When I was visiting my friend the journalist Sandra Burton in Paris where she was a bureau chief, every afternoon at 4 the limousine of Mitterand would park downstairs on the rue Meziere, where lived in the same building Dominique Sanda. Of course it was France, so people hardly noticed.
How silly we are, and how sad that the poor man can't just do a little tap dance on the side, exhausted and stressed as he had to be,without being lynched.
Oh, well.
On the local destruction front, the ugly crane that snapped outside my window has been secured, but that doesn't help the building. Along with being silly, we are apparently so greedy that the skyline of Manhattan is being savaged by this monstrosity, with its undulating blue and yellow facade that looks like a poor grade of plastic. The seemingly better news is it will go only up to the 75th floor, not the 100th as was previously rumored. And the hundred and first floor penthouse bought by an Arab in advance will be only the Seventy-fifth floor, though he is still an Arab.
During the snow I took refuge at a restaurant behind my building. The only other patron turned out, as is my wont, to be a story: he is an engineer for the building. So he did tell me of how cheap the materials are that he is using, and how other owners in this city are not that different from Donald Trump, though one hopes they are not such stupid bullies.
Ah, New York. Destination of Dreamers and those with true aspirations. But that was Ago.
