Strategery at the New School?

So I’m standing outside of the Parsons (I always knew it as the Parsons School of Design but at some point it got rebranded Parsons The New School for Design in line with all the other New School for… subschools), where we were putting on the IDEA 2007 conference this past week (which is why I haven’t been getting much blogging done although I have been taking a lot of pictures which I’ve been slowly posting to Flickr if you’re interested), trying to get some AT&T reception on my jPhone to return a call when two guys in suits with their arms literally around each other’s shoulders, laughing and schmoozing like the bunch of dyed-in-the-wool politicians I realize they are, as my brain sorts out the distinctions between these are people I recognize from my own personal life and these are people I recognize because the television has emblazoned them on my mind’s eye over the years, come bursting out of the front door.

It’s Chuck Schumer, I notice, the not-Hillary senator from New York and Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska or was it Kanasas, who is – I suddenly recall – president of the New School and someone about whom I’d recently heard rumors that he might be considering making another go of it in the Senate, despite his admissions of war crimes in Vietnam and his hawkishness on Iraq and Iran.
And I also find myself reflecting on how he used to comb his long receding bangs over his bulgy forehead but that somehow his time in New York had updated his fashion sense so that now he wears his gray hair (or toupe, who can tell?) in a modified Caesar cut, very short bangs brushed forward and it honestly looks much better. He is a handsome man after all.

By now it’s too late to snap a photo of the men, as Kerrey has slipped into a limo and Schumer has hightailed it down toward Sixth Ave and I’m talking on the phone anyway, so it would be kind of rude to put the call on hold just to take photos, but it occurs to me that maybe these guys were talking about said rumored Senate bid and if so was this supposed to be a sort of out-of-the-ways meeting, given that while this is the New School being Parsons and all, it probably isn’t the location of the office of the president of the New School but if so then wouldn’t they be more sneaky and less boisterous and buddy-buddy on their way out the front door?