Someday I'm going to have to tell you about . . .

. . . recent gallery visits with Abby (who just happens to be the best gallery companion you can imagine).

• Yesterday we investigated the Norman Rockwell show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum -- which I'm convinced should be called the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. We agreed that the best picture in the very disappointing show was "The Connoisseur" and that the best thing about it was the Jackson Pollock-like spatter painting that the hoity-toity connoisseur is standing in front of. Which means, since Pollock was the anti-Rockwell, that the best thing in the show was the least "Rockwell" of them all. (When I mentioned to a friend that the show was disappointing, she wondered "How can anyone be disappointed in a Rockwell show when there is so little doubt about what you should expect to see there?" Good question; I wish I had a good answer.)
  
• A couple weeks ago we had a great time at the National Gallery's Arcimboldo exhibit. The paintings are fascinating. It's easy to imagine this guy painting 50 years ago in New York or Madrid. Much harder to think that he actually painted almost 500 years ago in the court of the Hapsburg emperor. The works are absolutely surreal! Abby loved them. Several of the paintings -- ostensibly renderings of salads or vase of flowers or pot of pork -- can be turned upside down to reveal human portraits. The gallery -- reluctant to let people flip their valuable art work around -- attached them to the wall firmly but placed a mirror in front of them to show the upside-down view. Abby was thrilled with them, but wondered why the mirror was needed. "Look, Pop Pop, all you have to do is come out into the middle of the room and stand on your head, like this!"
• From Arcimboldo, we walked across the hall to glom some prints by Edvard Munch. After seeing about 20 of them, Abby tugged on my sleeve and whispered, "Did he do 'The Scream'?" I was surprised that she had even heard of "The Scream," and I was absolutely flabbergasted that somehow she recognized some similarity in style or technique or something in both "The Scream" and the prints we were viewing.
• On the way out of the gallery that day -- after hot dogs and sodas -- we walked past a lot of late 19th and early 20th century art. She casually identified the Picassos as we walked past. At least twice I had to say, "I don't know, Abby, I don't recognize that one; let me just go over and check the card . . . Um, er, yeah, Abby, you're right. That is another Picasso."

. . . our "Autumn in New York" adventure. Our very touristy "Autumn in New York" adventure, also known as "Darby and Joan visit the Big Apple":

• Our bus carried us from Key Bridge to Penn Station on Monday, the 15th, whence a 15 minute walk took us to our hotel, the AKA Times Square. (Thanks, Zarguna!) After checking in: lunch at a deli across the street, a half-mile or so stroll up Broadway and then over to 6th Ave. and back to the hotel to plan the evening. (Monday night is not the easiest time to find something to do in New York.) We settled on Katherine Jenkins performing at City Winery (no, we'd never heard of her either, but some YouTube videos convinced us she might be worth listening to) . She was OK, nothing more, and we left at intermission, but the evening was still a grand success because sitting at the bar, nursing a "Chivas with a little ice", I felt for all the world like Peter Gunn listening to Lola Albright perform all those years ago. (The link in this paragraph shows the beginning of a performance Ms. Jenkins gave in Dusseldorf; ours began exactly the same way.)
• Tuesday: Bryant Park with its ice-skating pond and then Grand Central Terminal, in both of which, colorful holiday art/craft/gift shows were being held, then the United Nations building, lunch at a greasy spoon, and back to the hotel to relax a bit and make plans for the evening before heading out for our afternoon explorations. As for the evening, we decided on "The Divine Sister" at the SoHo Playhouse; the show had received a good review in the Times and Times readers had given it 4 1/2 out of 5 stars. In fact the play was awful. Make that AWFUL! Fart jokes, for God's sake! Remarkably, although the play was AWFUL, it didn't put us in a foul mood, and I thought it might be fun to wander around a little looking for a neighborhood bar where we could listen to some music, but when we came out of the theater, the skies had opened up, so we just headed back to the hotel and drank a little wine. But I've gotten ahead of myself. After relaxing at the hotel and buying tickets for that AWFUL play, we walked to the Empire State Building and elevatored to the 86th floor observation deck. Neither of us had been there since we were kids. I came away with a strengthened belief that tall things are much more impressive when viewed from the bottom looking up than they are from the top looking down. But I'm still ahead of myself: On our way to the ESB, we took a little time to walk through the NY Public Library building on 5th Avenue; very cool.
• Wednesday: Subway to Lincoln Center (we'd never seen it), walk across Central Park, spend several hours wandering through the Metropolitan Museum, take an exciting taxi ride back to the hotel, and stroll back down to Penn Station for the ride home.
• Summary: A lovely three days!
• PS I'm coming more and more to the opinion that traveling in the off-season is the only way to travel. The weather be damned, I just want to avoid crowds. And we had no line -- none -- at the ESB; in Paris a couple years ago (also off-season) we found almost no line at the Louvre. The Metropolitan Museum did have a good number of people in it, but the information desk told us that it was not nearly as crowded as during tourist season.

. . . why you should never pay extra for expedited shipping.

• I ordered a new keyboard and mouse from Buy.com and chose "budget shipping" (free, but delivery would take 7 - 9 days) instead of "standard shipping" ($7, with delivery in 4 - 5 days). The keyboard arrived at our front door the very next day.