Wednesday Afternoon near Stuyvesant Town: Demonstration Against School Budget Cuts on East 16th Street and First Avenue

We were on our way to a meeting, crossing First Avenue from Stuyvesant Town at East 16th Street heading toward Stuyvesant Square around 3 p.m. yesterday when we spotted this demonstration against the New York City schools budget cuts outside the corner convenience store.

There was a bullhorn and chants like "Books, not bombs!" The old Stuyvesant High School, which now houses Health Professions and Human Services High School and the Institute for Collaborative Education, is down the block.

Handmade signs read "Bloomberg Thinks Education is a Business," "Don't Make Schools Like MLK" (?), "Protest Budget Cuts" and "Steal From Banks, Not Schools."

We don't know who sponsored this demonstration, but we do know ones like it are going around all over the U.S. as schools face drastic budget cuts.

Wednesday Morning in Gramercy Park: Breakfast at Stuyvesant Square

It was gloomy this morning when we got off the L train on our two-stop trip from Williamsburg, and kind of chilly still, but at least it had stopped raining on this last day of the rainiest recorded March in New York City weather history.

We got an iced tea and oatmeal at the Starbucks that's part of Stuyvesant Town on First Avenue and on our way to teach Twelfth Night to our students at the fabulous School of Visual Arts - which, incredibly, we were doing this semester exactly thirty years ago, during the Carter administration and Iran hostage crisis -

we stopped off to sit and have breakfast on the east side of Stuyvesant Square.

It was pretty deserted and quiet at this early hour. We put our blue plastic New York Times wrapper down on the bench and sat down and looked around, hopefully, for signs that spring is coming.

Antonin Dvorak was noncommital.

All the rain should make things green. This tree, by Beth Israel hospital, offered some welcome greenery.

And the flowers looked good to our winter-hating eyes.

We could go over to St. George's Church to pray for better weather, we guess.

But we had to go to work and explore Illyria, trying to do as good a job as Mr. Neil Berger did with Shakespeare when we were in 8SPE2 at J.H.S. 285 in East Flatbush back in the spring of the 1964 World's Fair or as Mr. Joseph Grebanier did four years later in Midwood High School in our honors class in that tumultuous spring of 1968. Fat chance, but we'll strive to please every day.