Well, just about everybody in Montclair and environs. We're not talking about the TV series but about the wildly popular eatery on Church Street, known for its hearty, well-made comfort food and its hip interior, part Brassai-era Paris, part 1930's diner.

The news is the owners, Raymond Badach and Joanne Ricci, are opening a second Raymond's...in Ridgewood this summer.

Stacked by the right-of-way...

The raw materials stand at the ready...

Every night I park my car under a pine tree...

Perhaps if there were greater demand, matters could be reversed, but not without incurring certain inflation.

I see this as an operating theater where all the equipment and the attendants and the patient, on its back, are ready for the surgeon to come in, gloved hands held aloft...

In which the rake has abandoned his loyal owner and has fallen madly in love with a chain-link fence. The evil front steps, which have engineered the whole thing, snicker in the background. Oh foolish rake!

When the rains come (when don't they come?), it's a little misaligned...

Before it was sheathed in plywood and insulation board, people passed through this doorway to do their banking...

You have plenty of time to stare at this button while waiting for a response from inside...

When I was newly out of college, I had a Jewish friend whose family kept Shabbat on Friday nights. When so many people are going in different directions all the time, I knew that this family would always, always be home on Friday nights. It made sense to me. After kindling Sabbath candles, they'd be sitting around the table, overeating, and I'd always be welcome...

Zod Arifai, chef/owner of Blu in Montclair--one of NJM's Top 25 restaurants and winner of the Readers' Poll Best of the Best category for the North region--said today that he will be reopening Daryl in New Brunswick with a new menu and a new look.

It looks like an amusement park for cars...

...watching others work. The crew boss at a car wash (the guy who handles the cash register) watches the crew swarm over the wet car with thick towels...

And there's nothing you can do about it...

This little fella snoozes, a laidback sentinel, above his pals the Marvel Heroes and the Glow Crosses...

All in a lather, my car inches through the wash cycle, barely recognizable...

At a car wash in Montclair....

Yes, it's a lot smaller than a dumpster, but it's one heck of a lot bigger than any garbage bag you've ever seen...

Where tank trucks refill, headed for home furnaces. Probably fairly quiet there this time of year.

Tree topples, limbs must be amputated, tilted stump remains...

Through a glass darkly...

The tulip tree sheds its long, soft, sensuous petals and welcomes spring undressed, making a bed of the ground below it...

April showers are not all about precip. Wherever there is a tulip tree, there is a shower of fallen petals.

Another view of the dumpster door, this time as a monumental installation...

Garbage in, art out...

No, I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about the tree next to the walkway behind our house.

I had to say goodbye to my buddy Roscoe this morning. He was 17 and a half years old--80 something in human years--and his health had been failing for awhile. We shan't see his like again. Why does an affected line like that occur to me? Probably a way to mask emotion...

An environmental installation starring a flattened traffic cone...

The back of a landscaper's truck becomes an inadvertent art installation...

And a fifth wheel too, as the truckers call it...

The staff of Vanity Salon in Montclair recently showed what can happen when people put their heads together--lots of them--for a good cause. In one Sunday, they raised more than $3,000 for Susan G. Komen For The Cure. Here's who, and how...

At a carnival, pizza on the go from an old-fashioned dome-shaped oven...

This kind of strawberry is even more seasonal than the edible kind...

A welded mechanical marvel of the old school. But Do Not Rock Seat!

The mechanical age survives at a carnival...

Enter into the mystery...

Luxuriant foliage while waiting to pick up a pair of eyeglasses...

Can only mean one thing--we're at the car wash...

There was a week when the tulip trees shed their lush blossoms, strewing sidewalks with an increasingly slippery pink carpet...

It's interesting how the quality of your waiting changes after you've been sprung from the waiting room and are now in the examining room, though still waiting...

People ask me if I ever set up pictures. The answer is that the world sets them up for me...

Here’s one of the stranger suburban rituals. It happens every Memorial Day Weekend with the official opening of the Montclair Beach Club, the lovely private pool that straddles the border of Montclair and Clifton.

Though Westfield may be the smallest stop on the 21-city nationwide Top Chef Tour, Saturday’s demonstrations and meet-and-greet drew in the largest crowd the tour has seen thus far, as “Cheftestants” from the hit Bravo TV series made a short layover in Jersey before moving on to Philadelphia and New York City.

As the first buds of spring burst forth, cars filled up before the clouds unloaded...

In front of CulinAriane restaurant in Montclair (one of NJM's Top 25 in the state), two inanimate members of the staff seem poised for a minuet...

A conversation between three parked cars and a weird tree trunk, with an audience of houses and a garage, lighting by the sun...

Outside the McHugh contracting company in Montclair, where sculptures are produced and sold as well as utilitarian projects taken on...

At the recent Cru vs. Brew competition I found out that when it comes matching food with wine and beer, the possibilities are endless. Each beverage is a potential winner.

From the tailor's driver seat, two headless figures form her offensive line...

Tailor shop windows, busy working environments, are theaters of the hyper-particular...

Speared by a red vertical, against a white wall, blue barrels...

A fringe of ice silences this teapot, which clearly could not stand the heat and got out of the kitchen...

The TNT Ramblers--an acoustic rock, folk, blues group--played recently, as they do every month, at Toni's Soup Kitchen in Montclair during a Saturday luncheon...

New Brunswick band The Gaslight Anthem has been touring the country for the past year and a half promoting their latest album The ’59 Sound. But Friday night at the Wellmont Theatre in Montclair, the fun-loving, rock-and-rolling foursome showed that their hearts and music still belong to Jersey.

With a break in the drizzly weather, I was overdue for a trip to the car wash. Then a funny thing happened...

Renovations often look worse for a long time before they start to look better...

Don't know why these were hanging up, and my bad for not asking. But they sure introduced a sober note as the tumblers tumbled and the agitators agitated and the people folded their laundry...

Well, yes, I was...

Drove by this panel truck the other day, and snapped this picture. Mondrian, eat your heart out...

The front of this shoe repairman's shop was blocked off for reconstruction of the building's facade, so all customers were directed to the back...

Can't quite make out the name of this painting company, but wonder how they got an old mailbox to use? It sure isn't an official one...

Plain Sight will take a breather as I head to Portland, Maine for a family wedding and a few days of R&R. Back Wednesday, Sept. 2. Meanwhile, a few vacationy images...

Even in the shadows, he catches your eye...

My cat is so old, in people years, that he should be playing pinochle in Miami Beach. Here is what the vet said is ailing him...

I don't know about you, but I feel better knowing the person drawing my blood is wearing a latex-free, powder-free, ambidextrous, Med Pride vinyl examination glove and has a little play sunflower attached to her station.

One thing I like about blood tests--probably the only thing--is the colorful paraphernalia, especially the specimen vials with their color-coded caps and mysterious preservative gel at the round end...

Awaiting the tourniquet and needle for a blood test, I did what anyone with a camera would do--look for pictures.

Catch 'em while you can. The dogwood blossoms will be on the ground before you can bark up the wrong tree.

Ah, the robin's chirp, the daffodil's bloom, the leaf blower's ceaseless whine. A sure sign of spring is the return of landscapers' trucks to suburban neighborhoods, gathering up winter's flotsam and jetsam...

Sometimes I just can't resist traffic cones, especially errant ones. I cropped them out of this thumbnail, so you'll just have to click to the full picture to see them.

I drove by the body shop to see about getting my 20-year-old BMW repainted, but they were closed. No problem, I had my 40D with me...

It served me well for half a century, but when it comes to sore molars, the squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease, it gets the hook...

Plain Sight's ten-photograph series on a trip through the car wash concludes with a lone figure waiting for her vehicle...

All good things come to an end, including the drag line at the car wash...

Having your car washed is an old-fashioned pleasure in at least two ways: it's a mechanical process (you can actually watch what's happening step-by-step, as opposed to the invisibility, the inscutability of digital), and it requires manual labor by human beings at the beginning and end of the process. For example, the initial drying...

I originally promised six Wash Cycle pictures, but hey, I seem to be on a roll, so it's on to bonus time.

In today's Plain Sight, midway through the tunnel of scrub at Palace Car Wash in Montclair, we encounter...the dancing sponges!

One of the pleasures of having your car washed is that the process has a distinct beginning, middle and end, like life itself. Watching your car inch through that tunnel of scrub, with its fulsome sprays and blinking lights, and emerge in the sunshine dripping as from a baptism, is to participate in a kind of secular born-again ritual.

Click to see whole picture...

Today we move from clothing to cars. First, the residue of brisk business paints the pavement.

Village Laundry in Upper Montclair has some serious hangups.

Who says a laundromat can't venture into the deep waters of interior decoration?

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner has his version, which has been criticized as vague, and so does this Montclair hardware store. Its version is not vague so much as contradictory.

click next line to see full picture...

Be it ever so humble, a table and chairs on the front porch is still pretty inviting.

On a sunny winter day you can see slush-spattered vehicles lining up halfway down the block to be vaccumed, hosed, blow-dried and buffed. No coins please. Leave a greenback in the old-fashioned mail box strategically placed within reach as you step out the exit and head toward your still-dripping mount.

Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine...Today's picture (the whole image, not the thumbnail here) reminds me of that line from Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." It wasn't the basement or the same kind of medicine, but it was strong stuff.

If you're like me, you never walk past a pickup truck without taking a peek at what's in the bed. You see some  interesting things that way.

The scene on Myrtle Avenue in Montclair late during a recent filming of a commercial at one of the gracious old homes where production companies like to shoot commercials and the residents are paid very well and everything is put back together afterward better than it ever was beforehand. Sweet deal.

Walking along Glenridge Avenue in Montclair, I stopped to enjoy the geometry of storefronts.

It's rare to see a vacant lot in the thickly settled northern suburbs anymore. When you do see one, the contrast between something and nothing is striking.

Yes, right in downtown Montclair, outside the Wellmont Theater. Residents are peeved that the trailers eat up parking spaces, and they have a case. But from a photographer's point of view, the trailers are kind of cool.

In this age of personal pan pizzas,  personal digital assistants and Smart Cars barely bigger than a suitcase, the mini-bulldozer has become a construction site mascot.

Though the Wellmont Theater in Montclair has been open more than a month, renovation mop-up remains.

I'm glad I happened by before the clean-up, because the search for order in disorder is one of photography's great pleasures.

On my first trip to the newly restored Wellmont Theatre in Montclair, I wasn't exactly surrounded by my peers. But that doesn't mean I didn't have a blast.

The royal road to the unconscious? Not quite, but a certain old-fashioned dignity, middle-class grandeur, Hollywood's red carpet transposed to a minor key on a quiet side street in Montclair...

The haphazard leftovers of urban planning, or the lack of it. But at least it's green.

Strange things you see while waiting in the examining room.

I don't mean this cute little kid, and I'm not casting aspersions on our praiseworthy Top Docs, either. But click and I think you will agree with my characterization.

A moment of silence for a piece of summer furniture--dashed, wet and alone, out of sorts and out of season. I'm getting misty-eyed. Or is that the rain?

At 6:30 am yesterday in Montclair, the line at St. Luke's Episcopal Church was already spilling out the door. It was morning in America, literally and figuratively.

Some pictures I take I know why I like. Some I can only hazard a guess. This is one of those.

Click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture.

An oasis in a parking lot, a place to sit and eat and watch the ivy twine.

Click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture.

The TV series had drama and suspense. This wire has mystery.

A secular altar tilted at the sun...

Click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture

Incandescent bulbs in the sunlight, a milky way of the midway...

Click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture

I was walking to my car in a parking lot on Church Street in Montclair. I have parked in this lot hundreds of times, but each time I look at the same white brick wall to see how the light is hitting it and whether something, in some way, is new.

Click "read the rest of this post" to see full picture.

Join me tonight, Sat Aug 9, between 5 and 10 pm, for the opening reception of the new photography exhibit at Andy Foster's Gallery 51 in Montclair.

I'm in the show along with five other photographers, all interesting and accomplished.

Thank you gift for anyone who mentions PLAIN SIGHT....

After the wind and rain, the snake dance in Montclair...

Somewhere around the turn of the millenium the blue polyethylene tarp became the universal symbol of suburban exterior home improvement. Now every house painter is a pocket Christo.

It's fine by me. I like my McMansions wrapped.

Tonight is baseball's All-Star Game, signalling the halfway point of the season. When you see store signs like this one, does it mean that summer is half over?

Lots of places are fun to traipse around after a storm. Parks are great, especially when it's foggy. Playgrounds can be magical.

But one of my favorites is construction sites.

We skipped Montclair’s Independence Day Parade this year for the first time since our kids were infants. But there was one July 4th ritual I would not pass up: Our annual parent-daughter softball game.

You've seen those giant American flags that fly over big auto dealerships, flags that look bigger than football fields.

When I approach one on these attention hogs on the highway, I find myself wondering about the weight of the fabric, the engineering of the pole, whether for the trip from the flag factory it was rolled or folded. None of the things that went through Francis Scott Key's mind at Fort McHenry in 1814.

But when I see a flag like this in the distance, catching the sun against a purple sky on a Thanksgiving morning, it's a different story.

It's flag week at Plain Sight. Three days to the Fourth.

This flag nearly made me shudder when I saw it.

It may not be the last roundup, but it does feel like the last for the day.

Git along little downtown Montclair dogies.

Red light. Montclair.

Construction curtains looming like a hull with cockeyed portholes.

Eastern Oil on Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair is known for its low prices and its discounts for cash. Cars are always maneuvering around each other like baby water buffalo to sidle up to  the mama pumps.

But yesterday morning, only four of Eastern's twelve nozzles had any gas to give.

Hybrid cars are all the rage, so why not try a different kind of hybrid, one combining photographs and the spirit of two popular children's books? Namely....

The Where's Waldo? series by Martin Handford (which you don't have to be a child to enjoy) and The Everywhere Cat, a 1970 classic by William Corbin and Consuelo Joems.

In coming weeks look for Roscoe J. Cat here in Plain Sight and also on the right side of this page, in Editor's Picks. Can you find him today?

Went for a haircut Saturday in Montclair.

Rain pelting the patio beyond the salon, but by the time I emerged so had the sun.

One wet magazine, though.

The clouds parted and the sun rained down on puddles.

"In A Mellotone," a great 1939 Ellington tune, is also what I'm striving for today, on doctor's orders.

So without further ado, let's return to the subject this blog began with back in March.

I made it through the first five days after my freak accident fairly well. I had what my doctors called a  "minor concussion," meaning I could expect several days or more of headaches and sleeplessness. Well, nothing unusual about that!

No, this picture is not upside down. But if you are lying on your back on a gurney in a Level 1 Trauma Center, and your neck is in a brace, as mine was, about all you can do is tilt the camera up and backwards.

It's a little unnerving to be stared at by the creature that will provide your dinner...

Oil prices fell Wednesday, the AP reported, after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates and a government report said U.S. fuel supplies unexpectedly fell last week.

The poet William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand. Well, how about in a thingamajig on top of a rusty metal fence in Edgemont Park in Montclair?

Flashback to First Night--December 31--in Montclair. Onstage, the Fab Faux, the mind-bogglingly good Beatles cover band.

"Happy New Year!" bassist Will Lee called to the audience. He's from Texas, but he spoke very well. (Years of playing in Paul Shaffer's Letterman band have ironed out his regionalisms.)

Guitarist Jimmy Vivino leaned into his mike and noted that on this side of the Hudson River, the correct greeting is "Happy New YEAZZ!" The audience, packed into the pews of the First Congregational Church on South Fullerton Avenue, shouted back in kind.