5/1/12 - Russell Clan Reunion NYC Chapter

Arranged to meet Stephen, Kathy and their three kids for lunch in Greenwich Village and found them by chance, just walking along the street.  This was fortunate because, as it turns out, Google maps are sometimes one street out in NYC with the result that we were struggling to find the coffee shop that was our agreed meeting point. They took us back for lunch in the loft apartment that they were renting and this turned out to be a seriously cool abode. There’s lots of graffiti on the front (street level) door to the building and as you climb the stairs the carpets are old and dirty but once you step inside the apartment you find yourself in a an uber modern world of wood and steel décor with strategically placed objects de art like a mounted mountain goat’s head and a giant chalk board with a NYC landscape etched on it.

As the family had just come back from the markets, lunch was a sensational fresh pesto and pasta dish with potatoes, oodles of fresh parmesan and delicious sour dough breads. And the blue cheeses and crackers to nibble on in the kitchen while it was prepared before us were wonderful.  Yum! 

As the kids were at Brisbane Grammar School and Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School we had lots to talk about as many of the staff that I worked with at BGGS in the 1980s were still there. Hopefully Peter and I supplied them with enough gossip to return to school with in the New Year!

Left Greenwich Village and made our way back home to get ready for our first of many nights at the Met watching opera. Tonight’s opera ‘The Barber of Seville’ was the last of the family holiday series where the work is sung in English and the performance is targeted at children or those new to opera. Although it was an abridged and translated version of the original opera we still found it to be thoroughly enjoyable and a fantastic introduction to the architecture of the Lincoln Centre as a whole, and the Metropolitan Opera in particular.

            Despite being broadly familiar with the place as a result of our having attended many ‘simulcast’ performances of Met Operas at various movie theatres back in Perth, this was our first time actually inside the opera house and we were thrilled to finally see all of the architecture and décor that we had been watching on simulcast back in Australia for the last two years.
In keeping with the grandeur of what was promised on screen the Met in real life did not disappoint. It was sublime.

The marble staircases, the red carpet, the gold curtains and those beautiful snowflake chandeliers that were, as we later found out, a gift from the people of Austria as a mark of gratitude for the work of the USA during WWII.  We now can’t wait to see ‘Turandot’ next Thursday night.