evacuation scares
Dec. 22nd, 2003 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelseagirlYesterday friend J. and I met up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art mid-afternoon. After paying our holiday-season visit to the Baroque creche/Christmas tree we decided to check out an exhibit of some Hudson River School painter I was unfamiliar with. He had one of those names where all of his names were last names -- something like Sanford Robbins Gifford. Not extraordinary stuff, really, but since I grew up amidst the Hudson River valley landscape, it always clicks for me.
So, you say? Well, we were about to finish up there when a guard came through and said "Everybody out of the museum! I'm not joking!" By the time they'd filed out the crowds, out a single entrance, it had taken close to an hour (plus we had to sneak back into the lobby to get our coats and never mind the hard time I got about having checked them in the first place *g*), so it's a good thing it *wasn't* a real attack. J. started amusing herself by making morbid little Titanic jokes, which made us some friends in the crowd but also got her some serious glares.
Didn't find out 'til this mornings *NY Times* that it was a "suspicious package" alert -- turns out someone had left a box with a stuffed snowman in it on the steps. By the time we got out of there, they were letting people back in, but we decided to cut our losses and go for coffee. We also, btw, completely validated the "visit the gift shop first" theory, as J. was evacuated complete with Jasper Johns poster.
Took the Fifth Ave. bus home so I could spectate pretty lights and capitalism at its most rampant -- it was nice to see the Rockefeller Center tree, since we'd taken Susan up before it was lit.
So, you say? Well, we were about to finish up there when a guard came through and said "Everybody out of the museum! I'm not joking!" By the time they'd filed out the crowds, out a single entrance, it had taken close to an hour (plus we had to sneak back into the lobby to get our coats and never mind the hard time I got about having checked them in the first place *g*), so it's a good thing it *wasn't* a real attack. J. started amusing herself by making morbid little Titanic jokes, which made us some friends in the crowd but also got her some serious glares.
Didn't find out 'til this mornings *NY Times* that it was a "suspicious package" alert -- turns out someone had left a box with a stuffed snowman in it on the steps. By the time we got out of there, they were letting people back in, but we decided to cut our losses and go for coffee. We also, btw, completely validated the "visit the gift shop first" theory, as J. was evacuated complete with Jasper Johns poster.
Took the Fifth Ave. bus home so I could spectate pretty lights and capitalism at its most rampant -- it was nice to see the Rockefeller Center tree, since we'd taken Susan up before it was lit.
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Date: 2003-12-22 08:32 am (UTC)Where's the baroque creche? That sounds interesting.
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Date: 2003-12-22 08:48 am (UTC)The baroque creche is set around and on a Christmas tree in the Medieval Hall at the Metropolitan Museum. It's 18th c. Italian, with an entire, immensely detailed village all around the tree and many angels in it. (It's an artificial tree, to preserve the figures.) Well worth seeing, particularly if they don't evacuate you immediately afterwards. ;-)
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Date: 2003-12-22 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-26 12:07 pm (UTC)Although the woman who had the faculty party in her flat this year has a wonderful modernist one -- white, minimalist, thoroughly abstract -- that's getting added to that list . . .