But the red shoes dance on

Yesterday worked. Having made the decision to go for our crazy day-trip at nine in the morning, Eric picked me up about an hour later and we made it to New York City with forty-five minutes to spare, successfully surmounting an unexpected detour for automotive repair in Connecticut—the heat shield came most of the way off the exhaust pipe on Eric's Civic at just about the one-hour mark; the mechanic at the Midas in Vernon fixed it for free and told us not to miss our movie—a complete traffic jam while waiting to get on the George Washington Bridge, and the fact that I had slept barely three hours the previous night. (I dozed through most of the rest of Connecticut, in the kind of weird shallow sleep where your dreams are more like hallucinations of things heard and seen through your closed eyes. The bit of rubber that flew off the truck in front of us and bounced off our windshield turned out to be real.) We had first complete parking fail and then a stroke of parking luck, in front of an old record store on Carmine Street; and at 3:45 PM, in a very nicely crowded theater at the Film Forum, we saw the restored print of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) for Eric's first time and my first on a big screen. It was gorgeous. ( Well, I don't know exactly why, but I must. )

Afterward we walked to Rivington Street for dinner at 'inoteca, which included pumpkin-and-thyme supplì and a ridiculously delicious salad of calamari with apple and celery root, and we drove back under what turned out to be the last of the Leonid shower, which I mistook for my own tiredness making stars glitter and blur. Even if this print comes to Boston, which I am hoping it does, I will not be sorry we drove to New York for it. I needed a day like this. It was definitely a good thing.