this is what, this is why

I head downtown on a sunny Sunday afternoon, park on the street for free, and take in a matinee performance of a High Performance Rodeo presentation that has been getting rave reviews.  I am mesmerized by the performance and afterward I chat to others to get their impressions of the show, mining them for quotations. I still find it hard to believe that I do this for a living.

I step outside of the theatre while there are still a few hours of sunshine left in the day.  Families are skating at Olympic Plaza, couples are strolling Stephen Avenue, nobody is in a hurry.  Neither am I, and I realize that I am right across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, which happens to be open, has free admission, and is in the final week of showing its Andy Warhol: The Athlete Series collection. 

The MOCA is a tiny gallery, a long L-shaped space behind a floor to ceiling wall of glass at one end of the Municipal Building.  There are over a dozen people inside, contemplating pop art.  One woman is explaining the retrospective to her young children.  I move from picture to picture, thinking about pop art, about the impact that Warhol had upon our ideas of what constitutes art.  

I marvel at how lucky I am to be able to do something like this on a Sunday afternoon in January.

This is why I live in a city.  This is what matters.