Singin' in the Rain

Grace, McCarran Park, Greenpoint, 2003

This is one of my favorite pictures of my daughter.

It was the spring of 2003. She was finishing up her senior year at William & Mary. I’d been up in Boston on business. She came up from Virginia and we met in New York for the weekend to look for an apartment for her.

She arrived on the train early enough for us to have dinner and catch a play. ("The Play What I Wrote,” a hilarious farce of a British import that was one of the goofiest and funniest nights of theater I’ve ever seen.)

It was drizzling the next morning when we set out for Brooklyn. The drizzle turned to rain as we wandered all over the Greenpoint neighborhood. Afterwards, we decided to walk over to the trendier Williamsburg area to see if there was anything affordable there.

This picture was taken as we walked past McCarran Park. The rain had turned to a downpour. Our feet were soaked and our little umbrellas were barely keeping our heads dry. All we could do was laugh.

Coincidentally, my wife and I were back in New York a month later on the same night the Tony Awards were being held. Out taking pictures after dinner, I found Hamish McColl and Sean Foley, the stars of ‘The Play What I Wrote,” walking down Sixth Avenue dressed in tuxedos. I’d enjoyed their performance so much that I stopped them to thank them. They were gracious, but quickly moved on. I didn’t know until I read it in the paper the next morning that their failure to win a Tony had sealed the fate of their New York show. It closed within days.