Vacating the premises

I am going on vacation. Actually, I have already been on vacation twice, and you didn’t even know I was gone! I don’t have to tell you every little thing! You’re not the boss of me! Anyway, now I feel like telling you about those trips, and so I will…if you can guess where I went. Here are two pictures from iconic places in the cities that were my last destinations:

So, did ya guess? Were you right? We’ll never know! Still, I’m having a great time playing this game, so I’ll just carry on.

The first set are from Salt Lake City. That’s the famous organ in the Mormon Tabernacle in Temple Square. It has 11, 623 pipes. That Brigham Young had a mighty big organ, I tell you what! The smallest of the pipes is only as big around as a pencil. It’s not the size of the pipe that matters, it’s how you blow it, right? The building that houses the proud organ, the Tabernacle, was built by a civil engineer in the domed shape of a bridge, because Brigham Young liked the acoustics under the Remington Bridge. Very clever, Brigham! The roof structure is nine feet thick, and lots of people thought it was destined to cave in on itself, but it has not had any structural problems in more than a century.

The second picture in the set shows Mormons from the Mormon Tabernacle. They will tell you pretty much anything about pretty much anything, whether you want to know it or not. In the picture they are telling where they are from, though I can’t recall anyone asking. The things they don’t seem to want to talk too much about are if their lives resemble the HBO series Big Love, if they want to be my sister-wife, and anything about the funny Mormon panties. http://www.mormon-underwear.com/

The second set of pictures are from….New York City! The first is of a building. New York has lots of buildings.

The second is one of many fantastic scenes carved into stairways, bridges and columns all over Central Park. They are very beautiful and I never saw two that were the same. The park is one of the greatest places EVER! It’s huge and diverse, with lots of different areas, and tons of stuff to do and see for everybody. All kinds of special things happen in the park; for example, in August, the play The Capeman by Derek Walcott and Paul Simon will be performed there. That’s a cool event, but hundreds of other once-in-a-lifetime things happen there every day; there are a million stories in the naked city, and here is one of them, written on the plaques three park benches:

Awww! So sweet! Here’s just one more perfect park moment:
Bubbles! Look how happy that kid is! Good times, I tell ya! Needless to say, I loved the park. Of course it can be very dangerous; I found that out the hard way. My NYC gal pal, E.D.B., plied me with sake and then took me for a midnight stroll through the park. It was dark and deserted. We wound our way deeper and deeper into the park, cuz E.D.B. is crazy like dat. She’s kind of gangsta from the hood. All of a sudden, from out of nowhere, an enormous RAT, big as a nutria, big as a Doberman-nutria, flashed his red, devil eyes at us and started chasing us across the bridge! You heard me, CHASING US! That rat had Big Apple balls, I tell you what! He wasn’t afraid of anything; in fact I think he was energized by my screams, which quickly changed from tough he-man warning cries to 7th grade watching Nightmare on Elm Street shrieks of terror. I could just imagine the saliva dripping off his yellow rat fangs; I never actually saw him, I mean not with my eyes, but I knew exactly where he was and what he was doing from the scritchy scratch of his knifelike rat claws and the way the ground shook with his heft. The monster rat kept coming, and, being no fool, I pivoted to run in the opposite direction, but alas, my touristy flip-flop got stuck in the gutter on the bridge and I fell flat on my face. E.D.B. must have been under the spell of the blazing, rabid, NosfeRATu eye, because all she could do was stand, unmoving, like a pillar; like a pointing, laughing, nay dare I say CACKLING pillar, her normally compassionate self convulsing in rat induced hilarity, head thrown back with a little tear trickling down her chin…it was horrible, I tell you, HORRIBLE. I still have the scar from the injury I suffered, a perfect commentary on the shock and pain of the situation. OUCH! Consider this a cautionary tale…