On Sundays a friend and I often have breakfast at Caffe Reggio. Afterwards she goes dancing. This is at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Who isn’t curious about dancing at 10 a.m. So I joined her. We went to a building across the street from the Jefferson Market Library. Yoga was on the second floor. We attended 5Rhythms Sweat Your Prayers on the fifth floor. After paying $20 each we entered a floor through room with windows overlooking Sixth Avenue. I’m guessing there were about 250 people, a cultural mix ranging in age from 20 to 80. Everyone did his, her, them thing. Rules: bare feet or ballet slippers, no talking. Armed with a towel and a water bottle parked on a window ledge, I joined in. The recorded music gets faster and the dancing is livelier until it reaches a crescendo. It then slows down and repeats itself. People swooped, jumped, ran, around the room. I lasted an hour and a half. It was fun and it was exercise.
Later in the week we met at Guitanos on Christopher for a drink and a few laughs. It’s cosy and dark. In a few months It’s moving way down the block to Charleston Street. I hope it maintains its atmosphere. The music is mid-twentieth century big band, Satchmo, Sinatra. The food is Italian American and is tasty in a down home way.
Graphic Lessons: What do a thirty-four-year old, a nine-year-old and an eighteen-year-old have in common? Murder.
Millie Fitzgerald applies for a Windsor School teaching job, faints on a dying man in the school kitchen, deals with a troubled nine-year-old and with the eighteen-year-old niece of the murdered man.
Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who accuses her of lying? Her father who’s fled to Singapore? She tells Millie.
Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned the murder case at the prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner was stabbed. He feels remorse over screwing up an important case. His corrupt boss is a trustee of the Windsor School. His girlfriend married his boss. And his daughter quit college.