This entry’s title brought to you by a game of Mad Libs Jo and I played on the Fung Wah to New York Sunday morning, when we weren’t listening to our various obsessions (Jo: Jazz and the Gorillas, Me: this book, which I have fallen utterly in love with, and which is a much more interesting creative accomplishment than the one I am about to tell you about).

An alternative title for the entry would have been “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” because that is what I mostly thought when we finally got to Central Park, after walking twenty (plus twenty plus twenty) blocks through pizza and used books. I’m very glad we went to see the Gates, because we had a delicious time, and Jo had a celebrity sighting which I will let her tell you about (we were crossing a road, and I was too slow, so by the time I turned my head the two very short famous people Jo spotted had disappeared. That’s all I’m telling you. They are both very short, and they are famous, and they are — Jo thinks — married to each other. Go guess!).

But the experience itself was sadly lacking in wonder-production. Actually, I’m quite certain that had it been a stunningly bright day, with a stiff breeze, and had we been, as in this picture, the only three people in the park, it could have been rather lovely — even a bit spiritual — possibly it would have been breathtaking. As it was, the life-jacket colored banners were pretty, but very flat, still, and almost completely overwhelmed by the teeming masses of humanity eating hot dogs underneath them. The tremendous number of people in the park turned the audience into the show, as far as I was concerned. Several times I clean forgot about the big orange things lying about everywhere, because I was so much more interested in looking at the people. Lots of families, lots of dogs, lots of babies. Lots of funny hats and fabulous coats.

That part really was amazing, and kind of wonderful — the sheer fact of so many human beings coming out on a cold February afternoon to see this… this thing, this spectacle, this crazy, expensive, eerily poetic but also weirdly mundane stunt pulled by a couple of wrinkled old coots who have figured out a way to play glorious jokes on the world.