Even Better Than Getting on a Popular TV Show

I got my fifteen minutes of fame over these past two weeks.  (Hey! I referenced Warhol in the last post too.)  Well, I had to share the minutes with lots of others on the TV show, Royal Pains - where I was sort of conscripted into being an extra in two scenes.

Our first scene, in a hospital, was shot not in the Hamptons, (false Gasp! added here), but in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, just about the furthest point from the Hamptons while still standing on Long Island.  

But the cool thing was not being on TV; it happened when I took to wandering off when we had some down time and saw something I never thought I would. 

It was the edge of evening, and as I walked a block over to an unobstructed view of Manhattan, the Empire State Building jumped out, majestically, subtly lit.  Now that building is my Mt. Fuji of the famous 100 views of Mt. Fuji - over the years I have been running across new viewing angles and lightings.  It seems to me like 100 different skyscrapers, not one.

The thing about it is, I still have one watercolor from when I grew up on the North Fork (the quieter fork above the Hamptons).   It's a watercolor of the city which I had then visited only once.  Featured in it is the Empire State building.  But the scene always bothered me these many years.  I painted it with short buildings and a gas station in the foreground.  A view that had the re-juxtapositioning of a dream - a small town contiguous with the city.  Not real. 

Now, many years later, I was staring at my watercolor come to life. I painted it in third grade; and as an adult, it was a rare itch in the back of my mind.  Now I can let it rest.