Famous Ankles

Late yesterday I got a tip that there was something special going on. A friend from work called to let me know that the Jonas Brothers were going to be doing a concert in Bryant Park early Friday morning for Good Morning America.

Not news to me. I had already attended and blogged on the Chaka Khan show. I had heard that the Jonas Brothers were going to play.

The news was that the attendance was going to be overwhelming. I found out from my tipster that people were so eager to get in that they were camping around the park overnight.

Wow.

So just after 6am on Friday, I found myself wandering near Bryant Park to see this sort of thing. I say “near” because getting in would have entailed a long, long line with some very excited youngsters and their more tired parents.

The police had completely cordoned off the park area. I did manage to get within visual range of the stage (that’s it in the background in the above picture), but I couldn’t have stopped there as the fenced area I was in was strictly for walking through.

And there were cops everywhere stopping people from jumping the barricades. I don’t know how many times I heard a cop say, ever so politely, “EXCUSE ME!!!!! THIS IS NOT AN ENTRY AREA!!!!” All of the talking cops were graduates of the Big Booming Authoritative Voice University of Life. It got the line jumpers attention and acquiescence.

I did find the area that there were lots and lots of overnight sleepers.

I kept trying to get a shot that showed the people. Man, there were a lot of them. The next picture is about the best I got. Well, it is the best I got.

What I should have gotten was one visual that I saw when crossing the street. There was one mystified, slightly terrified, somewhat excited woman coming by and she was very tightly clutching the hands of two extremely excited and joyous young girls. It seemed to capture the moment.

Instead, I kept walking. I did an entire circuit of the park and the next photo is about as close as I could get to the stage.

As a bonus, I was getting ready to leave the area when I saw this bus pull up with a two car police escort. The windows, the few it had, were pretty opaque. However, as I was going, one girl in the company of some others seemed to spot someone in the back of the bus and just started squealing with joy and jumping with excitement. It coulda been them, but I really don’t know.

I only hope that the fans got their wish and had a great set with the Jonas Brothers. I’m not in their demographic so I really don’t know anything about them, but it seems like harmless fun for the kids and their parents and it may even be good music.

-H

This entry was posted on August 8, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Events, Manhattan, Mid-town, Wanderings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.