You know, I could shave my head right now if I wanted to. I'm that free.

I walked over to the library yesterday and finally caught the farmer's market at Grand Army Plaza. I didn't see any celery, which I needed, but bought shallots, a zucchini, an eggplant, and two green peppers. On the way back through the park, I saw a woman carrying a big iguana on her hip like a toddler, yelling, "It's my baby," to anyone who made eye contact with her. She switched to raising and lowering it over her head like a barbell, then tried to put it on the branch of a tree, but it was too heavy. Let's not worry about what she gets out of showering her love on a lizard. What I wonder is what in the iguana's DNA enables it to make any kind of sense out of being carried around by a . . . primate. Yet I also laugh, because I'm reminded of Bert Parks singing, "There She is, Miss Komodo Dragon" in the movie "The Freshman".

This morning, I went up to Seinfeld country to see "Moliere" (the script's a mess, but Romain Duris is bitchin') and sought Ollie's Noodle Shop for lunch afterward. There's a cute provenance to how I came to eat there at the first time, with my cousin Patty. We'd gone to see the new wing of MOMA and such good travel companions are we that neither of us actually wanted to go inside, we just wanted to see what you can see for free. We did each buy a print from a sidewalk display, and surprisingly, Patty knew a lot about printmaking and was able to talk to the artist about his process. (And I say surprising not because it's uncharacteristic of Patty to know things, but because I presume that if I don't know something, it must be unknowable.) I think I was the one who wanted to see Lincoln Center and by then, we were really hungry. I had the name of a restaurant on Amsterdam, but Patty--again with the knowing of things!--had a New York address decoder that told her we were 30 blocks south of it, not the three I thought we were. So we were trudging up Broadway, seeing nothing but variations on Starbucks and McD's when we found ourselves behind three teenage girls. One of them was carrying a big artists' portfolio, and they were all talking about how starving and broke they were and they should go to Ollie's. We cleverly engaged our mad tailing skilz and followed them to Ollie's, which turns out to feature the kind of Japanese noodle soup they ate in that terrific movie, "Tampopo" which I'd wanted to try ever since seeing it. It was good and cheap, although the girls, after many consultations on their cell phones, decided to eat someplace less good but more cheap. Anyhoo . . . my basil shrimp wasn't cheap, but it was okay, and I really had a hankering for seaweed salad. You gotta get your two cups of veg at lunch on the Beach, you know.