It was Saturday night. My week-end spirits soaring with ideas of grandeur and dreams of fluid, motion-blurred skating photography, I set out in the cold for the  Rockefeller Center and its giant-Christmas-tree-adorned skating rink. It would seem that I had not gotten the hint at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and was still ignorant of holiday crowd prognostics. I was about to learn my lesson.

 [sound of needle scratching old vinyl record]

No, this will not be a long lyric post. I traveled on a packed subway. Had trouble exiting the building’s bowels. The crowd was thick as molasses and piled up so far back from the overlook onto the rink that it took me the best of 10 minutes squeezing my way to a somehow vantage viewpoint.

Once on location, I attempted to unfold my tripod while people bumped into my back repeatedly. Bump. My tension rose. Push. The tripod jammed. Bump. I insisted. It broke. That was the end of that. It was a cheapo Slik. Not slick at all. That’ll teach me.

My dreams evaporated, I swore everything I had at the mob, took a few hand-held tourist snapshots and got the hell outa there.

Surprisingly, I’m quite fond of the skater shot, blurry and all. Go figure.