Research indicates that there are health benefits to be had from talking to strangers, the very behavior Progressive commercials – the ones about new homeowners becoming their parents – portray as pathetic.
Well, that was an eventful weekend. In addition to the World Cup and Wimbledon, the United States celebrated its 250th birthday and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got married. If only, instead of Madison Square Garden, they had chosen the antenna of the Empire State Building.
The Fitz Bar & Lounge in Fort Lauderdale has put up on a back wall some of my photos of the city and Saturday hosted a reception. At one point, someone asked me if I was thinking of other venues for exhibits, perhaps a museum. I told him I wasn’t, for the simple reason that I’m not a professional; taking pictures for me is simply a hobby. It would be, I thought later, like someone who just writes blogs getting a book deal with a major publisher. Then it occurred to me that, these days, that happens fairly frequently.
Saturday afternoon we drove to the AMC theater in the Coral Ridge Mall to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 and found that the 2 o’clock showing was sold out. (We generally catch movies at Savor, where we’re sometimes the only patrons.) We got back in the car and headed up Federal to Big Apple Books, which was busy with customers. Within the space of 30 minutes we discovered the fallacy behind two widely held assumptions: That people no longer go to the movies and people no longer read books.
David Hockney, who died last week at the age of 89, was a brilliant artist and also a frequent wearer, particularly in his younger years, of Rooster ties. He preferred thick knit ones with thin stripes, which he often wore with striped shirts, giving his torso a colorfully clashing horizontal-vertical aspect. It’s hard to pull off – and believe me, I’ve tried.