Friday from Four to Ten

Family post here. A break from the officiousness of music reviews and t-shirt hawking (keep the orders coming!)

Friday afternoon, we decided to take advantage of Free Friday Nights at the Museum of Modern Art. Even though I recently discovered that MoMA's admission prices for kids were quite reasonable (read: Under 16 = Free), the idea we could walk into the high-priced MoMA for free (Adults = $20, regularly, which is steep, by museum standards), was too sweet to pass up. And, as the week had gone by without any take-advantage-of-living-in-New-York-the-greatest-city-in-the-world moments, I really felt morally obligated to take advantage of the offer.

The plan was to hit MoMA for a couple hours, thenn let the girls bowl at Chelsea Piers, meeting up with Melanie after her adult gymnastics class for dessert.

The line was a bit long when they got to MoMA at 3:45, but it moved rather quickly.

Experiencing a museum with two strong-minded young ladies is quite the adventure. The kids really liked the architecture and design section. Jolee wanted this chair, designed by Charles Eames:

Shayna's favorite piece was created by Mona Hatoum:



It may not look like much, but:

This work is a large-scale re-creation of the kinetic sculpture Self-Erasing Drawing Hatoum made in 1979. Replacing conventional artists’ tools (pencil and paper, paint and canvas) with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand, Hatoum mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure. At a rate of five rotations per minute, the sculpture's hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.

Overall, it was enjoyable, but when I got to the floor which had the most notable works of art, the sand had run out of their art-appreciation hourglasses. For example:

"Daddy, I want to get out of here. It's too crowded."

"That's because the most famous art is here. Everyone wants to see it."

"So, let's leave."



"Look: Van Gogh's Starry Night."

"So."

"So, it's Starry Night."

"So, I've seen it before."

"Not in person."

And so it went. Note to self: next time we do MoMA, we're starting on the top floor.

From MoMA, we rendez-vous'ed met up with Melanie and we headed over to Chelsea Piers. The plan was to head over to the bowling alley and let the kids bowl and spend mindless amounts of money on arcade games so they could each get $2 worth of crappy toys for $20 worth of games.

Alas, the Alley was packed, and said plans were thwarted by a corporate party's monopolization of the lanes.

Disappointed (well, at least 2/3rds of us), we headed back to the Field House, where Jolee watched Melanie tumble her heart out, and Shayna watched a couple of indoor soccer games. I plodded toward the end of The Show I'll Never Forget.

When all was said and done, we headed out to a late dinner.

We stopped at a new restaurant called Burgers & Cupcakes, on West 23rd between 7th and 8th Avenues.

We had to wait a bit for a booth, but the delay was well worth it. The menu is simple, affordable and the food was delicious.

I ordered the chiptole chicken burger with pepper jack cheese and grilled mushrooms. Melanie had the vension burger with goat cheese crumbled over salad. Jolee and Shayna had turkey burgers.

Unfortunately for us, the kids were not so fond of their burgers. They are accustomed, through a failure in parenting, to pre-processed turkey burgers, as are commonly served in Brooklyn diners.

However, the "fresh cut-twice fried potatoes" were spectacular and the chocolate raspberry truffle cupcake was a delightful flourish to end the meal. The kids had basic chocolate cupcakes.

Check out the menu here.

Website: Burgers & Cupcakes.