The Theater Crowd

On Friday evening, I took the boys into the city to have dinner with Steve. Once we got past the Yankee Stadium-bound traffic, we had clear sailing all the way down the West Side highway. It's thrilling to actually go 60 mph on the Westside highway and get a little air as you sail over the pot holes.

We had a very mediocre meal at a barbecue place in Times Square. We should have known the meal was going to be average when the waitress asked us where we were from. "We're from around here", we told her, and she was shocked. She said that everyone who comes in is a tourist.

For some reason, tourists seem to love barbecue food, so there are five or six BBQ joints right in Times Square, and they're all so-so. Two words of advice when visiting New York City. One, New York City is not known for its BBQ food. Please try a different type of food. Two. Don't wear shorts south of 125th Street.

While the brisket at this restaurant was really dry, it did offer $3 beers and large open windows with prime people watching opportunities.

I love watching people getting ready to go to the theater. They're dressed up and walking briskly down the street just sure that everyone is admiring them. Sometimes they're dressed all wrong. Mini-skirts with sequins. Three inches heels that haven't been broken in yet. Sometimes they've gone too causal in khakis and a t-shirt.

But regardless of how they're dressed, they are terribly excited, even those teetering in the three inch stilettos. They bought their tickets months ago. They've saved up for these tickets and hired a babysitter. They downloaded the music onto their iPods last week. They know that when the curtain goes up, they'll be transported to a South Pacific island or a French drag club.  

Comments

[MH]

With the exception of Urinetown, every musical I've seen as been disappointing. The one about the stripper and her mom wasn't bad.

[bj]

We love musicals. The only one I've found disappointing was a version of Cinderella, and that might have as much to do with the spot we were squeezed into in the back as the show.

[Matt]

Pretty much no where in the Times Square area is good to eat at. It's a tourist trap and pretty much nothing else. But, while I'm far from a BBQ expert, I'll suggest that Dinosaur BBQ up in Harlem is quite good, reasonably priced, and fun, if often over-crowded (with locals, mostly.) It was one of my favorite places.

I don't get the shorts point.

[laura]

Bailey's is a pub near Steve's office, which has an excellent shepherd's pie. There's good food along 10th Avenue.

re: shorts. Women don't wear shorts in Manhattan.

[MH]

In North Carolina, I was the only man under 50 who wore long pants to the office all summer, even on days when I didn't have a meeting.

[Matt]

Women don't wear shorts in Manhattan.

Ah- I wasn't thinking of women's wear. For a while, though, lots of women in Manhattan were wearing those terrible, terrible dress short things, sort of like capris that kept getting shorter and shorter until they became longish shorts. They were worn a lot by office-working women, even pretty fancy ones (lawyers and the like) a lot last summer. I think of them as the even uglier version of skorts. If they have gone out of fashion again it's for the good. But they were all over last summer in Manhattan.