NYC Day #5

Ahh. Saturday morning. Nothing scheduled until 1:20pm. Most of the group meets at 9:30am to go to the Empire State Building. I accidentally lead the group through Little Korea- but thankfully the Empire State Building is hard to miss. Because we've done it before, the Coxes and us head over to the JP Morgan library. It's a really pretty museum- which has 3 Gutenberg bibles on permanent display. It also has his office- and- the man really liked his bibles because in part of his library, there are- no joke- over 1000 of them from all over the world. The Morgan museum also lots of manuscripts and sheet music from Mozart, Beethoven, Bob Dylan... but instead of those being on display, there was an old hunting manual. Oh well. It was still cool (and the gift shop had some cool books).

After that, we all had a hankering for peanut butter. We hopped in a cab (my first time) and headed down near Washington Square Park to a restaurant called Peanut Butter and Co. They make 6 different flavors of peanut butter (milk chocolate, while chocolate, fiery, cinnamon raisin, normal and some other kind I can't recall...). It was a really tiny restaurant so we all got our food to go (I got a white chocolate peanut butter marmalade almond sandwich- it was awesome) and we went to Washington Square Park, watched a woman loudly berate her drunken boyfriend and watched chess players try to lure people to play timed chess with them. We must not have looked like good players because we were not propositioned.

After lunch, my sister Arianne arrived at our hotel from Boston. We headed over with the group and saw, my favorite show of the trip, In the Heights. The show, created by Tony award winner Lin Manuel Miranda spends July 4th weekend in a small neighborhood in Washington Heights. Most of the people are immigrants from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. The music (rap mixed with traditional Broadway) was great (as were the performances) and the dancing (latin, hip hop, break dancing, salsa, etc.) was amazing. Our group was happy it won best musical two nights later.

Leaving the show, a thunderous downpour caused most of our group to get soaking wet- and me going crazy making sure everyone knew where to go for their evening show.

After getting 1/2 price tickets for The 39 Steps, Ari, Jackie and I went to Eatery (no bugs in the salads this time) and then over to the show. We were happy a lot of our students were at the show- because it was great. The script is word for word the screenplay of the Alfred Hitchcock film The 39 Steps- only performed by 4 actors. 1 girl plays 4 female roles (each with a different accent), 1 guy plays the leading man and, the best part, 2 guys play over 100 roles (including a marsh, thorn bush, etc.). It was so theatrical it was great.

After the show, we met some people that had gone to see Curtains and took them down to Union Square to go to Max Brenners. I got a white chocolate coconut frozen drink- that instantly gave me 75 cavities. In summary:

The JP Morgan Library- Go Bibles!

Peanut Butter and Company- Yum!

In the Heights- Chillaxious!

The 39 Steps- Theatricagenius!

Arianne- Bostonian! (and hotel floor crasher)

One more thing- it was really funny how nervous Jackie and her parents were when Ari crashed on the floor and I called to have a blanket and pillow brought up for her. Well, I guess it just Ray (although I thought it would be funny if Ray had pretended to be me at the door- with his sister wives Renae and Arianne. Jackie was not amused by this).