bucaneer grandma

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Drove into Queens to have lunch with grandma at the Buckaneer Diner (where my parents used to go for icecream after a high school date.) My father, true to form, ordered an extra-thick chocolate milkshake. Grandma picked apart her turkey burger while telling her trademark stream-of-consciousness stories that meandered from eating fish (with the head!) in Portugal, to trying on a kimono in Japan, to noticing the lack of cats and dogs in China, the dress of foul-mouthed junior high school kids down the block, the lack of Starbucks in Queens, grandpa's full head of hear, Uncle Sammy, Long Island Christmas light decorations, and the apartment she's lived in for 297 years straight, from back when it was first built and had mud sidewalks and a hand-cranked water well and they raised chickens on the roof and walked 12 miles up hill in the snow to get to school after working all night in the shoe factory...
After lunch we went to MOMA's temporary location in Queens, a converted wharehouse. Total and complete letdown. Twelve bucks got us into far too much crappy modern art by Kiki Smith, and all of three reasonable interesting paintings from the permanent collection. Very very lame, including the musuem store which featured books and postcards and other crap available at amazon.com. The new design for the museum looks cool, so I think we'll wait until next year before we bother with MOMA again. Verdict: skip Queens and head for The Met.