Tuesday night the New York Philharmonic Orchestra gave a free concert in Central Park.  In the morning we laid down a sheet and when we came back in the evening we had a front-row seat to the whole thing.

The past couple of years, this concert’s initial schedule date has been rained out and they’ve had to re-schedule it.  This time around, despite a weather report that predicted “scattered thundershowers” - there was no problem.  The weather was great.

The evening’s program was:

Shostakovich: Festive Overture
Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4, Italian
Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture
Sousa: Washington Post March
Sousa: Liberty Bell March
Sousa: The Stars and Stripes Forever

Just a note about Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March” - it’s also been used (and may be more commonly known) as the theme music to Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

In that spirit, this year the NY Philharmonic did something that was “completely different” than past years.  They allowed the audience to make a choice as to what the orchestra would play for an encore.  The conductor, Bramwell Tovey (who had everyone laughing with his humorous remarks between pieces), gave us directions as to how to vote using text messaging and the two choices were between “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov or “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix.

The votes were counted by the end of the intermission and according to the director more than 60,000 votes were cast.  The votes were “overwhelmingly” in favor of “Purple Haze.”  It was awesome.

The experience was even better because of a couple of good friends who were with us.  I won’t divulge any names but will simply say that it was a couple I’ve known since my 1993 BYU Jerusalem study abroad experience.

Today we were on the Upper West Side, walking towards an entrance to Central Park, when we saw a mother duck and ten ducklings crossing Malcolm X Boulevard. Pedestrians were helping to escort them across, making sure that traffic stopped on both sides until this duck family had crossed the street. When she got to the other side, the mother duck was able to hop up onto the curb but the ducklings were too small and simply congregated there, straining to get up on the sidewalk … until a couple of people finally bent down, cupped their hands and gently helped them up one by one.

Once they got into Central Park, the mother duck and her ducklings followed a fence until they found a place to sneak through … at which point they all got into the water and were quite contentedly swimming around.

We’ve never seen this sort of thing before in Manhattan and may not see it again. It was awesome. The only sad thing was we didn’t have our camera to take pictures.

Last week while walking around Queens, we saw some graffiti artists at work. This particular wall was previously covered with random graffiti and the owner agreed these artists could re-paint this surface with something a little more organized and cohesive in appearance. They had been at work for six hours (since 8am) and at least one of them did not mind having pictures taken while he was at work - not that he is recognizable in any of the photos.

Ha-Aretz (which I sort of view as the Israeli version of the New York Times) has a glowing article today about Mohammad Shamsi Ali.  He is the deputy imam for the Islamic Cultural Center (or ICC) located on 96th Street in the Upper East Side - a couple of blocks away from where we live.  I took a picture of the mosque dome some time ago.  Maybe it’s time to drop by there for another visit.