Walking Through Central Park...

Walking home through Central Park from the Van Cleef and Arpels Show...the weather was perfect, the sky so blue, and spring just around the corner...so lovely and so peaceful (well, relatively for New York  

anyway).

Set In Style - The Jewellery of Van Cleef & Arpels in New York

Today I visited the Carnegie Mansion (AKA The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, part of the Smithsonian) to view the collection of historical Van Cleef & Arpels jewellery on display there - a fabulous collection of to-die-for precious and fascinating jewels including items that belonged to Greta Garbo, Princess Grace of Monaco, Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor - it was jaw-dropping, really it was - the lushness of these amazing pieces, the size and the design of them was astonishing - the Carnegie Mansion was quite interesting too and the tour guide was worth following around.   I was lucky enough to arrive early, because I as I left, there was a long queue out the front with people waiting patiently to view the collection which was almost as astonishing to me as the collection, I've never seen Americans queue for anything before!

Blue Man Group, New York

Just come back from seeing the Blue Man Group at the Astor Place Theatre - laughed until I nearly died.  

I chose this rather than something more serious because frankly, sometimes you just need a damn good laugh - and although I began by thinking 'well, this aint this funny' in the end I just was rolling around laughing - I wasn't expecting to see the amount of audience particicipation that there was, and those who (involuntarily) were involved were really good sports about it -- the show was an orchestrated series of chaotic events - paint spraying everywhere, rolls of toilet paper all over the theatre, I cannot tell you --- it was just one of the maddest evenings I've had in ages - it was like being seven again, and all this hysterically childish stuff happened but in the end, you just could not help being totally engaged with it - if you do get the chance, go and see the show, it can't help but make you happy.