WAR HORSE

 We only did two things today, but one was so spectacular that it overwhelms everything else.  We went to see the play War Horse.  As much as I don't like horses, I absolutely loved the play.  This is the one where the horses are puppets and even though everyone had said how good the puppets are,  they were even more amazing.  I actually felt sorry for the horses a little bit.  The play is 2 hours and 40 miutes, and I was very worried that I'd be bored but there was never even a time when I wanted to try to sneak a look at my watch. 

This is a picture I downloaded from the internet. Each full horse (there are some half horses) has three handlers. You can see the handlers at all times, and you can see some of the way they manipulate the puppets, but it's still magic. I was surprised that it had a happy ending, because I didn't think it would. After the play we walked up Columbus and had dinner at an okay Mexican restaurant called Jalapeno, and then we went to a book signing at Barnes and Noble. Can't remember his first name, but he's an economist and his last name is Stiglitz, and he was talking about the vast differences between the wealthy classes and everybody else in America. America, the first country to have a big middle class is now the only country where the middle class is disappearing. Of course this Barnes and Noble is on the upper West Side, so he was pretty much preaching to the choir. That's all I have today. Tomorrow I think we'll go to the Met (museum) and then we're going to hear One Ring Zero at the Jewish Museum. This is a Balkan inspired band which includes songs with lyrics by Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers and Neil Gaiman. I don't know the other three, but I'm fascinated by the idea of Margaret Atwood. I finally got a chance to get Sam's harp out of the case and play it. When I looked in the case, I thought it was a double strung harp because I could see two rows of tuning pins. After I got it out, I think it's an old one of those Pakistani harp-shaped instruments. Most of them are real junk. And this one seems to be, too.