No Flash at the Met is an excerpt from The Guardist, published in the Metropolitan Diary of the New York Times, May 3, 2013.
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 — 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!”