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May 31, 2009

1873: CELEBRITY SIGHTING: PRINCE HARRY

Whenever I leave a concert or any other fairly large-scale event, I'm always awed by the way in which the city can so quickly absorb everyone in the audience as soon the show is over. Venues empty out and crowds disperse in such a short span of time that at no point does it ever feel like this mass of people caused any notable interruption in the natural flow of the city's traffic. If you passed through that same space only a short while later, you might ever know anything had taken place there.

Similarly, you can miss crossing paths with a celebrity by a matter of seconds and not know it. Had I taken another elevator or chosen a different cross street, for instance, I wouldn't have found myself walking up Lexington at precisely the same moment that Prince Harry was leaving the Intercontinental on Friday.

I was strolling along, enjoying the weather and anticipating my phone buzzing any second with dinner plans, when I found my path blocked by an exceptionally large and grim-looking man in a suit. He was standing in the middle of the street, blocking traffic in both directions. I glanced behind him to see half a dozen black SUVs, virtually identical, taking up the width of Lexington above the point at which he stood. He turned his head slightly and I saw a bright white earpiece; obviously, I had stumbled into the way of someone more important than me or this guy in the suit.

I didn't have a moment to actually wonder who that important person might be, because at that very second, a crowd of people in suits emerged from the hotel and shoved a very tall, very red person into one of the SUVs -- Prince Harry! As soon as the door on his vehicle shut, the whole group was off and running, windows down, grim faces peering out each with the butt of a machine gun tucked under each arm. It was impossible to know which vehicle he'd gotten into -- the SUVs were identical, and the way in which they turned together onto the cross street made them even harder to differentiate. But perhaps the most impressive thing about it was that it happened so QUICKLY -- in fact, I hadn't heard a single car horn sound, so it they must have interrupted traffic for only a few moments. And in nothing flat, they were gone; you'd never have known they were ever there unless you'd happened to be right there to see it yourself.

Sadly, it was only at the last possible second that it dawned on me that maybe I should take a photo of all this; even sadder still is the fact that THIS is the result of that effort:

But I guess I'll have to be happy with the knowledge that I managed to be there to see anything at all -- 8.2 million other New Yorkers weren't.

Posted by ashley at May 31, 2009 02:47 PM

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