We’ve Got the Oranges by Oswegatchie

You can buy it on ebay for ten bucks: a swatch of fabric from The
Gates by Christo. They’re handing them out in Central Park, the people
in the gray suits with tennis balls on poles, the docents, or whatever
they call them.

It was "a good day for viewing," as they say.
Forty degrees, sunny, snow setting off the brillant
orange/tangerine/saffron/traffic cone color. The swatch doesn’t do it
justice, of course.

If I had been alone, or with my husband, we
might have made a day of it and kept walking. Gates draw you on, you
don’t want to step off course or abort the journey. Coming to a fork,
there’s a desire to go on both paths and not miss a single Gate. But we
were with R & A, and by the third time they asked if we were nearly
at the Natural History Museum, I knew we would see only ten blocks or
so of the whole.

I wish I could stop thinking of Bill Gates when I write this.

Like
you, I’ve gotten a lot of email from friends with their photos and
their comments. "It leaves me cold." "It’s beautiful, you have to see
it!" "Stunning." "There’s not much to it." "I wish they’d picked a deep
red."

I wished the color were a bit more yellow, but with the
sun behind the drapes, firing them up, it is one of the happiest
colors. But the festive atmosphere is the key to a public art project,
and I did feel it with this one. Everyone becomes a little more
present. Usually it takes a public emergency to do this for a city; how
much healthier when it is art. People look into each other’s faces and
smile at the shared experience, attention focuses on a thing, these
things