Last time I was in New York, I got really lucky with the theatre gods. I played the lottery and won. See, most theatres have a lottery system whereby you arrive 2.5 hours before a show and enter your name in a drawing. If you win, you get very close tickets (rows maybe 1-3ish) for a VERY reduced price. I saw In the Heights and West Side Story in 2010 from the second row; I didn’t pay more than $70 for the two shows combined. For this trip, I really only wanted to see one show: Book of Mormon. However, getting tickets for the musical that was nine Tony Awards is no small feat.

I decided to operate on the assumption that I would not be seeing that, but how would I get my theatre fix? All I had to do was think, “expecto patronum,” and Alan Rickman came to my aid. He was headlining a small but talented cast in Seminar, a play that dealt with a subject close to my heart: young folks trying to become writers. He was supported by Hamish Linklater, Jerry O’Connell,  Lily Rabe and Hettienne Park. The play was funny, poignant,  surprising. The characters were well developed and relatable. It was great to see such gifted artists on the stage. Being the dork I am, I couldn’t help but wait with the masses after the show to get my Playbill signed. Mr. Rickman smiled at everyone and seemed very polite.
I was satisfied with the investment I made to see the show. Today I’ll still try my hand at the good ole lottery, see if I’ll be one of the lucky few to score seats tonight. I’ll let you guys know.  🙂

Tuesday was a busy day. I rose late and treated myself to a trip to Chelsea Market, a place I definitely now rank among my favorites in the city. It is a huge (a city block) market, filled with bakeries and dairies and fish shops and special cuisine, as well as clothing stores. I walked for a while first to survey the options, and finally settled on a bakery I think called Amy’s. A sticky bun and cinnamon challah roll were ingested before long, as was a Jacques Torres hot chocolate.  Sated, I walked back to the High Line to enjoy the perfect weather and read (I finished The Help and bave moved on to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which I’m just waiting to cry over.)

At 2 I was sitting at The Meatball Shop on Stanton. The Meatball Shop opened in 2010 and has already expanded to have 3 locations in New York. The vibe is low-key, the servers are friendly, and the menu is affordable. Best meatballs ever. We topped off lunch with an ice-cream sandwich, all made in house and yummy as heck. Jess and I walked (thank God, otherwise I would have burst) down to orchard and Delancey, window shopping as we went.
3:45 marked the beginning of our tour at the Tenement Museum. The cool thing about the museum is its interactivity and intimate tours. You choose to hear about a group’s experience, and they vary from sweatshop workers to Irish immigrants. You can do a walking tour or “meet” the immigrants, portrayed by actors. We took a tour called Irish Outsiders. On the tour,we learned about NYC in the 1860s through the story of an Irish immigrant family. The Moores had moved to the building and only stayed for a year, in 1869. They had 3 daughters, and were living in a building full of German protestants, rather than other Irish families.
The first stop on our tour was the little courtyard where the outhouses were; the wives also did the family washing there. Four stories up lived the Moores. At the time, little was understood about health and sanitation. Disease was still regarded as a punishment for sin, not a result of germs and infection. That was problematic for immigrants especially, because they were often living 8-10 people per apartment, with maybe 20 apartments per tenement, and thousands and thousands of tenements in the city. There was no such thing as street cleaning, and garbage was piled high in the streets.
Not only were health conditions poor, malnutrition was a real problem. Malnourished mothers who couldn’t breast feed their babies would turn to milk peddled on the street, which often was rotten (but sellers would add to it so that one couldn’t tell the milk was swill until much too late). The Moores lived this, and little 5-month Agnes soon fell ill and died from malnourishment and scrofula. The infant mortality rate at this time was 27%. Mrs Moore bore 8 children; only four survived past toddlerhood. Only one had her own children, and it was through these descendants that the museum procured some photos and oral history about the family. The Moores only lived in that tenement for a year.
Twenty or so years later, a family of Russian Jews has mo ed into the building, the Katz family. Now the tenement is filled mostly with Romanian and Russian Jews; Yiddish is the primary language spoken. The Katz family has 3 daughters, and although it’s not so long after the Moores had lived there, things are changing. Science had progressed far enough such that people understood the origins of disease. Instead of swill milk being sold, milk began being pasteurized and sold in chilled bottles. Children did daily hygiene checks at school. All 3 of the Katz children lived into adulthood.
What I liked so much about the tour was not only how much I learned and retained, but also how much it made me think. The public issues raised in the tour–what kind of regulation should the government be able to put on landlords, how much should be legislated in terms of garbage collection, what the role of community is in an immigrant family’s life, whether we discriminate against modern immigrants in the same way as in the past — are all still relevant today.
One thing I know for sure is that if Americans had to lug coal and water up 4 stories multiple times a day for their lives,  we sure wouldn’t have an obesity problem.
If you’re ever in NYC and are interested in an informative and engaging tour, check out the Tenement Museum to see what most New Yorkers lived like in history.

So Sunday night I decided to try to get tickets to Upright Citizens Brigade, an improv comedy troupe. They have shows all week, but this one was free and I hadn’t the foresight to buy tickets before they sold out. The show we saw was called Assscat, and I have no idea why. The thing about free tickets anywhere is that obviously other people will want them, too. I did (minimal) research online to figure out how early we should arrive at the theatre, which is only a block or two from my aunt and uncle’s. Different people who had visited at different times of year had different advice. Some people got there around 6pm (tickets are distributed around 815) and were 44th in line. Some folks showed at 7 and got tickets just fine. So, just to be safe, Jessica and I met at 6 and lined up. 

We probably could have arrived a half hour later; we were 8th and 9th in line. Either way, we passed the time doing what we would have been doing anyway, which was talking. The difference was that we were doing it outside sitting on the sidewalk next to two very hungry Canadian kids who looked much too young to be smoking the cigarettes they had. One or the other was also always going into the store next door to get more food. At one point, he was eating brie, but just straight up, in bites. I guess I can’t blame him, brie is really good.
We successfully got our tickets, and at 930 the show started. Long form impov, at least what they did, involved a monologist telling a story based on a suggestion from the audience. Our audience suggested diamonds, and “caught red-handed.” What evolved from the guy’s monologue was an improvised representation of it, most of which was quite hilarious. UCB is sometimes  known for starting careers of comedians, and people like Amy Poehler and Donald Glover grace the stage. Although I only recognized the face of one performer (the blonde lady who’s supposedly Dutch on 30 Rock), the whole cast was very funny, and I left having laughed a lot.

After dim sum, I accompanied my aunt, uncle, and their two friends to the 9/11 memorial. It wasn’t necessarily something I had planned to do on this trip, but it was free and I was pretty curious what it would be like. So much controversy had surrounded the building of the monument, and although ten years have passed, the whole thing isn’t completely done. The main parts of the memorial are the footprints of the Twin Towers. To highlight what has now become open space, the architects designed two water falls. Instead of reaching high into the sky, your focus travels down with the flowing water.
   

My aunt and uncle had their wedding reception there. To my knowledge, the only time I was in the WTC was when I was also in utero; my mom was pregnant during that reception.
Everyone experienced 9/11 differently. My experience differs greatly from that of my family, who felt firsthand the terror of an attack on their city. For months, my aunt said, the smell of smolders clung to the city.
My memory of 9/11 is this:
I awoke to go to school. Our phone rang, and my mom’s friend advised us to turn on the television. The first tower had just been struck. Nobody knew what to think. We tried to get ahold of our relatives in the city, but phone calls were not an option. I was supposed to have a test that day in history. A few other students and I requested to take it later, and huddled in the office of one of the college counselors. Eventually we were notified that our loved ones were safe. But everything was different. Everything will always be different. Now many of my students are babies born after the millennium. Many of them were born in this post-9/11 world. Since their beginnings, the war on terror has raged. It felt odd having to describe that day, and the days after it, to children who can only imagine.
I’m glad I went to the memorial, if only to see where those towers once stood. Most symbolic of it all, though, was not the water falling or the names chiseled into the darkness. Rather, it was the lone pear tree that survived the attack. It was taken to Van Cortland park to rejuvenate, and recently moved back to ground zero. Yes, it still has slings helping to hold up some of its branches. But so do all of us.