No Flash at the Met

Dear Diary:

It was so obviously Barbra, underneath her enormous glasses and big straw hat, that I figured the best thing to do was pretend I didn’t notice, so I moseyed back to my post somewhere between Van Gogh’s cypresses and Gauguin’s walking stick.

There weren’t a lot of people in the Met that day. The one rule, other than please don’t touch, that had to be commonly enforced was: no flash.

There’s always a flicker of tension the moment before a flash goes off. As a guard you learn to tune into it â€" to feel the pressure behind the bulb, just before it irreversibly sucks a shade of color from the 19th-century pigments.

I watched the big straw hat pull up in front of Vincent’s wheat fields, and form her legendary hand into a clutch.

“Wait, Barbra, no flash!” I was as shocked as she was how the words had popped out. We exchanged a look, shared embarrassment.

“It’s O.K., I’m not her,” she said, and walked off, a goddess disguised as a beggar.

Then a tall man in a silk shirt stepped to me, wide-eyed and incredulous.

“Do you know who you just told not to use a flash?”

“Who?”

“That was Bette Midler!”

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