical theater to be bought by the walt disney company, totally renovated to within an inch of it's life while maintaining the historical accuracy of the interior and the public areas...all for their up coming project of The Lion King. the project was amazing to work on - we wound up on 42nd street, buying the crumbling and decaying theater once owned by florence ziegfield - the home of the infamous follies and the lesser known "hanging rooftop gardens," (unless your a theater devotee and perhaps you've seen the movie "ziegfield girl" starring judy garland and a slew of other famous names). the rooftop itself was collapsing and the rooftop of the building had been covered in net to stop animals and birds from coming into it. there was 40 years of water damage to the inside, (it had been converted to a movie theater in the 50's and by the sixties the entire place was vacated and repossessed by the city of new york for tax liens and such), yet disney, true to their pledge, kept the reconstruction absolutely 100% accurate to ziegfield's orginal design and construction a hundred years before. because of the roof's collapse into the theater, they were able to create fly space above the stage (which had been boarded over and we weren't able to access before purchasing - we could only imagine it from design files submitted to the city by ziegfield a hundred years earlier....boy were we in for surprise after surprise after surprise!) due to the machinations of the anticipated musical piece to be performed in this space, disney and co. insisted that they needed a much larger space than any modern theater could offer, yet alone one built to put on a show that had it's technology limited to a man pulling a rope that had pullies attached....even the lightening in the theater was a challenge since when it was built, electricity was not the norm for the theaters of the city and it had gas-lamp fittings visible along the balcony as well as under the stage along what had once been an orchestral seating area. disney prevailed....after the sale of the building we immediately started on demolition which took six months. so careful not to remove a single seat of the balcony without making sure to find the largest and best piece of fabric remaining of the original upholstery, we were able to have it cleaned (and cleaned again, then again, and again) until we had a general idea of the true original colors and fabric design...then we had thousands of yards of matching fabric hand woven over seas to reupholster the 1,800 seats that would line the balcony, the par-terre boxes that lined the walls and the seats that would be hand carved to replace the ones installed 60 years earlier to make it a movie house...the costs were staggering!the woodwork in the entire building was ornately carved in an early rendition of art decco. ziegfield was ahead of his time on this decor! when we were finally able to remove the boards covering the proscenium arch across the stage, this had become the projection screen, we found an amazing remaining red velvet curtain....in tatters of course, but you could see the quality of the hand stitching and the expense that was put into the silk fringe lining the bottom edge and the sides that would have drawn back diagonally towards the ceiling to reveal the ziegfield girls as they descended from their fantastic underground lair via a detailed cast iron staircase that descended 3 stories under the city sidewalks, and that catwalked 3 stories above street level for the ladies to get onto the stage or up to the rooftop theater for the fabled hanging garden where every night tuesday through saturday, the after theater rush of famous people and theater stars would come post dinner, (wrapped in ermine and pearls, chinchilla and diamonds, fox and emeralds, mink and rubies or any conflux of the finest silks, wools feathers, bows and patent leather,) here 1,000 of ziegfield's closest friends (atleast for the evening) would see a "private" 1AM performance of his most famous and highest paid girls...among them the fabled Fanny Brice (of jingle bells fame...or funny girl...depending on how gay you truly are ;+D ). the 1AM show would also feature an orchestra as well as several guest performances, never pre-determined or announced, instead, they were culled from the celebraties in attendance that evening, and always, the orchestra was so talented and well rehearsed, that they would know the exact music, the right key and be able to accompany someone they'd never played for, but who's song was the big one of the hit parade....i wish i could have been there....even as i stood there and dreamed it into vibrant colors and noisy, smoky applause in my head, i was overwhelmed by a sense that i had missed the place in life i was meant to be....
we had to drill into the proscenium arch to get core samples of paints used in the building by ziegfield. this was a complicated task. the arch is exactly that, an arch...but it was 2 1/2 stories tall. the floor of the stage was partially collapsed into the underlying dressing rooms - these were the dressing rooms of the stars, nearest the stage. we had to erect scaffold the width of the entire interior of the theater so no one would be in danger of falling thru a weak spot in the floor. once the scaffold was in place, much like giving a boneless chicken some bone structure, we were able to climb like the theater monkeys we were becoming, up to the top and secure mesh wire from one end of the theater to the other as well as from side to side. this was time consuming, difficult and very, very expensive, but without it, we were in equal danger from the collapsing roof as the collapsing floor. now we were safe with tons and tons of weight distributed through the entire building, we weren't going anywhere near the basement until we wanted to descend there, and there was no chance of the remaining hanging gardens becoming the famous falling garden that crushed a crew of hundreds....we were happy....but soon, we were to become ecstatic!
six of us climbed to the very peak of the arch, up hundreds of rings of scaffold, to stand on a floating island of wooden planks....it was terrifying since i'm afraid of heights and climbing scaffolding is not high on my list of favorite things to do...heck...monkey bars are scary to me....i still have a hard time believing i ever faced my fears with so much reckless abandon and came thru it not only unscathed, but with some of the most valuable memories a person could ever be lucky enough to own, yet alone to share....this is one of them...and it's priceless....we are all standing in the center of the scaffold on a step ladder to reach the woodwork we're about to drill. the head of my office, who happened to be my boss, since he was the director of TRG (tenant representation group), that was peter, a senior partner that i loved working with (ruth ellman), an associate (frank small), another one (phil liebow), myself and another young consultant. there were several disney folks in the building overseeing and working with the contracting and architectural teams...we had our core sample materials, a drill, packaging and lables as well as a gridded architectural rendering of the arch, set to scale so we could precisely mark where we had drawn each of the 50 or so samples from. you have to remember, the building was now over 100 years old, and in 100 years, there was water damage, there was fire and smoke damage (a normal thing when gas lamps are involved, fires happened on stage all the time since the foot lights alone would have frequently caught curtains, scenery, fly-ropes as well as sandbags used for fly weights (a tie off for the ropes) would catch quickly when even millimeters too close...and this doesn't include the fires started by costumes that were often bursting into flames due to trains and capes of feathers singeing and igniting as someone would rush offstage to change (and be extinguished!) - that's why the stage hand workers still have such a strong union - they used to be very necessary and had a very dangerous role!
that said, peter and ruth each began to drill on opposite sides of the arch. phil and frank were packaging the samples and sending them down the scaffold while i, and my colleague both marked the samples and the graphs with precise coordinates as well as going back to the drilling spot to leave a marker that matched the marker on our charts. this process took us 2 or 3 days. it was back breaking and tedious...then, the most amazing thing happened.....
to the lower left hand corner of the archway, the drill stopped getting anything in the core. it came out with 1/2 inch of dirty, rotten, wood...the exact, but random location of that core drilling was hollow. we didn't know what to make of it. we didn't get what we needed so peter move a few inches to the left and drilled again. the noise was weird coming from his drill....everyone stopped what they were doing because of the noise...it sounded like the drill was twisting into metal, but there should have been no metal there, it was carved wood. again the core came out with 1/2 inch of dirty, rotted wood....we were there for the same reason, but we were asked to mark this spot on our grid so we could go back to it later with a flash light and see if we had hit a beam or structural piece of the room somehow, but it seemed unlikely since we could see the roof where we were at that moment was still balanced above us and looked fairly secure. moving 4 more inches to the left, peter drilled again, expecting the sound of metal or a clean buzzing sound as we got another core. these cores were anywhere from 2 inches to 6 inches deep generally, 1/2 or 1 inch of wood used to cover the arch, and several inches deep of layer after layer of paint, and an occasional bit of the actual carved wood of the arch...it's amazing how many layers of paint there were...and every single one could be clearly seen in side view...so many varying shades of white. then white again. then layer of gray which meant it was fire and smoke damage, a another layer of white, some yellow, more gray and then black which was a fire in the arch itself...someone had pulled the chandeliers too near the arch at somepoint and the radiating heat had resulted in a large area of damage that had been painted over several times to cover it....fascinating.....
finally done with all the required core samples we shipped them out and could move on to doing the same thing in every other area of the theater, the bathrooms, the lobby, the balcony, the side walls and the back hallways....all in hopes of finding the exact begining of the woodwork and the very first color to ever be applied in the theater. when the core samples were chemically separated in a lab and scientifically analyzed for lead content as well as other chemical make up (basically, trying to recreate the recipe used by those hired by mr. ziefield), they were recreated in the lab to see if the resulting color was anywhere near the actual oolor visibly separated from the core....an amazing thing to see and fascinating to experience, but it was like magic when you witnessed how it all comes together....each core sample was plotted, right? so as each color was recreated, there were two copies of the plots given to the labs. the dirty, orginal sample pulled from the core was attached as a sample to the plot chart, which gave a variety of hues, all within the same color scheme...varying due to smoke damage from fire or from patrons smoking in the theater.... then the recreated colors, made from scratch by chemical analysis and recomposed by the labs were applied to a chart in the same way...we found the base color was the right color and would be maintained by disney, albeit, without the lead content...here's where it gets most interesting and memorable though....
we now have analyzed and determined which of the samples was truest to ziegfield's vision for his follies house. we took paint samples in that color up the scaffold ourselves and painted a large square of color over each core sample marker so we could see which color would truly help light up the space. we remembered to take our flashlights back with us somehow....it was probably almost 6 months since we'd put up the scaffolding inside. the theater, very slowly, and still unknown to the passersby outside on 42nd street, was coming together and looking like it could possibly raise from the dead to offer new life to the theatrical masses...it still needed major surgery, not just a face lift but major reconstruction, but the walls and seats were swathed in streaks of color, paint samples, new fabric samples, pieces of wood brought in and fitted to missing molding and waiting to be blended into the walls...we had uncovered murals on the walls, they were being carefully documents and plotted to be recreated...but this one day we found buried treasure!
when the ziegfield theater became the new amsterdam after mr. ziegfield died, it was no longer a show palace and home of burlesque reviews, but instead it was the equivelent of today's broadway theaters. it had been wired for electricty, retro-fitted for the newest in stage lighting and revamped to remove excessive fixtures once required because gas lamps were not as strong as other lightening for the theater. at the same time, the stage area and the arch had been modified, which we were unable to see from the architectural renderings borrowed from the city files. as we stood on top of the now second nature scaffolding and step ladders, we took turns peering into three extra holes drilled for core samples, but yielding nothing but mystery, that is until now....remember, we had heard metal being ground into. it wasn't structural, we were certain, there was not a single support beam to the roof or on the roof that would correspond with our current position in the building. the first hold showed darkness, but deep darkness, close to two feet in depth. the second hole showed the same thing - but this is where we'd heard something odd...we could see nothing but darkness...the third hole showed the same....we were confused. maybe the metal was somehow attached to the arch and we'd scraped it drilling thru? was it attached to the boards that had covered the arch and the stage opening? someone got a piece of rebar that was up on the scaffold. we took this 6 foot long piece of steel meant for reinforcement and pushed it thru the first hole to see how deep this odd opening was. easily 1/3 of the rod was swallowed up the same with the second and the third. this was a uniform opening. peter got a small lead weight from his bag, along with some twine, he pushed it thru the opening and let it go. softly we heard an echoing thud from all three holes. the space behind the wall was hollow and it was deep in bepth as well as height. we had no idea how wide it was other than what we knew, we drilled every 4 inches so it was atleast 8 inches wide probably more than 12 inches wide since looking in with the lights, we'd not seen a wall or structural piece near the hole, the rebar couldn't be angled properly to find where the next solid side wall was on either side....we got the sawsall and ran a 100' extension cord up the scaffold and under the arch. the disney folks were not happy and the contractor was about to have a fit. we needed to see what this was before someone else found out the hard way and got injured...this is our job, we're in charge, it's what we do....the dirty work and the delegation...disney execs were busy climbing the scaffold so they could stop us. peter didn't listen, he was not about to take direction from the cartoon climbers. instead, he put the jigsaw type blade in the first hole and joined it to the second and then the third. then he gently allowed it to follow a fairly straight line down from the third to approximately where the weight had thudded in our non-scientific test. he repeated the same process at the first hole and the carefully and slowly worked across the bottom in a jaggedly straight line. the large chunk of rotting wood was starting to tip out of the hole he'd created and with blue sky shining thru the falling ceilings and all kinds of spotlights and flood lights aimed off the scaffolding down to the workers beneath as well as those of use above, we all gasped as ruth ellman screamed the single most blood curdling scream i've ever heard in this lifetime - behind the wall was a woman's head.
the saw stopped, the hole gaped open as a few guys lifted away the rotted wood and we all crushed in to the viewing area to see why ruth had almost gotten hysterical - we knew her well enough to know she was a tough cookie and not prone to hystrionics. i'll be damned. a head. covered in soot, in rot, in chips of paint and sawdust, but obviously a very beautiful woman when she'd been alive...a ziegfield girl, perhaps a ziegfield lover, immortalized forever in bronze and left to her own lonely devices these last hundred years, sealed into the walls of a theater that should never have spoken again, yet alone given up such sad secrets!
the disney executives, rushing to the sight of the scream, screaming and ranting themselves, were about to fire anyone they could (as if...good luck disney guys, you're powerful, but the theater was owned by lasalle for the privacy and secrecy of your project....no way were you pulling anything on us...you'd have been singing circle of life on the circle line if you hadn't backed off and shut up! contractors were called up to help remove the head from the ravine. as they tried to lift her out they realized she wasn't fully intact....she had been more than a head...and she was lying in a pool of some of her own parts....
this beautiful creature had been a fixture in the theater somewhere, but where...her various loose parts were a puzzle to be recreated on the floor with too many helping hands...then it dawned on us. she had been a gas lamp fixture. the beautiful face would have covered the gas pipe fittings and the loose pieces were branches each containing a gas fueled flame that would have been covered with a brightly colored hand blown glass globe....these were not found in the carnage....but where did she belong? this mystery would plague us for several more weeks....that is until the day the demolition of the reconstructed arch began....
the idea was to remove the overlaying rotted wood that been the movie screen. then we would visually and physically inspect the underlying original arch. professionals were to be called in to assess it's structural integrity and to find how much would need rebuilding/replacing/rethinking. three boards into the removal (remember, this is 2 1/2 stories above ground and boards were floor to ceiling as well as wall to wall - that's a lot of boards to pull out especially when you have to fear falling forward and thru to the floor on the opposite side, since we'd yet to explore that side or set up scaffolding . the only thing in place on the other side was the netting on the external rooftop to prevent the animals and other debris being added to the interior disaster area already in place.
three boards into this labor of love, we had our first clue to where the beautiful head went...there was an arched recess in the archway itself...in this recess however, we found a body....a bronze body....life size, a woman's body in a diaphanous gown. no arms or hands though. we found them later. as the boards continue to be jettisoned into a dumpster below the scaffold, more recesses were uncovered, it wasn't a fluke. the stage had been lit completely from above as well as below, with open flames. that explained why we had found so much fire damage in the paint cores along the top of the arch, so close to where the ceiling should have been. they must have used these lights for the theater before the performance began so the audience could read the playbill and people watch in the boxes....when the show was set to start, a gas line must have been turned off from some central area, dimming the entire theater and allowing the gas lines that lit the stage to be brought up. if you know how gas lines work, you can't run lights on one line in one part of a building at the same time as those on the same line in a different part of the building. if you do, the lights will drop drastically in one area as the gas is diverted to the second area and neither will have very good lighting as both are residually splitting the available gas which causes the lights to flare and drop, or worse, occasionally extinguish, and then create a fire as the gas pours out of the dead light then suddenly explodes above another lighted flame, catching anything light and flammable nearby to burn (an a-ha moment for me - it explained all the smoke and fire damages we'd encountered and couldn't put a solid reasoning to).
over the course of several weeks, we recovered the bodies of four such woman. each, decapitated and with arms and hands missing. often times, when we found another of the female heads, we would find branches for gas lamps but no glass work to accompany them. then one day, we found the mother load. the arch was nearly fully exposed and we were working near the bottom of the scaffolding. on either side of the arch, there were recessed areas for the gaslamps yet again, if i recall, we found 12 or 18 of them between stage left and stage right, each 2 feet deep, 2 feet tall and just under 2 feet wide. near the base of the arch was suddenly discovered another random treasure trove of body parts, it was a mass grave, a jumble of tumbled arms and severed hands. fingers missing, forarms cracked in half or smashed flat. they had been lovingly maintained for years of the theater being a jewel in new york's crown and one day, these lovely doyenne's of a by gone era had become obsolete and out of style...their art deco clothing and antiquated hair styles and poses, once mitigated by the follies themselves, had become relics of what had been and not at all the forward thinking ladies who were now asserting themselves and changing the rules of history in america.
in total we found 4 full statuesque bronze woman, and when we laid the parts out prior to sending them off to a foundry (a spa if you will, for the bronze woman in each of us!) we discovered that indeed, there would have never been more than 4 of these woman...the branches that held their glass globes of fire were each representative of a season in nature...so that was it, buried treasures from nature as envisioned by flo ziegfield. but what of the two extra heads found? well, i'll tell you...once the arch had been optimally uncovered and the theater beautifully and historically recreated to within an inch of most of our lives, these heads were the lightening fixtures that once had lined the upper balconies of the theater, surrounded by painted and carved, gold gilt and leaf, these heads had shown down on the wealthy people with all the radiance of the noon-time sun.
as for the 4 women, they were located in the main entry, as soon as you had handed your ticket in and crossed the foyer threshold into the main lobby area, you were walking into a semicircular carpeted cocktail bar that then descended gently into a plush theater and the best seats in the house. these for beauties had held dominion over those who entered and those who left, bidding each patron a good evening a glorious welcome to the most spectacular even to grace the stage. the bronze foundry was employed to recreate the missing fingers, correct the broken arms and smashed arms...since there were 4 nearly complete pieces it was much easier to recreate them since we had pieces to be copied from. the bronze ladies alone were nearly $5 million to excavate, repair, rewire with electric lighting and the capping glory - they were each fitted with custom made tiffany and company stained glass globes....we were never able to document if that was correct or not, but it certainly fit the grandeur and the feel of the theater. in the end, we had a second set of these ladies cast for the theater - bronze understudies if you will...they would have also lit the 3rd floor rooftop area where the patrons enjoyed the hanging gardens...unfortunately, disney and co spent several hundred million dollars to fix, refinish and repair the theater, that is prior to the expense of actually installing a show there and making it ready to run as a theater again, so they put recreating the rooftop garden theater on hold. that was 13 years ago. the rooftop is till off limits. the lion king is no longer the king of his once proud domain in the new amsterdam theater (i believe he's living over at the broadway now that beauty and the beast finally closed, phew!) one day, i hope they do finish the rooftop and open it to the public again, but for now, all i know, secret project "super-cali-frag-il-ist-ic-ex-pe-al-i-dotious may all ready be underway with them (can you tell from that clue that mary poppins is currently the disney tenant at said theater?).
i hope you enjoyed my most exciting and priceless memory from a job i loved. it's now taken two hours to type it up and i'm sorry that i can't share the pictures of it, but when i left my job, they were property of the firm....if you have the chance, go see a show at the theater, and witness first hand a piece of my personal history. yes the tickets are too expensive now, but the opportunity to walk on ground once tread by untold celebrities and to sit in the very seats of the infamous ziegfield, you will almost certainly hear strains of rehearsal piano if you sit with eyes closed and listen intently for a minute....and it's true, you might even have the exhilerating scare of seeing your own ghostly follies girl...they're in their, and not every beautiful girl is in bronze.
an obvious sign that mr. potato head was stuffing himself full of ecstasy pills (10.5 ounces - it's a long flight from ireland to sydney!) in order to cope with the in flight service on a aer lingus flight to australia....
