Simon and I went on together up from Midtown, through Grand Central Station, Central Park, and finally into the Metropolitan museum of art(the Met).  One of the coolest things about the met is the outdoor sculpture garden.  It is on a balcony where you can see nearly the entire skyline and most of central park.  It has these massive replicas of ordianary items as sculpture, as you can see......
	After we'd had our fill of art, we went down to the great lawn in Central Park and talked about politics, history, religion, social policy, and the like.  We felt a pleasant torpor come over us as we drank cold beer and watched people play baseball and fly kites in the warm summer sun.  Simon was excellent company, with a good knowledge of history, quiet humor, and intelligent observations.  It was with reluctance and difficulty that I picked myself up off the grass and went to meet my SERVAS host, Eric Kuzmuk.  As it turned out, the reluctance was unfounded.  To my relief, I found that Eric also was excellent company, with the wisdom and anecdotes of a life lived to the hilt.  He had moved to NY slightly before my birth, dabbled in a few things before settliing on Real Estate, and had a story for most of the buildings we went by.....But I'm getting ahead of myself......
		I met my Eric at the Chicago City Limits theatre, as one of our mutual interests is theatre.  As we took our seats at the front of the small, empty theatre, we started to fear that we would be the improv troupeīs only audience involvement.  Fortunately, in bounded a groug of about 40 middle school kids.  They were all energy, noise, and racous laughter.  They definitely added a fun element to the show.  After the show, we first went to a local bar and had a drink.  We then went to a piano bar near Broadway where we encountered severat theartrical types.  It was apparant that several of the perfomrers were actors that hadnīt made it yet, and probably never would, but couldn't bring themselves to give up the dream.  They played as though they needed it, as though they were spiking their veins with a timbre that ran straight to their heart.  They played with a passion that gave their unpolished performances a power that my words can only shadow.  It was during one of their songs, Elton Johnīs "your song", that I slipped into a moment...This is not the appropriate venue for going into it, but suffice it to say that New York is the kind of place where you can have several life altering moments in one night and still have time to go the corner diner for a midnight snack.  Once we had enough of that, Eric brought me to the oldest drinking establisment in NY, McSurley's