Bookmark of the Week: No. 4

When in New York a few years back, we popped into the Coliseum Bookstore after exploring the nearby New York Public Library, and I picked up this very large bookmark. The scanned image above is but a section. Although we could fit the bookmark in our bag, we couldn't fit the international literary evening into our schedule. We had missed it. It took place on Monday, March 22nd, 2004, at 7 p.m. at the Alliance Francaise, Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, (tickets were $10, free for students), the same evening our train, behind schedule, sallied into Penn Station with many a tired and rumply passenger. To listen to and see Walter Mosley, Alfre Woodard, Salman Rushdie and Chris Albani would have been a delight for us. Now, it is but a remnant memory of what might have been attached to this very large bookmarker.

However, there is another memory attached to this bookmark. One evening as we walked towards Lincoln Centre, we made way for a group of people coming our way on the sidewalk, and I looked up to see a very attractive woman with beautiful eyes and visage, and we shared eye contact as we passed. The beautiful woman was Alfre Woodard. It remains one of those special memories of New York. It was only later that I saw she was starring in Drowning Crow, a play by Regina Taylor which ran at the Biltmore Theatre from February to April of that year.

Salman Rushdie had recently been elected to the position of President of the PEN American Center, March 9, 2004, and over the years he has brought much to the table. Check out the PEN American Center and their audio archive.