So, Monday the 13th was the 30th anniversary of the day I met Charles. Or, as I’ve sometimes put it over the years, “I woke up still unenlightened. But by bedtime, I’d found out there was a Charles Keiser in the world.” It was and probably will be always the best thing that’s ever happened to me. This is how we met.
But, as I opined to my shrink this week, an anniversary hits differently when it’s no longer about ‘look how far we’ve come since then’ and is now ‘gosh, that was a nice thing that happened. Shame the whole thing’s over now.’ Which is not to say it shouldn’t be celebrated, but it’s definitely different, and much less urgent.
So I didn’t really do much about it on Monday, waited until Wednesday, which was the ‘first date’-iversary and the official curtain-rise on the Charles & Eric show
I came back from my trip determined to take more advantage of my trips to the office, which put me within blocks of not only Broadway, but (in the winter months) a skating rink. So I had plans for Tuesday. I brought my skates in and made a reservation at Bryant Park for lunchtime, and then snuck out around 10:45 and got a ticket to that evening’s Gypsy.
The rink in Bryant Park is not great, but it is free if you bring your own skates and lock. The criteria for getting in and what facilities were available to you changed drastically during COVID time (for a season or two, they didn’t allow you to check bags or use the lockers). Now it’s kind of the way it was in the olden days – but I have to remember to bring two locks because the self-serve lockers are really small. I’d checked to see when the Zamboni times were, and the obvious ‘sign-in’ time was 12:30, right in the middle of a Zamboning. (heh) Showed up, changed into my skates, which is always an arduous process, particularly when you haven’t done it in many months. Then ready to go – and they decide to have a little performance after the ice is cleaned – some local club gave us three ice performances, which were all lovely, but I was like, “Dudes, I’m in my skates already and I’m on my lunch hour, wrap it up.”
This was very much an experiment. I’d been holding off on skating until my weight dropped down to where it was before the heart thing (last time I skated). But I gave up on waiting – so I’m probably 10-15 pounds heavier. I’m always scared of falling on the ice, even though I don’t very often, and especially of having trouble getting back up. But ‘success’ this Tuesday was ‘can you get your act together enough that you actually got out on the ice’. Did you check your skate bag to make sure you had everything? Do you remember your locker combination? Did you bring your skates to work? Did you make a reservation at the rink? Did you show up to the rink? YES, I did all that.
So the fact that I got out there and did basically one lap and called it a day isn’t great, but it was a success by those measures. I felt very unsteady. I’d hoped that after a minute of WTF, my legs etc. would remember how it worked and it would all click in. It did not. So… that’s a shame. But easily addressable – I need more leg strength, I do need to keep losing weight, and I just need to keep getting on the ice and build up both my stamina and my confidence.
So the plan is to try to go skating at lunchtime every time I go to the office, unless the weather is miserable, or I have some sort of conflict. And maybe try to go on the weekends, too (either there or one of the Queens rinks). I really don’t want to let this atrophy – au contraire, I want to make it a regular thing and get coachings and work my way up through the skills. So… let’s do that.
Gypsy ticket was for 7:00, so I did my usual pre-theater ‘drink a cosmo very slowly at 9th Avenue Saloon” routine. My ratio of ‘that was a fun time at the bar’ to ‘that was really boring’ is usually about 2:1, but it really depends on whether I find myself in conversation with someone. I need to be just a tad more forward about that, not necessarily in a pickup sense, just in a ‘please talk to me so I’m not bored out of my mind’ sense. I used to be so good at that in my 20’s, just walk right up to someone and say, ‘hey, wanna talk?’. But I was young and foolish then. Anyway, this time, the man and woman being loud and boisterous next to me pulled me into their conversation. They were both from out of the country (she Australia, he England) but had been working a booth at and just finishing up a trade show/conference at the Javitz center. Anyway, they were fun to talk to and filled the time nicely.
Off to Gypsy. As I’ve said before, this is a show I admire more than love, but was happy to see it again. My real interest was to see how Audra was going to manage this role she really wasn’t an obvious fit for. Not actingwise, she can do anything, but vocally. Broadway roles have fachs just like opera roles, even though they don’t really talk about it that way, and Mama Rose is a Brunnhilde, which Audra is not.
Anyway, I had a great seat in the orchestra, off to the side. They had the full orchestra as advertised, but as always in the modern Broadway pit, even if the orchestra is there in the room with you, it still sounds miked and tweaked to death, which it is. Fine Bway-level playing.
The cast was excellent across the board, no surprise there. The only name I knew other than Audra was Danny Burstein, perfect for Herbie. I didn’t get to see Brittney Johnson as Agnes/Amanda (she’s famous for being the first black Glinda on Broadway), but the understudy was fine. The three strippers were terrific, of course. Such a weird show, let’s just hand 15 minutes to these three women who you’ve never seen before and let them run off with the show with one hilarious number.
I’ll spent a few sentences about the ‘can these characters be black’ issue. It’s not an issue for me – unless the play is specifically about race, I’m happy to go with any casting. I just plunk my mind in the alternate universe where their skin color is not relevant. I did see called out that the child newsboys (who are black) are replaced with white newsboys when they grow up, which was thought of to be an unstated effort by Rose to help get their act into ‘better’ houses. Also, June was (I think) deliberately lighter-skinned and I think they tried to, as part of the act, make her up as light as possible, but this was never referred to in the script, of course.
Audra was wonderful, as expected. She certainly acted the hell out of it, and it was a Mama Rose for the ages – but all Mama Roses are ones for the ages, you don’t do the role on Broadway unless you’re ready to tackle it. Vocally, she made it her own – she sang sweetly when she could, and she never (audibly) pushed. She’s so well-trained vocally that she just made it work for her and you never felt like she was ‘singing on the principal’ or doing herself damage – but also never cheating the score. Sure, she changed keys from the score, why not? Much as I loved Bernadette in the role, she was clearly husbanding her voice all the way through the evening. She has even less of a Rose voice than Audra does. Patti, on the other hand… perfect vocally for the role, as well as histrionically. (Yes, I’m a big gay, all these women are on a first-name basis with me.)
Louise is the biggest other role and all three of the Louises I’ve seen have been top-notch: Tammy Blanchard, Laura Benanti and now Joy Woods. Woods was great at being mousy, but being quietly competent, and then coming out of her shell once she’d found her talent. Benanti was more hilariously talentless, I think.
The production? It was fine. As far as I could tell, it looked like all the other Gypsy’s I’ve seen.
So, yeah, go see it just to see one of our best performers tackle one of the genre’s pinnacle roles, fabulously.
My life is so nicely set up I very rarely have to worry about the next day when I get home late – I just work from home and sleep in. But that wasn’t going to work this week. So the fact that I got out of Gypsy at 10:00 on a Tuesday night, and hadn’t had dinner yet… normally, I’d go back to Jackson Heights, but I wasn’t sure if I’d find anything open. I decided to go west on 44th to go to Don Giovanni, but it looked quite closed – so I ducked in an Irish bar one door down whose kitchen was still open (and was joined by other Gypsy audience members who I had seen there). Had some quick sliders (which were yummy) and a bottle cider, then off to home. I didn’t get home until after 11:00 and didn’t get to bed until midnight.
This was an issue because I not only had to go back into the office on Wednesday, but (a) I had to dress pretty for my fancy dinner, and (b) I had to neat up for the house cleaner. However, the house cleaner emailed me that she was sick and could she come on Friday instead, so that was unlucky for her and very lucky for me.
Dressing pretty was a bit of a conundrum – it was cold, so I needed extra layers I wouldn’t otherwise need. My suit didn’t fit particularly well, so I ended up with slacks (over long johns – you’re welcome), a turtleneck and a blazer. It looked fine, and wasn’t that cold.
Nice normal workday, no skating or ticket buying, as I had to leave early. Up to my dentist’s office, right by the City Center back entrance I went in and out of a zillion times when we had Big Apple Corps rehearsals there. (one fun moment back then – I’m standing by the receptionist, when a man came in and asked where the Paul Taylor Dancers were. Turned out it was Paul Taylor!)
The restaurant where C and I had our first date was up by where he used to live, 85th and Broadway, and is long gone. But I’ve been trying to do this solo celebrations at nice restaurants where we celebrated anniversaries and birthdays and such before. This dinner was at Jean-Georges, which we’d been to once before, years ago, for a previous anniversary. It’s in a Trump building (yuck), the one right north of Columbus Circle, but I’d remembered having a great time there. (Fun fact: before I knew him, when quite a young thing, C spent years managing the restaurant at the Mayflower hotel pretty much in the same spot. It’s gone now. He had such wonderful celebrity stories from that time.) My reservation was at 5:30 (couldn’t get a normal time) but I was earlier still. They didn’t have a problem seating me, and I had a great little table and view out of all three windows: east towards Central Park, south towards the globe and Columbus Circle, and west towards the Time Warner Center.
As I try to do at a nice restaurant, I stayed in the moment – no Kindle reading and very little phone interaction for this meal. I don’t remember what our options had been the first time, but at the moment they were only doing tasting menus. I got the ‘omnivore’ six-course menu. My waiter, Ed, was totally lovely and fun and of course asked me if I was in from out of town (‘no, I live in Queens’) and what the special occasion was. “Well, it’s the 30th anniversary of the first date with the man who eventually became my husband. Unfortunately, he’s now my late husband…” He was properly sorrowful and kind about it.
They had specialty cocktails, but I just decided to try their cosmo, which was quite nice. They started with bread (three kinds: sourdough, sesame and one of those really dense breads with unground seeds in it) and some sort of really fancy butter drizzled from the udders of magic cows or such. (there was a lot of info conveyed about where the ingredients came from. I smiled and nodded a lot.) I was determined not to just plough through the bread plate, much as I wanted to, but did eat (eventually) four of the six slices. Although it was all good, the sourdough didn’t rise up to the stuff I’d just had in San Francisco, alas.
There were three amuse-bouches, which you can see in the first picture below. One was a sashimi on crispy rice thing, the first was also a fish thing, maybe? and the third was an onion soup. I always make sure to ask what’s finger food and what’s not, and this all was (the soup was in a handled cup). All great, of course.
The six courses were:
- Egg toast with caviar and herbs. This was absolutely delicious, even the caviar. (I’m not a caviar fan)
- Yellowfin tuna with soba cha ponzu, kohlrabi and camelina oil.
(And by this time I was drinking white wine.) - King crab with nishiki rice, vermouth , nori and dill.
- Halibut with herbal butter, fennel gremolata, sunflower ajo blanco
(and now I ordered a glass of red) - Wagyu Strip Loin with shelling beans, chantarelle mushrooms and lovage
I’ll get to dessert in a bit. Every dish was wonderful, although I was not sure why it was all fish until the steak. I really do not know what half those ingredients are. I’m not a fennel fan, but it worked in the halibut dish. They were all (appropriately) small portions.
6. Passion Fruit Flower with hazelnut dacquoise and passion fruit jus. You can see this in the later pictures. It was super-pretty and he advised me to cut it up ‘like a pizza’ so you got all the ingredients in one bite. I was also gifted (I think) the chocolate dessert, along with the little candy sign that said With You Always, very kind and (literally) sweet.
Ed also wheeled out this cart with a tray of teeny chocolates and pastries and odd things like champagne gummy bears and put together a plate of what I asked for. That was a lot of fun!
I had him wrap up the chocolate dessert, and he also gave me an almond ‘breakfast bread’ all nicely wrapped up which I had for breakfast the next day.
It was a great great meal. Also a really really expensive one. I hadn’t expected it to be on a Per Se level, either experience or price-wise, but it was both. But that was not a problem, it was a beautiful experience.
I don’t expect to be treating all anniversaries and birthdays like this by any means. But this was a big one, and kind of wraps up the year of Big Events that 2024 was largely about.
Coming up, more trip reports, and a very packed weekend of culchah.
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