Waking up this morning was really tough. I guess st aying up until 5AM will do that to ya. I'm able to peel myself out of bed in time to meet my account reps at Hitwise, a competitive research firm that we've been using.
I met Loren & Keith at our place of choice, The Spotted Pig, a gastropub in the West Village. The last time I was there (also with Keith because The Spotted Pig has basically become his living room), I saw P. Diddy. This time, I was sitting in what was known as Bill Clinton's booth...need I say more. Anyway, the real reason I love this place is the gnudi. It's totally heart-stopping and if you ate it more than like once a year, you'd probably keel over dead from eating that alone. The last time I saw Loren was at the Internet Retailer show in Chicago a few months ago where she met me carrying a giant bag and smelling strangely of garlic. Why, you ask? Because she had brought a dozen everything bagels from NYC to help me out of my I miss Manhattan doldrums. What a sweetie!
Fortified by gnudi and the best chocolate torte in the world, it was off to The Met to meet my fellow book club members for a day of Greek art and literature. The Reading Odyssey was started by my good friend Phil Terry, CEO of the customer experience firm Creative Good and his best friend Pat Wictor, a blues slide guitarist. Last year, they decided to celebrate 20 years of knowing each other with a commitment to read the classics together and in typical Phil-style, they opened it up for others to join.
We were meeting at The Met to do a literary tour of the Ancient Near East and bring to life the first three books we'd read over the last year--Herodotus's The Histories, Homer's Odyssey, and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. The first part of our day we went through galleries and a packet that Phil had put together as an informal guide. We touched on Assyria, the Trojan War, Babylon, the Persian Empire, the Scythians and King Croesus of Lydia.
At this point, our dogs were pretty tired, so we went to the members-only area upstairs for cocktails and met up with Horton A. Johnson, MD, our private tour guide for the next part of our Greek adventure. I have met few people as passionate as he was about Ancient Greece, so it was a treat to have him show us everything from Cycladic art to Roman copies of Greek statues. Horton is so into Ancient Greece that a few years ago he published an article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine about the foot ailment suffered by the hero Philoctetes during the Trojan War (depicted in a lekythos or small oil vase from the 5th century BCE at The Met).
Horton kept trying to show us just one more thing, and who were we to argue? But finally our tour was at an end and we went up to the Trustee Dining area to have dinner. We had a private room for the 7 of us--6 book club members plus Robert Strassler, the editor of the Landmark Edition of Thucydides we were reading. It was so awesome to have him with us at dinner. It is so rare to be able to spend hours with an expert like him. We were able to ask whatever we wanted--from the differences between Herodotus and Thucydides to what lessons we can learn today from Ancient Literature.
We actually closed down The Met. Closing down bars is nothing new for me (don't mind me, mum), but closing down The Metropolitan Museum of Art? We left at 10 after 11pm and the guard had to escort me and Phil out. It was an amazing experience to walk through the museum after-hours, completely by ourselves. The only noise was our shoes clicking on the marble floor. I kept trying to walk extra slow so I could look at the priceless art in the near-dark (all of the overhead lights had already been turned off) but unfortunately Phil walks faster than I do and he apparently didn't get my hint. :)
8 hours at The Met--a record for me! It felt good to exercise my mind--I probably needed it after having killed several hundred thousand brain cells from the partying I'd done the night before. lol
