We went to a new restaurant in midtown, Oscar Wilde. I wonder what Wilde would have thought about this vast, dark series of bars and small rooms packed with Victorian props. We were escorted to a small room where dinner was served. It’s typical bar food: fried calamari, lamb sliders. Salty enough to keep you drinking. The service -surprise, surprise- was excellent.

A friend and I got to Guggenheim’s Mystical Symbolism the day before it closed. The museum was installing a huge Chinese exhibit. Much of it was off limits including the ramps. After a two minute sulk about not being able to wander up to the top floor and then wander down, we used the oddly (but artistic!) elevators. Mystical Symbolism is deep, dark, religious. Rosicrucian symbols abounded.

Juilliard gave a splendid concert, The Genius of Monteverdi. William Christie conducted the young, talented cast in a mostly Monteverdi evening. The packed audience in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater seemed mesmerized by the event’s gravitas. In these troubled times it’s restorative to spend an evening savoring a superb musical event.

Graphic Lessons: Recent thirty-five-year-old widow Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a stabbed and dying man in the school kitchen, deals with the only witness to the stabbing – a troubled nine-year-old, develops a crush on a NYPD detective and her dog dies.

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears three people fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie.

Graphic Lessons: Something’s eating at NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek: a failed marriage? surviving a car bomb? his girlfriend marrying his corrupt boss? screwing up an important case? It doesn’t matter because he’s relentless.