How to live through your lawsuit

As much gaiety as you, too, might experience with your lawsuit, it’s a healthy distraction to take a break and enter fully into hours or just spare moments of odd pleasure.

You can plan the pleasure — a walking along the river, a concert, an art gallery, a session of yoga stretching. Watching a TV rerun of Bullitt and noticing, maybe for the first time, that a dear friend, Albert Brenner, was its brilliant art director.

Or you can turn a usual corner and run into something unusual.

Just now, as I returned home from buying my newspapers at the local shop-around-the-block, I heard a drum beat and fife-like flutings down at the end of Waverly Place, so I wandered off course to see what was going on.

Morris Dancing was going on, right on the street, where Waverly ends at 11th. The dancers were all male, fully costumed in black, white and red, with bells wrapped around their shins, and leaping high. The dancing was more elaborate and energetic than I imagined Morris Dancing would be.

The drum was played by a woman and I think there was an ocarina sort of instrument, as well as the flute-like thing. The air in the West Village is at this moment perfumed with ailanthus.

I watched for a while and applauded and smiled a lot. And not for a second did I think about lawsuits.

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