sarah in nyc

Our friends invited us to join them last night for  this book talk  at Temple Emanuel. The talk was between Yaakov Katz  former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post and Bret Stephens. The book is about Israel's failures to anticipate the awful events of October 7. When we got to the synagogue, the entire block was cordoned off with not only police barriers but also with large granite blocks around the synagogue . Police were stationed at each corner asking people to show their tickets to the lecture. After getting through the police barriers we had to go through a security checkpoint to get in. There were a fair number of New York City police inside. The audience as most free lectures in New York tended to be older. The lecture hall was ringed by synagoge security officers and New York City police.  At first I thought this was overkill. Soon after the conversation between the two journalists began, a masked audience member began shouting. he wasn't trying to engage...

 The other day we took a bus from the Port Authority Bus Station. When I was in college I traveled through the fetid halls of the Port Authority Bus Station often.  The bus station has been going through a series of improvements over the past several years. Before we boarded our bus I realized that I needed to use the bathroom. I assumed that it would be the same exercise of nose holding that it was in the past. I was shocked. The bathroom was spotless.  If I ever told my mother that  I was going anywhere in Manhattan, she would let me know where the nice nearby bathrooms were. I thought that she should publish a guide to all of the best publicly available bathrooms in Manhattan. Someone else published that book. If she were updating me about excellent bathrooms in midtown -west she would have suggested using the Port Authority bathrooms. This George Segal sculpture has been near the local bus ticketing windows for the last many years. I never pass this sculpture whe...

 First, a bit of housekeeping: A note about comments. I love comments from readers. They make me think about what I have written and frankly, I love the conversation. I do not love comments that are designed to drive eyeballs to other sites. So,the comments from the bug extermination sites in Dubai, or the porn sites get tossed. Those are simply mildly annoying.  HOWEVER, posts from commercial tallit manufacturers accompanied by text saying things like,"For all your tallit needs visit my tallit site". Blech! that just feels awful. last night I sent an irate email to such a site. I did get an apology today but --blecch. Today is my father's seventeenth Yahrzeit.     Because I have just put two projects to bed I can now get to what some of my sewing friends call the "Tuit list", that is, the things that you put off until you get to it. I love high end men's dress shirts. the cotton is just delicious. When my daughter was in high school I turned some beautiful ...

 Yesterday, the tallit that I was mending got picked up. All of the bits that get touched in normal wear  just got worn out. I backed the edges near the atara with silk chiffon and just stitched and stitched away with silk thread. One sees this kind of work on really old garments from the early 20th century. The fabric was just too fragile to stitch by machine. hopefully I have strengthened the material enough so the tallit can be cleaned and then worn  for the big family event coming up in a couple of weeks. Yesterday  we went on a little adventure to  Little Island . It is an island constructed on a series of plant like cement pods on stems planted into the Hudson River. from outside of the island it looks like a completely artificial man made folly. While on the island it feels like a series of sloping bits of wildlife. It's both very beautiful and really silly. There is an amphitheater space within Little island and some dancers were rehearsing. While we wat...

 My 1930s sewing books will often talk about wash dresses, that is, dresses that are easy to launder and iron up without too much fuss. A garment that can be ironed flat without worrying about pesky ruffles or pleats is to be praised. recently, I made two skirts that one might think of as wash skirts. A friend just gave me a treasure stove of fabric that had belonged to a seamstress. in the huge plastic bins there are some uncut lengths of both home dec and garment making fabrics as well as a few offcuts left over from sewing project.  One of these gems was a strip of fabric that was about 20 inches wide and just under two yards long and made out a a lovely dark indigo blue cotton. I thought it would make a good wrap skirt. The fabric wrapped one and a half times around my hips. I added a few darts along the top edge.(Those are the triangles at the top of the drawing above.) I placed the darts where I thought would be on either side of the CF and CB.I added two ties made out o...