You Look Sorta Famous

We had an excellent trip to the city on Tuesday . . . we found some stuff in the Met that I've never seen before (mainly in the aboriginal art exhibits-- big scary head-dresses and ritual boats) but if you bring your kids to climb inside Tomas Saraceno's interactive sci-fi fun house sculpture "Cloud City," which is installed on the roof, then be forewarned-- to participate, kids have to be ten years old and 48 inches tall-- and though my kids gamely lied about their age, my son Ian (who just turned seven and is definitely forty-eight inches, on the nose) was just shy of the counter-top, which the museum staff claimed was forty-eight inches tall . . . but they were definitely skeptical about his age; I find this ridiculous, that a kid who has gone on every roller-coaster at Knoebels and conquered Disney's The Tower of Terror without a whimper wasn't allowed to wander around in a mirrored steel sculpture, but-- on the other hand-- there were a lot of old people inside "Cloud City," murmuring things like "it's disorienting, but not terribly organic, like the city itself," and so maybe it isn't the place for my children, who got into a dust up on the rooftop pavilion over an apple . . . anyway, from the Met we hiked down to the Central Park Zoo, which was quite impressive for a small zoo-- especially the sea lion show-- and then, as we trekked diagonally across the park, on our way to Columbus Circle, stopping at playgrounds as we went, we had a celebrity sighting . . . but it took a while to identify the celebrity . . . at first I thought it was Ellen Barkin, but my wife disagreed, and then I remembered it was the woman from the David Lynch movies who also had a small role in Jurassic Park III and a famous dad, but it took another fifteen minutes to remember her name: Laura Dern!