Man On a Wire

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of one of the most remarkable public feats in New York City history, Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers. It still is, as the New York Times - or as I call it, "The Times" - calls it, the Art Crime of the Century:

Mr. Petit’s walk was a long-planned act of subterfuge. He had seen sketches of the towers in a magazine while sitting in a dentist’s office in Paris at age 18. Six years later he did several reconnaissance missions to check out the towers as they were under construction. He honed his tightrope skills at home in a French meadow, asking friends to shake the wire to see if they could knock him off. The night before his self-described coup, he and his team smuggled the wire in and rigged it from one tower to the other, using a bow and arrow to shoot a fishing line across the distance, followed eventually by the cable, which was winched and tightened. It was an audacious act of nighttime engineering, half-jerry-rigged, half daring genius. 

And of course 9/11 has added a different shade of light to Petit's triumph:

The walk would be iconic even if the towers had not come down 27 years later, but it became even more so after the attacks. When the towers collapsed, it was also the memory of Mr. Petit in the air that remained. It had the aura of a myth, yet it spoke to the very human notion of recovery. It was an act of creation that stood in almost perfect opposition to the destruction, a deus ex machina moment, performed in advance, signaling the ability of the artist to provide beauty even in troubled times.

I will be celebrating tomorrow evening - privately, if you must know - by FINALLY watching the 2008 stunning documentary about it all, Man on a Wire.

But of course every time this whole thing comes up, all I can think about is that as crazy as it is, I can understand walking across the wire once, therein giving your life purpose and cementing your own immortality...but why the other 5 times? I mean, he bounced around on that wire for 45 minutes; the second my tootsies touched the other tower's roof my ass woulda been on the elevators shooting back down to the Ruby Tuesday's to celebrate my being the world's greatest hero ever. but hey, that's me.