New York Trip, Part 2 - Less Talk, More Action

There are times so perfect that I want to sear them into my brain in a way that transcends photography. I think, remember this forever. I had one of those moments watching Wicked on Broadway. My family was all around me, and each one of us was completely caught up in the plotline, humor, and production quality of this wonderful musical. After all the planning for the trip, and all the aggravation of traveling, this was exactly what I had been wanting. I’ve seen a lot of theatrical productions, including some on Broadway, and this was the most entertaining and best-produced play I’ve ever seen. If you can’t get to New York to see it, try to catch a touring company if they come around again.

Late the first evening of our trip a hotel employee of undetermined nationality showed up at our door with a big bag and said she was “room serve.” I told her we didn’t order room service. She said, “Pree.” I reiterated, we didn’t order room service. She said, “No, pree,” and started pushing bottles of water at me. Ah! Free bottles of water! We were very glad to have them as we wandered around the following days and always called them pree, as in, did you remember to bring pree? Many encounters later I commented that everyone we ran into was from another country, and Ian said, “They all come to America. It’s the Land of the Pree.”

Art museums … my love. We saw the Guggenheim, skipped MoMA, and had much too little time for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If we had the trip to do over again we would skip the Guggenheim and spend an entire day at the Met. The guys spent a lot of time in the armor section alone. My sons like to think of themselves as being pretty unflappable but even they said “wow” a lot. It’s the kind of place where you walk into a room full of objects that are completely familiar, for example, the wrappings and sarcophagi of Egyptian mummies, and then it washes over you that you aren’t seeing Hollywood replicas, you’re seeing the real thing. Wow.

Touring NBC with our family is a little different from the average family since three of the four of us have been involved in television production on some level, especially Ian. At one point they asked for two volunteers. One little boy spoke up and then there was dead silence. So I said I would do it, not knowing what “it” would be. They put me at an anchor desk and had me read a news report from a teleprompter, and had the kid do a weather report against a green screen. When it was over the NBC pages were remarking that people didn’t usually do such a good job. I neglected to tell them I had played a newscaster in a community theater production one time, so I knew how to do the voice. They filmed the whole thing and tried to sell it to us afterward but we didn’t buy it because I was having one of the worst hair days of my life. Later on Steve kidded me that they were going to try to find me and hire me. It works that way, right? Newscasters get hired from among the tourists? Even if it did I can hear it now: she’s got the voice down, but that hair! Oh. My. Gosh.

Our trip to the United Nations Headquarters didn’t go according to plan. We started out in high spirits, razzing Alex about having a knife in his pocket, which they confiscated. Way to go, Alex! It’s the UN! Doves of peace everywhere! UNICEF! They did give it back as we left, but they told him to stop carrying around knives. The hitch was that we were going to have to wait several hours for a tour and we couldn’t both do that and see the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So we left.

There were so many things we didn’t get a chance to do. A week is really too short. We wore our feet down to nubs trying to optimize our time, but we didn’t go to Ground Zero, spent only a few minutes shopping, didn’t get to the Empire State Building, didn’t go to the Apollo Club. As we limped through the Portland Airport Alex commented that one thing the trip had taught him was that there are a lot of other different kinds of places out there. Little fireworks went off in my head. That is exactly what I wanted the kids to see.