Sunday, October 6, 2002

Weiner Dogs and Woody Allen

This is why I love living in New York.


Despite weather forecasts that threatened the region with the remnants of Hurricane Lili, yesterday's weather was beautiful. So I decided to take myself to Washington Square Park, where something very special was going on.


Yesterday marked the date of the autumn Dachshund Fest. Hundreds of dachshunds and their owners gathered in the north end of the park (as the southern end was dominated by some very hopped-up nannies who were getting ready to march to City Hall to demand labor standards). The event culminated in the group gathering together to hoist their weiner dogs above their heads to sing the Dachshund song.


This, friends, is why you never leave the house in New York without a camera.


Not content to end my day with that, I paid a visit to the Met. As I was walking to the 19th-Century European wing, the family of three a few paces in front of me stopped to admire the sculpture courtyard below. It was Woody Allen and Soon-Yi, with their young daughter. They wound up in the same room as me a couple of times in the Impressionism section, and plenty of people noticed them, too. Nobody seemed to care all that much.


In three and a half years, that was my first celebrity-in-the-wild sighting. At least the first one that I noticed.


And tourism in this town is flagging? Come up and visit, people! All this happened in a span of four hours. Imagine what you could see in a weekend.


Robyn