After a week of childhood illness and grumpy parents, Yasmin showed signs of needing to get out, as did the grumpy parents. (One grumpy with cabin fever, the other with overwork.) So we took the train to the New York Auto Show and Ringling Brothers ‘Greatest Show on Earth’, all in the circus that is New York City.
It was a very windy, very wet and persistently rainy day. Brollies, coats and boots were
de rigueur for every single body on the streets of the city, but not everyone had the forethought to be dressed for the weather. Most thought a small, foldable umbrella would see them through the worst of it. Hrumph. We counted three or four dozen bent and broken metal spiders abandoned on the sidewalks: evidence to the contrary. We were extremely surprised to find that a place with so great a tolerance for large amounts of snow has almost no capacity to cope with a couple of inches of rain.
Getting a cab was impossible and so we took the bus across town to the Javits Center (that’s how they spell here, not Centre) and joined the first of our queues for the day to get in to the Auto Show. We expected great things. We’ve been to the Melbourne Auto Show and while that’s really good, everything is better in New York City, isn’t it? (…wait for it…) Actually, no, as it turns out. It was big, and there were a lot of vehicles on display, but it was reminiscent of a car yard. I guess we expected to see concept cars and lots of bells and whistles you can’t get on your new Ford/Commodore just yet. Maybe it’s simply that downunder we get so few extras on vehicles that we’re very easily impressed. Maybe it’s that many of the cars available here this year won’t be available to us for a good long while yet. Maybe it’s because cars are so-o-o-o-o much more expensive in Australia (for what reason I can’t fathom – car makers are serving international markets aren’t they?) Sidebar: my favourite new dream car starts at $45,000 AUD compared with $15,000 USD. Just does not compute.
Despite the blandness of the show we did snap off a bunch of photos, no mean feat in a ‘wet-day-in-New-York-let’s-go-somewhere-indoors’ crowd. I don’t know if it’s just Americans, this could be an international problem, don’t want to speculate… but why is it that just as you snap the button on the camera, a shoulder … an arm … a head … an entire family … manages to cross in front of your lens? Even when they can see you’re taking a picture, they just keep on moving, looking right at you.
After about an hour or so of the crowds blocking views of anything that was actually interesting we gave up and headed to the circus. The circus tickets were already in my hot little hand so we joined the queue to get into Madison Square Garden and tried to avoid the vendors blocking up the entrances with their extravagantly priced ‘merchandise’. Now I know that this country runs on the right of everybody to make a living (that’s why so much dodgy commerce occurs – they don’t want to infringe on the rights of capitalism, small or large) but $9USD for a drink at the concession stand – a plastic container of coke and way too much ice – is extortion. Or at least I thought it was until I paid $10 for a bag of cotton candy and a paper hat, then $6 for a box of yesterday’s popcorn, after already having shelled out $25 for two foot long hotdogs and a kid’s meal. If we’d had time for lunch between the two events we could have gone to Trump Tower, paid less and eaten more, and likely had at least some encounter with a vegetable or a fruit. But no, all that money went on half a cup of sugar, a tablespoon of corn, two doughy rolls puffed up with air, and barely an ounce of meat (with fillers). I guess we have to count the ketchup and mustard – at least they once were plants.
Yasmin’s request for ‘one of those light things’ (an annoying twirly-gig that spewed forth light and sound, $18) received a firm ‘no’. She’d do better let loose with the same money in the toy store. Not that she understood that reasoning.
Aside from the extravagance of the extravaganza that is the circus (or indeed any show) at Madison Square Gardens, the performance was great. Yasmin and I were in kiddy heaven. Walking trick dogs, tigers, elephants, llamas, clowns, acrobats, tight-rope walkers, trapeze, everything you’d expect. I confess to some queasiness at watching such highly trained animals – but the acrobats are on union minimum, I believe. No, I did flinch at the response of the tigers to the whip, it put me in mind of the way a beaten dog responds to a rolled up newspaper. But if it was me in there with them, I’d want them under control too.
We could have done with those trainers after the show was over, though. Getting out of the Gardens was a nightmare. Remember that scene at the end of Crocodile Dundee where he gets up on the heads of the people waiting at the subway like a sheep dog? Well imagine that swarm of people, moving down five shut-down escalators and out an entrance way at most five metres wide, with those aforementioned vendors in the way and the patrons for the next show trying to get in. You couldn’t call it walking. It was more like shuffling. I felt sorry for all the wee kiddies amongst the crowd. They’re being smacked on the head by swinging purses and bags, being yelled at by stroppy, stressed out parents, and worst of all, they’re at bum height. It just can’t be pleasant down there, after all those hotdogs…
