Most weekends I do fun things in the city, which makes for good blog material. This weekend I took a break from that and it was definitely the right thing to do.
Friday night I went to the Museum of Modern Art with my friend Lori, the one night a week that the museum is completely free of charge, thanks to a generous grant from Target Stores. However, this made the experience somewhat lacking to say the least, as the galleries were as crowded as Penn Station the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Literally, you could not take two steps without having to avoid somebody in some of the popular galleries, such as the one with Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night. That one reminded me of the crowd in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris, where you had to wade through a crowd 10 rows deep to get close enough to see the painting. Here, people were having their pictures taken with the painting like it was some kind of rock star.
Far from being a "museum of squiggles" as some might think, there are lots of very significant and recognizable works in their collection as one of the preeminent museums in the world, including Henri Matisse's Dance (1), Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory, (which is not currently on display however); Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World and Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which turns 100 years old this year, and part of the museum's world-class collection of Picassos. There are also some impressive works by Monet, Chagall, Cezanne, Seurat, Modigliani, Pollock, Rothko, Warhol, Rodin, Gauguin, and of course many others. I look forward to bringing my family to see this museum on a quieter, non-free day.
Saturday I had a lab appointment to get some blood drawn, but I slept right through it, so I had to reschedule. The rest of the afternoon I did my errands and then went to pick up Bee as I was taking her to a spa treatment Saturday night after she got off work. We went to @Ease Spa in Hilldale, where she got a facial and I got a full-body massage. It was her first time at a spa, and we both had a fun and relaxing time.
Afterwards we met up with Tara and Bug at the local Fuddrucker's to eat dinner and listen to some obscure 80s music they were playing in the restaurant. I put this Duran Duran CD on my Christmas list, and we had a wonderful time laughing together over our meal, which was admittedly not quite up to what we expect from Fudd's, but didn't matter because we had so much fun.
Sunday I woke up a bit early and did some shopping before all the churchgoers let out, then went home and relaxed for the better part of the day, alternating some reading and TV watching on the couch with vaccuming and straightening up the apartment. I went out briefly in the late afternoon to buy a vanity tray for my small collection of scents, then entertained Tara at my place for a few hours in the late evening before bed.
And that was the extent of my weekend activity.
