With permission, I’m posting this email Adam sent to both me and his father.

The New York Lighfair was enormous, though lacking some familiar names. Lots of big names don’t show a booth, both because of industrial espionage, but also the cost — the bigger you are, the harder to distinguish yourself, so the more it costs. $30k – $50k seems like the low end of the high end. Didn’t see any of those factories’†people either — they sometime send folks to walk about just for the sake of being there politically.

The trip was good, though not especially “productive”. We took the Acela high-speed Amtrak train†down from a stop on 128/95 south of Boston –†3 hrs. 15 min. there to Penn. Station. And just days before they were grounded for brake problems. Rode down sitting with a rep friend†and Tracy from Ripman, who’s just gotten engaged, her boyfriend proposing underwater while scubadiving in Curacao!

Dropped our luggage at the Times Square Westin (not to mention dropping several hundred dollars) then a free shuttle to the Javits Convention Center on the lower West Side. Walked onto the floor about noon, where we were to meet a German manufacturer for lunch.

There’d been a change of plans, though, so no lunch. Invites to Germany on their dime at some unspecified time, but no lunch. Despite grumbly stomachs, we decided to just hit the aisles and later bought savory crepes (of all things) from a sales floor vendor. Huge show, with hundreds of booths. Lots of interesting new stuff, though little approaching revolutionary. LEDs have really hit their stride, showing up in everything from track fixtures and outdoor spotlights to neon-like linear things and television-like panels. Much of it kinda silly, really, though some of it quite useful and clever. And Chinese firms were as usual†dense around the fringes, making few contacts that I could see but engaging in the aforementioned subtle espionage. Luke even saw someone thrown off the floor for unauthorized photography. And China itself (or its trade commission or something) took†several whole “blocks” of booths, a first in my experience.

Show closes at 6:00 each day, and after waiting in a huge line for the shuttle bus and changing back at the hotel, we were off for the first of the night’s attempt at three parties, at the Guggenheim, arriving there about 7:30.††Few familiar faces, and the museum devoid of art for the first four floors due to an installation in the atrium — a 90-degree outside-corner mirrored tower reflecting the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral back on itself, with small panels of neon-green colored taped applied as dashes to the insides of the spiral rail/walls for visual clarity. Clever for about 5 minutes. Then funny for the funhouse mirror moments for†a few minutes more, and then the stark whiteness of the place begins to gnaw, the black-clad human ants insufficient and equally stark counterpoint. Tasty hors d’ouevres and free drinks kept us there a half-hour or more, but then we were off for the next party, thrown at storied The Tavern on the Green in Central Park.

More mirrors, but a†whole other experience. Zigzagging paneled halls of faceted mirrors confuse the eye but ultimately†lead you into a brashly frilly open space full of white latticework gingerbread and drippy crystal chandeliers, where hundreds of people were hoovering up extensive tablefulls of food and free booze, a few dancing in the central greenhouse atrium (to cheesy Abba covers as we arrived, almost spinning on our heels and departing in response). Many hundreds more were in the†equally drippy†garden outside, where the huge trees are wrapped trunks-to-branch-tips in glitter-light nets. We’re told that over 700 showed up, about double the expectation, making a harried night of it for the waitstaff.

Some compatriots and old friends were smoking cigars outside (like everybody else who for some reason finds that habit a social necessity — not that you’d get any truly fresh air in NYC, but you had to go inside for it there), so we stayed to talk. After about as much as we could take, though, we were rescued by a phone call from the third party, which was nearing its close at 9:30, our friends about to head out for dinner. So we scooted by foot a couple blocks down to the Time Warner complex on Columbus Circle, a fascinatingly massed almost twin tower of curved glass, up to the 15-minutes-of-fame-trendy new Stone Rose bar, where I managed most of a quick Glenmorangie port finish, one icecube, which beat the Red Label and Dewars from the last parties, before wistfully leaving it half-full as the last member showed up and we were off for dinner.

Which was at one of New York’s most famous steakhouses. And me a vegetarian. One walks in past the deliberately windowed meat curing room full of darkened slabs of aged and tagged meat. A macabrely repetitive scene of bizarre simplicity, floor to ceiling beef. Despite that, we forged ahead, and later, my ordering the “Seasonal Vegetable Platter” was a rollicking moment of irony, the wine good, the stories entertaining, ranging from my growing up in Venezuela to one of the reps’ it-only-gets-worse tale of misbehaving and being serially thrown out of a Jimmy Buffet concert for his increasingly insane attempts to get back in after the first transgression forcefully separated him from the clients he was entertaining.

It wasn’t all fun and games, as some business and politics were slid in subtly, but after we left, we declined the last stop at a swanky bar and instead wandered back to our hotel through Times Square marvelling at the excess, and hit the hay about 1:00 a.m.

We also declined our last offer, breakfast at The Rainbow Room the next morning –†probably a mistake, but Lukas, father of two small children, never gets to sleep in, and that seemed more enticing. So he and I went to a small cafe for a leisurely breakfast, then checked out, and got back to the Javits about 11:00. Many more familiar and long-lost faces, and more in-depth conversations, the pressure to see it all dispelled by the first day’s efforts. I was less effective than Luke, staggering about on legs that were quite done yesterday, thank-you-very-much, and randomly hitting up interesting booths. Our separating both days was good strategy, though, as there was little overlap in our efforts.

Perfunctory lunch there again, some political intrigue to do with reps and firings and Machiavellian scheming, more old friends, then off for Penn Station for our 7:00 p.m. train., home about 11:00.