This past Sunday, I hooped it up in Sara Roosevelt Park in Chinatown. I got there early so I could park my Escalade on the street. A really cool thing about Chinatown on an early Sunday morning is that it's very busy and active. All the old Mao Ze Dong-aged people and the young crowd just coming back from the rave clubs are out in the parks.
One group of old people were doing tai chi on one side of a handball wall while on the other side kids with Dragonball-Z haircuts and black wifebeaters were preening and showing off to each other. It was such a dramatic display of the gap in generations. The gap, in this case, being a twenty-five foot high, two feet thick concrete handball wall.
The tai chi group was mesmerizing to watch. Their movements were graceful and it was like watching water flowing over smooth rocks. It didn't last long, though. About an hour later someone switched the tape they were playing on their radio and they started doing the electric slide. It was so jarring because they couldn't keep the beat. How could they be so graceful with complicated tai chi movements and have such trouble doing simple line-dancing feet shuffling?
Posted by glenn at June 5, 2006 01:04 AM