November 21, 2012
Well, after more than a year cooling my jets in Columbus and paying off my 2011 extravagant Asia trip, I’m sitting in the Columbus airport waiting to head to New York City for Thanksgiving. It’s the first trip Mark and I have been on together for more than two years.
As some of you know, a group of our friends travel to the city for Thanksgiving every year, and we join the group every third year. This year, the group is larger than normal; there are 17 of us with a few more who live in the city joining us for dinner on Thursday.
We are seeing The Book of Mormon tonight and The Heiress on Friday night. Mark goes to see Evita on Saturday night while I meet up with an old friend from OSU to see Golden Boy. Other than that, it’ll be drinking and dancing in the streets!
Just a update to say that we’ve arrived at the Hotel Edison (“the premiere Art Deco hotel in New York City”). Our room is the loveliest we’ve ever had here. We are on an outside corner and have views east and north.
Ahh the sounds of the city after dark. Sirens. Horns&mdashalways horns. Motorcycles. People talking. It’s hard to believe I can eavesdrop on street conversations 16 stories up. I just discovered that our room window was partially open; closing is has helped a little.
We sawThe Book of Mormon tonight at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. I didn’t think it was that great, but everyone else seemed to be enjoying it. Just not my kind of humor, I suppose, and that’s fine. I’m glad to have seen it. Don’t ask me to sing any of the songs, though.
The best part of the experience for me, though, was the intermission arrival of Sue. Sue is our friend from Milwaukee who was flying in directly. She was supposed to arrive around 3, but Matt got a text from her at 11:30 saying that her flight was delayed and that she wasn’t expecting to land until 5. A combination of a work strike and fog in Chicago were messing up travel from the Midwest. If she had no further delays, she’d have just enough time to cab it to the hotel, drop her things, and go to the show with us. At 5:30, she called Diane “practically in tears” to say that she was stuck in the Lincoln tunnel and didn’t know when she would be here. Estimates for getting through the tunnel were as high as three hours.
We waited for Sue until 6:30 but then had to go if we were going to make curtain. We left her ticket with a note to join us during intermission and a couple Jolly Ranchers. Then we just fretted about her rotten luck.
At intermission, about half of our group went out to smoke, pee, or call Sue to see where she was. The rest of us milled around at our seats and stretched a bit. I had just turned away from Mark to look around at the crowd, and there was Sue at the aisle below our seats looking up at us and waiving. Of course, my phone service provider being AT&T, I couldn’t get a signal to call Diane to say that Sue was here, so we just waited for her surprise when she came back at the end of intermission. Tony caught Sue up on the plot (a narrative of which the couple in front of us approved. “That was great! I could’ve skipped the first half!” the fellow said appreciatively.” “Indeed,” I thought.
After we all wrapped Sue in the warm blanket of her friends “back east,” the show resumed. It was during the second half that I was, again, reminded how different I am from other Americans. For much of the rest of the show, the crowd, including my group, roared. Gil, seated to my left, rocked back and for in convulsive laughter occasionally stealing knowing looks at Terry, his wife, who was guffawing a few seats to my left. I could clearly hear Tony’s cackle (as, I suppose, could the rest of the theater). I could only smile politely and be bored by the purile humor. Oh well, purile humor is what the shows writers (who also write South Park) are known for.
After the show, the cast did their usual Thanksgiving-time appeal for donations to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and hammed it up a bit. (I found those ten minutes to be much funnier.) On to the discussion of a late dinner. It was a short discussion. It was late, and no one felt like wandering around the city to find food, so we opted to go to Sophia’s—the restaurant at Hotel Edison (not to be confused with the cafe, which is their wonderfully dirty spoon)—for some Italian food and some good conversation. We called it a night around 11:30. Sue was in fine spirits; the travels of the day had fallen away from us all.
More tomorrow. Good night.