Once you’re in Philly, it’s easy to catch a train to New York City. The trick is making sure you’re on the right one. Thanks to the mercy of an Amtrak porter and Amanda’s travel luck, which is far superior to my own, we found ourselves on a train that arrived in Manhattan sooner than we expected at no additional cost. That allowed us to check into our hotel (which boasted what might be the tiniest room we’ve ever stayed in) and queue for audience spots on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. It was Amanda’s first TV taping. Colbert’s guests that night had been announced as singer-actor Renee Rapp and someone from NPR, but the latter was a ruse: We learned in line that the real featured guest was former Vice President Kamala Harris, who was there, apparently, to explain why she decided not to run for governor of California. If you’re thinking, “Oh, that’s probably because she’d rather run for president,” well, not only did she deny that but also claimed to be fed up with public service altogether — and who could blame her? We were seated about 40 feet from Colbert’s desk and couch, so I had a direct line of sight to Harris between a pair of stern, intimidating Secret Service agents. It made for an entertaining but unexpectedly tense couple of hours.
I’d been to New York City once before, two years after 9/11, and I remembered Midtown pizza as living up to its national reputation. We stopped for dinner at NY Pizza Suprema, which was excellent and validated my happy memory. Why can’t we have pizza that good in Olympia? New Yorkers swear it’s the water; I think it might be the result of fierce, abundant competition. For the most part, Washingtonian pizza is as good as it needs to be. Examples of higher quality would be deeply appreciated, Gentle Reader. Feel free to plug your favorites in a comment below.
We finished our first Manhattan evening in the Comedy Cellar, the Greenwich Village chuckle hut you’ve seen on Crashing, Louie and countless standup specials. I love the Village. There’s an all-hours energy there unlike anything I felt during my years in L.A. Amanda snapped pictures of Cafe Wha?, the historic music club that helped launched the careers of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers and Bruce Springsteen among many others.
On Friday, we scarfed Liberty Bagels before catching the subway to South Street Seaport, where the Circle Line harbor cruise launches from Pier 16. The Statue of Liberty Super Express Cruise is, yes, a super way to see much of New York from the water, where it looks best, in a relatively short span of time. We chugged past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty and under the Brooklyn Bridge, which is a great way to process its impressive scale. You may not know this, but construction of the bridge killed over 20 people including its designer, John A. Roebling. In his case, it was a foot injury that took him out. His son was tapped to assume control of the project, but then he got a debilitating case of the bends from working in an underwater caisson, so Roebling’s wife Emily, a gifted mathematician, became the de facto chief engineer. The bridge spans almost 1,600 feet. A thousand or so people attempted suicide by jumping from the bridge, and at least 30 survived the fall. Those aren’t terrific odds, though, so please don’t try that yourself.
After the cruise we strolled through Chinatown, stopping only for a cheap but delicious lunch at Shu Jiao Fu Zhou. Thus fortified, we stood in line for reduced-price Broadway tickets at the TKTS booth in Times Square, then made our way to the National 9/11 Memorial Museum, where we essentially relived one of the most terrifying days our country has ever seen. I’ll spare you my full 9/11 story, but suffice it to say it got pretty surreal as I learned of the attack in the executive offices of Warner Bros. in Burbank, where I was employed as a full-time temp. Amanda and I were reduced to tears as we descended into the exhibit and reacquainted ourselves with that morning’s almost 3,000 victims. It’s a complicated topic, but I guess if I had to boil my takeaways down to one sentence it’d be this: We must never let fear overcome our humanity and empathy. Attacking the wrong country or blaming an entire religion or ethnicity does nothing to relive our terror but increases fear and misery the world over. As Frank Herbert famously put it, “Fear is the mind-killer … the little-death that brings total obliteration.” So it was in 2001. Here’s hoping we never see another year like it.
After all that sad nostalgia, it felt doubly good to ride the 60-second elevator to the 102nd-floor observatory atop One World Trade Center, the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere and a middle finger raised to despair. When I visited the Empire State Building in 2003, the city was in the middle of a December-record blizzard that obscured it under thick clouds. This time, we were able to see clear to the horizon. It’s wild looking down over buildings you had to crane your neck to see from the street. There’s a relaxing bench outside the tower from which you can lay back and stare up at it, its triangular surfaces converging toward infinity. We finished that long day at Death Becomes Her, which is far more enjoyable than the movie and features outstanding lead performances by Megan Hilty, Christopher Sieber, Michelle Williams (the one from Destiney’s Child) and a deliciously droll Jennifer Simard. We loved it.
We enjoyed classic works of passion and whimsy at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, about which I’ll say this: You may not love modern art, but if you love any of it, chances are it’s at MoMA. If you can’t stand modern art, go anyway because it also hosts older, stellar works including “Waterlilies” by Claude Monet. And I just learned as I was writing this that the fifth floor, which we thought held nothing but offices and meeting rooms, boasts Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” Dang it all! That thumping sound you hear is me violently kicking myself. (This “Starry Night” should not be confused with “Starry Night Over the Rhone,” which we enjoyed at Paris’s Musee d’Orsay.) We braved the pastrami-crazed multitudes at Katz’s Deli (“I’ll have what she’s having”), visited Saturday Night Live‘s famous Studio 8H and the Tonight Show set on the NBC Studio Tour before revisiting All’Antico Vinaio (a lifetime favorite from our visit to Florence). As a capper for our trip, we caught Stranger Things: The First Shadow at the Marquis. This live, non-musical play takes advantage of a dedicated theater and the magicians who brought Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to life in a show unlike anything I’ve experienced over a half-century of theater-adjacent existence. It was the best show we saw all week by a comfortable margin, and it both scared you and made us gasp out loud. Who’d have thought jump scares could work in live theater? So if you happen to be in Manhattan any time soon, it’s worth what they’re charging, I promise. The producers believe, based on audience surveys, that three out of five people who attend the show have never seen a live play before. That’s both good and bad news because, while they’ll damn sure be interested in trying it again, it’s unlikely anything they see the second time around will compare to it. It’s an A++ show, friends, I guarantee. It’s awesome.
Per Amanda’s request, we stopped by the jaw-dropping enormity of Grand Central Terminal before catching a train back to Philly and our plane back to Washington. Next up on our busy travel calendar: two epic weeks in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, Japan in November, so watch for that in only 88 days! Can you believe that? Because we scarcely can, and we’ve spent the last year-plus planning it. Fingers crossed the U.S. doesn’t declare war on Japan for some idiotic reason in the meantime.
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