A friend with a baby writes:

I wish to report a great New Yorker-reader success story. A rare moment of service journalism. Do you remember a couple years ago [actually Sept. ’05], there was a Talk of the Town about the Car Seat Lady, who helps hapless New York parents install their car seats? After several months of unease about [the baby’s] car seat and its precarious wobbling, much arguing among ourselves, and an unsuccessful visit to our precinct—the diabolical seat stumped their Highway Safety expert—I sought her out, and immediately found her at thecarseatlady.com. She was brilliant. [Baby] now rides very, very safely. We also met her apprentice—a Car Seat Lady in training!

Via Gothamist, the long-awaited Bryant Park movie schedule!

June 19th The Birds
June 26th To Have and Have Not
July 3rd M*A*S*H
July 10th Bullitt
July 17th The Band Wagon
July 24th High Noon
July 31st A Shot in the Dark
August 7th The Manchurian Candidate
August 14th Charade
August 21st Rocky

Friends and future friends, I’m available for picnics most of these nights. Especially June 26. Maybe I’ll save that one for someone I’d really like to be in the dusk with.

Lance Baker, my high school boyfriend (who’s now happily married with a baby on the way—congrats, Lance!), as Algy in the 2004 production of Earnest at Chicago’s Court Theatre.
Subject line of a reader email received this morning: “I think earnestness is cool.” I usually think of it as enthusiasm with a reasonable side of skepticism, but earnestness, in the Importance of Being sense, is also up my alley. Thank you, emailer. (It no longer feels right to hyphenate the word “email,” except when necessary for work. It’s just closed up in my head—e plus mail. It is mail. In five years I bet all stylebooks will have united them for good. Plus, my name is almost “Email,” so it feels perfectly natural to type it all together—there are those who have called me “Emaily.”)

Update: I swear I didn’t know Hilton Als was reviewing the new BAM production of the play this week: “The modern literature Wilde is referring to here includes the play we are watching, which, until its final, improbable moments, has very little to do with simple truth and much to do with pretense; loyalties and affections are dropped and picked up like the stitches in an especially complicated piece of needlework.”