Undercover Photography

I'm generally not a lawbreaker - I don't swim in the reservoirs, I signal when changing lanes - and I don't generally hang out with bankers, but I got invited to a party on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and you better believe I went, because in all my born days, I'd never been there.

The invitation said "photo opportunity", so I packed my camera, picked up my walker and headed downtown. We had a ball, me and my snarky friend. Open bar, passed hors d'œuvres, and the chance to wonder at the vast yet intimate space - a collision of old (marble stairs, coffered ceilings) and new (screen after screen after screen). We talked to a woman with great glasses, an art dealer, a lady of a certain age - all of them said the same thing: "I've never been here before".

On the way in, there were several big NO PHOTOS signs. It turned out that the "photo op" was actually a chance to have someone else take your picture up on the balcony where the bell gets rung. We did, everyone did, and got a souvenir to take home, but I really wanted some pictures of the floor. I wanted the odd little details, like the Purell dispensers and the 1940s vinyl fold-down chairs and the newspaper clipping collage and the empty soda bottle suspended gaily in the middle of one of the pods. It's so clearly a workplace, not a museum, and despite all the high-tech, there's a distinctly human quality about it.

So I played spy-girl and took vague photos from the hip while holding my scotch in the other hand, but they're all terrible because I was trying too hard to be discreet. Oh well. I wasn't supposed to be taking pictures anyway.