A Day in Central Park

One day in August I went to Central Park with 2 objectives. The first, which I failed to accomplish, was to ride the AeroBalloon at Cherry Hill. The basketed helium-filled balloon was there to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Greensward, the original plan for Central Park, by offering riders the opportunity to view the grounds from 300 feet in the air. I wanted to ride in it because how often do you get the chance to fly in a balloon and get an aerial view of Central Park?
The balloon was available for rides from 7AM to 10PM, and when I arrived there sometime past 10AM, I figured I'd have enough time to fly up, eat lunch, and then go on to do the second thing on my agenda. When I got in line there were maybe around 40 people ahead of me. That didn't seem too bad since the rides were supposed to last 10 minutes, and up to 4 people could ride at a time. After a few minutes of waiting, however, one of the AeroBalloon workers came to the end of the line to give an unconvincing speech—for people who must have said it so many times, couldn't they have at least figured out how to sound more believable and undeniably not joking? Maybe spouting off by rote, they just came across as really bad actors—about how the people waiting at the rear would have to wait 8 hours or more to get on the balloon. The guy said that he knew that we were optimistic, but that we could be doing better things with our life. Being in the spot where we were, we might not even be able to get on because they would probably have to halt rides later in the day if the wind was too strong. The wind had already affected the speed of the line; instead of 4, only 2 people were let on to ride at a time due to it.

View of the Lake from Cherry Hill

Despite the attempts to convince us there was no hope of getting on that day, people still stuck around for a while. We were told that if we wanted to try another day, it was best to come before they opened at 7AM. The only problem was that was the last weekend the balloon would be there, and the final day was that upcoming Friday. After a few hours of waiting and considering whether I could try to get there earlier on another day, which I could but didn't exactly feel like doing (:P), I finally decided to give up since I was anxious to get ready for the other thing on my itinerary for the day—to see the SummerStage concert happening that afternoon.

I'd never gone to see a SummerStage performance before. Most of the events are free to attend, and there are a few benefit concerts. There were 3 concerts that season that I considered. The one with Santogold I couldn't have gone to since I had tickets to see The Dark Knight in IMAX that afternoon. When I think about it now, I could have resold them for a crazy amount like some people did since they were hard to come by at that time. :P It's too bad I missed the concert with Janelle Monáe. She's one of my new favorite music artists, but I was a bit busy around that time and would have been too tired if I had went. I even thought of getting a ticket to see her open for Raphael Saadiq but later shot the idea down. At least I was able to see some clips online of her performance at SummerStage. Here's one of her doing the moonwalk and performing one of my favorite songs of hers, "Sincerely, Jane.:"

Love it!

The SummerStage concert that I went to was the final one for that year. When I got into Rumsey Playfield for the concert there were still a lot of empty spots in front of the stage, but with the sun blaring and having neglected to bring something to sit on, I settled for sitting on the bleachers all the way in the back. Later on during the show, before the final act came on, I shimmied my way through the crowd to get a better view.

All the acts that performed that day were Daptone Records recording artists, starting with Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens, then Menahan Street Band, and finally Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. I was only familiar with the latter, and that was the reason I went to see the show. It was great to see them live; Sharon Jones was especially terrific.

Below is a selection of photos I took during the concert:

Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens:
Menahan Street Band:
The Dap-Kings:
Sharon Jones:
Ms. Jones dancing with a man pulled onstage from the audience:

Dancing with another member of the audience.
If I remember correctly, his name was Rick:


The rest of the photos I took can be seen on my Flickr.