We got married on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, 2014.
This year, the anniversary was also on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. Our eleventh, and fourth without him. That’s right, our marriage didn’t even make it to our eighth anniversary, and I’m still furious about that.
Last year, since it was the 10th, I made a bigger deal of it and took close friends out to dinner at the restaurant where we were married. I doubt if I’ll raise this anniversary up to that level again, but I do like to go out to dinner at one of the restaurants we loved and this year, since it was a Sunday, I had in mind I’d go to a matinee first.
Started the day with a cemetery visit, of course. Those now have hit a natural rhythm of about every two months, and if I can tie it to an event, I try to. (the next one will probably be on or around his late-October birthday, and then Christmas after that) It’s a nice peaceful walk to St. Michael’s, and I make a point to take off the headphones and stop listening to the podcasts or audiobooks or whatever for that final leg through the cemetery to the mausoleum, so I can get into the proper frame of mine. All those headstones. All those lives, what were they like?
There was a car or two at the mausoleum, but, luckily, no one was up on the third floor. I monologued at his crypt, and as always, was reminded that right now it looks pretty stark and although I don’t want to put up the vases for the (they only allow fake) flowers, I would like to put up a picture, I just have to find a good one. No rush, but I’d like to do it before next year, when I think Niece Samantha will be bringing the kids to visit.
Off to the diner across the highway for breakfast as per usual, and a walk back. And I had about an hour and a half before I needed to get cleaned up and leave again to go into town.
I’d bought tickets to the Broadway production of Moulin Rouge! (exclamation point is part of the title) We hadn’t gotten around to seeing it, and I’d forgotten that it had taken most of the Tonys when it opened pre-COVID. Charles (and I) had loved the movie, so I thought that would be a fun choice, and also Wayne Brady and Taye Diggs are in the cast now. I’d managed to get a nice aisle seat from the box office on Thursday.
MR does two shows on Sunday, which is weird. This curtain was at 1:30, quite early. And they announced at the last minute that Taye Diggs (playing The Duke) was out. (fun fact: my buddies Susanna and Patrick were in a community theater production of A Chorus Line many years ago in Rochester, which I saw twice. Donna Lynne Champlin was a very young Cassie, and Sheila was played by Taye Diggs’s mother! She was the best Sheila I’ve ever seen. When Richie does the “and I’m black” line, she gave the most perfect black-lady look at him, it was hilarious.) Diggs out was a shame, but I really did want to see Wayne Brady, who I don’t think I’d ever seen live before.
The pre-show is slinky sexy people in revealing costumes strutting languidly around the stage and balconies and posing. Oh, look, there are two boys making out, how naughty! Slink and strut. And then the MC makes his entrance and exhorts us to leave our troubles outside, because in here, everything is magical. Hmmm… have I seen this before somewhere? And then we got 20 minutes of cruise-ship-show nonsense with pop-song mashups, leaning heavily on Lady Marmalade. (I suspected there’d be a lot of this, which is why I hadn’t been in a rush to see the show.)
Once they got that out of their system, it actually got really good for the rest of Act 1. Christian was actually played by a guy named Christian, and he was really good. The two buddies (Toulous Latrec and a tango dancer – and are we now in Aladdin with the two buddies?) were fine. But the standout was Satine, who elevated the proceeding every time she opened her mouth, either singing or in dialogue. And she was the alternate! (Hailee Kaleem Wright)
Act 2 got silly again, particularly when they went into an absinthe fever dream (although I loved the glowing green bottles and glasses), and then we did get more cruise-ship-show nonsense during curtain call, which sort of dispelled the sad-hopeful ending energy they’d just set up.
Bottom line, I had a good time and I’m glad I saw it. Brady was excellent, and so was Miss Wright. Rarely are the performances a problem with Broadway shows. I was actually pretty impressed by how clever (and often quite granular) the pop-song usage was. But not really my sort of thing.
Also, and this is my own fault, some entertainments feel like you should being seeing them at night after having dinner and a couple of cocktails, and this is one of them. This isn’t a Sunday afternoon show.
I trundled up to 50th street afterward for an early dinner at The Palm. C and I used to go there frequently for pre- or post-theater. How that started was pretty funny – somehow at work, C got saddled with setting up a big conference dinner at The Palm in Vegas for his bosses, for a conference he wasn’t even going to. But he’s the one who ended up with all the reward points for the dinner, so we dined out on reward points several times. The Palm is basically a steakhouse, but it’s a lot of fun. It has Sardis-style celebrity caricatures on the wall. Food is great, but it’s big. For instance, I would have loved to get the fried calamari appetizer, but with my Zepbound appetite, that would have been game over for the meal.
I started with a cosmo (excellent) and enjoyed that while I perused the menu. Everything looked good, and if this was a local restaurant I went to every couple of weeks, I’d probably rotate my way through the menu, but you go to a steakhouse for steak, so I decided to get a filet with bearnaise sauce, broccolini on the side, and a glass of red. This was a nicely-sized amount of food for what I could handle (I didn’t finish the broccolini). The steak was also served with a round of what I thought was potatoes but turned out to be like the bottom slice of a head of garlic, roasted! That was a nice surprise, although I wasn’t entirely sure how you were supposed to eat it (although I managed quite a lot of it, spitting out skins discreetly). The steak was quite good, the right amount of pink.
As soon as I’d decided to go to The Palm, I knew I wanted to get their chocolate cake, even if I had to have them just wrap it up to take home. I’d never had it before, because every time C and I went, by the time we got to dessert, I was too full. But I was determined, dammit, and got that with a cappucino.
It was yummy! I didn’t finish it.
And I slunk off home and chilled for the evening. And that was that for that.
Happy Anniversary, angel, you were there in my mind’s eye across the table.
Oh, look, it’s the start of a school year. I have some events in town this week, including the start of Planets rehearsal. I took out my horn yesterday, got some work to do.
I’ll continue the Pinazoo posts soonest. Happy Fall!
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