Easter 28: Life here is, well, alive

5/17

Enjoying the opening

Annual Landmarks Conservancy Sacred Sites Open House Day. Glad to be on the tour list again this year. Although it will mean seven straight days of work and I need a rest.

 So they come. By ones, twos, threes. A tour group from a Roman Catholic Church. A group of tourists from Germany.  Curious neighbors. Their Landmarks Conservancy guidebooks in hand. Sometimes it feels good to be an official landmark with architectural and historic significance. And hopefully current relevance. I enjoy being a docent. Giving my archi-socio-historio-culutral tour. From Richardsonian revival to Tiffany to Papp, SANE and FREEZE and Occupy.  Answering questions. Trying to explain the current social and demographic realities to the Germans. Letting the neighbors know we’re still alive.

I’m wondering if this will be a one- man show when Don comes in at the end of one of my tours and listens in amazement to what he hasn’t known yet. It will be good to have him help. Later Leila and Marsha will arrive to help out too and Danielle will wrap up the day.

Conrad is here to help with the reGroup Theatre people who are in to work on a massive clean up of Mc Alpin. They want to do a run of Preston Wilson’s Texas Trilogy in August. (http://www.regrouptheatre.org/) Plays I came to know and love back in my Tulsa days.  And maybe it can be  a longer term commitment. They’ve committed themselves to the noble endeavor of recapturing the spirit and ethos and legacy of the original ground-breaking Group theatre that gave birth to the generation of method actors and Kazan and Strasburg and the Actors’ Studio. (http://www.regrouptheatre.org/) (Lynnea of Frog & Peach (http://www.frogandpeachtheatre.org/) and her husband Ted are part of that same tradition and lifetime members of the Studio.) I go up to watch them at work and share some pizza. Oh, and then Conrad talks to me about wanting to do a launch party for his film project on a band, the Dirty Urchins.(http://thedirtyurchins.com/bio). This could be fun.

Back downstairs to do a few more tours then out to meet my boys at Yankee Stadium. My hometown Pirates are in town to play the Yankees.

After the game, I stop by Berik and Leila’s latest opening. Leila laughing warmly about Berik’s auditioning five singers for possible gigs at his later shows. They’ve got their typical multinational collection of artists tonight. Leila and Marsha and I sit and talk and enjoy the scene. I’m thinking, reflecting on last night with Dos Pubelos, el Grupo Interncional and Open Mic and today with my preservationist tour-goers, the reGroup and the New York Realist artists, how day after day life here is well, life, alive in the very best sense of that word.