My Fall Bucket List: The NYC Edition

This list is a mere slice of the fun I'll be having this fall.

1.  New York Comic Con! It's like prom for nerds, so it's only appropriate that I take my niece Fatso, a black STEM girl of epic proportions that looks like a sub-Saharan African supermodel.  (There's got to be a really funny joke in there somewhere.)  We go every year, just about. Together, we will meander our way through the Javits and take a lot of pictures.  As usual, my blackness will be my costume.
   
   
2. Diane Arbus: In The Beginning at The Met/Breuer  Her images are so iconic at this point that a lot of contemporary photography echoes her work -- when they're not flat out imitating it.  Here's my chance to see some of her earliest photographs. 
   
   And yes, I saw her mammoth retrospective at The Met some years ago.  For a long time afterwards -- too long, really -- I daydreamed about those children frozen in stiff black and white portraits with their blurry twisted faces, like a visual stammer that bounced against an audible one somewhere in the recesses of time and memory and randomness, and I wondered whatever happened to them, and that made me wonder what could have been.
   
   
3. Luke Cage, Birth of a Nation and Insecure. Enough said.
   
4. The Pumpkin Flotilla at the Central Park Conservancy Who knows? I might make one this year.
   
5. Seedless ThomCord grapes are better than candy. Wild caught salmon skin is better than bacon.
   
6.  Juice Press is turning me into a vegan.
   
   
7.  Steely Dan's Beacon Theater Residency in October -- they've got 10 dates, and most of them are themed (October 16th is Aja!)
   
8. Manhattan Vintage  This annual pilgrimage must be taken with BFFs who love vintage as much as I do, so we can all flip out over the cool stuff we find, whether we can afford it or not.  Lately, I'm a little giddier than usual because I ca fit into more and more of the incredibly dope old cool stuff in my closet.
   
9. Byron Lars Beauty Mark Tackles Size & Inclusion in Fashion  I didn't miss Byron Lars' runway show during Fashion Week in September (I took Fatso but she didn't like it) and I 'm not going to miss this, either -- it's a panel discussion that includes: Liz Black (Journalist-Refinery 29) Michaela Angela Davis (Cultural Critic-CNN & Creator MADFree), Byron Lars (Byron Lars Beauty Mark), Allison McGevna (Editorial Director - Hello Beautiful) and Lynne Ronin (CEO-Nation Design).
   
   
10. ETHEL (and friends) at The Met It'll be nice to lose myself in their take on classical music with MPB -- and since Fatso plays the cello, I'll probably take her, too.