On the train well after midnight

Wow, has this been a weird day. I went to work, which somehow included watching an entire episode of The Donna Reed Show, and then left early to go to New York.

What's going on New York, you might say? Family business of a sort. First off, today was the dedication of the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center. Yep, a new theater perched on top of the Vivian Beaumont/Mitzi Newhouse Theaters. Named after my mother. My father has been on the board of directors of Lincoln Center Theater for a while and managed to help make something that had been something of a dream for the artistic director for 20 years finally happen. Absolutely gorgeous theater with  a great rooftop feel from a deck outside. Lots of speeches by Lincoln Center types and performers.

It's a small theater (130 seats) designed to be a place to showcase new talent at affordable prices. I had been following its progress for months but had no idea what it gem it would turn out to be.

Then to the New York TImes building where my father was given an award by the City University Graduate School of Journalism for service to the city of New York. The award was introduced by Mayor Bloomberg and a few other people, and there were other awards as well, but first I got to hear my father described as "one of the unsung heroes of philanthropy in New York" and see a 10 minute film about his support for the school and other causes. Then saw my father, who'll be 84 in a couple of weeks walk up to the dais and give a 15 minute speech without notes about his support for freedom of the press and desire to help the transition to new technologies. Pretty heady stuff.

Then, because this is the way my life's been going, I walked down to Penn Station of see that my 10 PM train is, get this, an hour and 45 minutes late.  In fact, it was so late that I took the train that was scheduled to leave over an hour later instead. In the meantime I was miserable because most of Penn Station isn't air conditioned, and the one cool part has no seats. This was a problem because I was wearing grown-up shoes for the first time in a while and my feet hurt. I had a suit on too but that didn't stop me from sitting on the floor. I was waiting for the moment when the answer to "Could this get any suckier?" was finally "no."

Finally got on the 11:15 train and made it home a little after 1. Glad I went. Glad it's over.