I Want To Go To Chelsea

Spent the weekend in NYC again.  Lovely weather.  It was one of those happy to be alive times.  Well, I'm always happy to be alive but you know what I mean.  This weekend I was really happy to be alive.

When we walked out of The Manhattan Club about 1 o'clock on Friday afternoon we still hadn't decided what we wanted to do with the day.  A few steps towards Columbus Circle I remembered that we wanted to walk The High Line, which opened last year and which we wanted to do last time we were in NYC earlier this summer but didn't because it was like 100 degrees and it's all out in the open.  (We went to Central Park instead that time, where at least there was shade.)  So we headed downtown, got off the C train at 14th St. and headed west towards 10th Ave. where you can pick up the High Line.  Just as we were crossing 9th Ave.  I looked to my right and noticed a sign for Chelsea Market.  I'd heard of Chelsea Market but knew nothing about it so I grabbed my girl and steered her towards 15th St., saying let's take a quick peek inside.  We spent two hours there.  It turned out to be one of those serendipitous decisions that make travelling so much fun, the discovery of a little gem that you'll remember and return to anytime with pleasure.  It's housed in the old Nabisco Co. (The National Biscuit Company) warehouse, where they made the first Oreo cookies. It's totally restored as a kind of food court though they've kept a lot of the history. It's loaded up with the restaurants, delis and bakeries, all with the most delicious-looking food, a fabulous grocery store, and a whole lot of other fun places, all having to do with food.  The fact that I was starving may have had something to do with everything looking so scrumptious but I came away thinking I could eat at Chelsea Market for weeks without ever repeating a meal or having a bad one.  We had dinner reservations so we indulged in nothing but a baguette from Amy's Bread, which reminded us of some of the baguette's we'd had in Paris last year. Delicious. Before we'd left home in the morning I almost grabbed my camera, my pocket Canon Powershot but I like to walk the streets as unencumbered as possible.  As soon as we'd entered the market I regretted it.  Next time I bring the camera because the place was full of photographic possibilities.  Even the cupcakes.  My wife had mentioned to me about a week ago that there is some sort of national cupcake craze going on, and perhaps has been going on for some time.  It's certainly in full rage at Chelsea Market, where the bakeries are apparently in competition to outdo each other in cupcake imagination and design. People are clever, in all fields, even cupcakes, and some of the cupcake artistry made me smile. I didn't eat one though because that much sugar on an empty stomach would have sent me reeling.  Anyhow, go to Chelsea Market.  Next time we're going to go just to eat our way down the line.

We left Chelsea Market and then continued on our original course over to the High Line. Which is fine, a nice walk with a different perspective on the city.  They will be extending it too, eventually up to 34 St (right now it ends at 20th, I think).  My baby then wanted to walk over to the river so we headed west towards the Hudson and ran right smack into the Chelsea Piers and its huge sporting complex right on the river.  I'd heard of the multi-level driving range on the Hudson and there it was.  It's about 50 yards wide, extending out a little short of 200 yards, all enclosed with netting 40-50 yards high. So I guess the game would be, can you fly one over the net into the river? You'd have to be a big hitter to do so - a ball still that high 200 yards out probably has to travel at least 250 in the air and there are not many of us who can do that. I can't. I'm happy when I drive one 250 total.

We walked all around the piers, ending up in the park to the north of them, a lovely spot whose name I do not know. There are a hundred places in the city to get away from it all and here was another one: people strolling, sunning themselves, kids frolicking in little playgrounds and tiny water parks. All in all, a lovely day. And we still had the evening and the full day on Saturday.

We ate at Amarone Ristorante, a new place for us because we've decided to always try to do new things when we go to NYC.  And it was good.  Not out of this world, but good.  They made a good martini.

We then went to a show that I guess everyone in America has seen, Wicked.  I wanted to like it, really I did.  I was aware that it was a crowd-pleasing blockbuster going in and my history with these types of shows is not good but I went in with an open-mind, honestly. But it was bad.  It wasn't just kinda bad, or sorta bad.  It was truly bad.  And I knew it would be by the end of the opening scene, when I turned to my wife and whispered, "I hate it."  I found it earnest and plodding throughout, with songs so banal and tuneless I defy anyone to walk out of the theatre humming them.  There was also little humor besides the one overdone gag of the blonde witch throwing her hair back as an indicator that she was a dumb blonde. There were chuckles and obvious gag lines but never did the crowd burst into a roar of laughter.  Perhaps one of the problems is that we just watched the PBS broadcast of South Pacific, which we had seen live twice and which I consider a bit of a minor miracle in its structure, its staging, its storytelling, its integration of book and musical numbers.  And the songs!  Everyone walks out of South Pacific humming those songs and, if they are like me, continue humming them for a week.  All in all,  it's a bit of perfection in an imperfect world.  So maybe South Pacific was too close to see Wicked and not see all flaws.  Its schizophrenic storytelling is part of the problem, jumping from romance to action to (attempts at) comedy and back again, all in the same scene.  The writers also just made things up when they needed to turn the story in a different direction.  There was no flow and no sense.  It was incoherent to me and I'd only had one martini and one beer so it had nothing to do with that.  By the break I was convinced my wife would want to leave with me but she was so fascinated by its badness she wanted to stay and see if it could get any worse.  It did.  What had been truly bad in the first half of the show became farcical in the second.  The story is wildly out of control here with its explanations of how the Tin Man and the Scarecrow came to be (with only a nod to an offstage lion.) It throws in a bit of animal rights nonsense, a girl in a wheelchair, and an incredulous motivation about how the Wicked Witch of the West became so. You see, she was the good one, the caring one, a misfit in this cruel and corrupt world. By the penultimate scene, when Glinda (the Good With of The North) and the girl who is about to become the Wicked Witch of the West sing a sickly sweet song of understanding to each other I was shaking with stifled laughter, my hand over my mouth. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg were probably doing the same in their graves, while spinning.  To wit, I've already compared Wicked to South Pacific but the show it should really be compared with is The Wizard of Oz.  Just think of all the wonderful songs in that show.  Think of the lightness, the humor, the charm, all staples of American musicals, both Broadway and Hollywood. Wicked has none of it. It's all pure spectacle and beyond that, nothing.  It's success is nearly incomprehensible to me but, as my wife pointed out on the walk back to our room, people love a spectacle. I certainly realize I'm in the minority in my opinion about Wicked but there's little I can do about that.  The show stinks.

We slept in on Saturday morning and then my wife took her run in Central Park, her favorite activity in NYC, so we didn't really get started until about 11:30.  Which was fine because our plan was to head down to Greenwich Village for the day.  We were seeing the Barrow Theatre's production of Our Town in the evening so we decided to spend the entire day down there.  We've been to the Village lots of times, to see shows or just to wander but we never did a tour so I found a good one online and printed it out.  And it was okay but I'd just rather wander the streets.  Still, my baby likes to walk around getting some history about the buildings and such.  One place we went into was the Magnolia Bakery, which confirmed the cupcake craze. Apparently some girl from the show Sex and the City (I only watched it once, for about ten minutes.  That was enough.) made it and the cupcakes popular.  So the entire country is eating cupcakes because this girl on a bad TV show did.  Is that it?

Anyhow, we ended up in Washington Square Park, which I love, and relaxed there for awhile, along with thousands of other people.  It really was a lovely weekend and everyone was out.  We had some time so we decided to walk back up to Union Square Park, at 14th St. and take the subway back to our room so we could freshen up before dinner and the show. It was jammed here too.  There was a hip-hop band playing with the name of BR and Timebomb (memo to band: get a new name) and they were good.  What makes them good is a young lady named Olivia Martinez, who plays a mean violin and gives the band that something extra that separates them from the ordinary.  She saws her way through their songs with abandon, screeching and scratching out melodic lines behind the beat and adding resonance to what otherwise might be ordinary.  She's wonderful.  Her bandmate Shanelle Jenkins can play a very nice trumpet and she can sing too - she should be the lead singer of the band, not BR, or she should grab Ms. Martinez and start up a new band.  At any rate, we enjoyed listening for awhile and we picked up one of their CDs, not because I think we'll ever listen to it (this kind of music is best experienced live) but because we dropped them a donation and the CD came with the donation.  You don't stand and listen to a band and then walk away without helping them out.

We then made our way through the farmer's market they set up every weekend at Union Square Park and bought some apples for the ride home the next day.  Then back to the room for a shower and change of clothes, turn right back around and head back to the Village.

We ate at The Cornelia Street Cafe and it was really good.   I had the warm goat cheese salad and that night's special, a Filet Mignon Au Poivre, very delicious.  A couple of beers, an espresso and I was ready to see Our Town at the Barrow Theatre, which has been around for a couple of years but is closing in a few weeks.  It is as good as Wicked was bad and I walked out with my faith in the theatre restored. I'd like to blog more about it and perhaps will soon but that's it for today - I'm blogged out.  It was a great weekend.

NOTE:  This post's title is a play on Elvis Costello's "I Don't Want To Go To Chelsea".  I wanted to put the "Don't" in the title with a slash through it but couldn't figure out how to use the html slash in a post's title.  Because I really do want to go to Chelsea.  Again.