Last Friday night night, Emily and I went to the Allen Room for Lincoln Center's "An Evening With Alan Menken." For anyone who doesn't know, Alan Menken wrote the music for almost every Disney animated movie in the last 20 years, and other cool things like Little Shop of Horrors. First of all, check out the ridiculous performance space here. It's gotta be the coolest space in the city.
As for Alan's performance, it was amazing. He played every song you could want him to, including some great and less popular stuff like "Out There" from Hunchback and a whole Newsies medley. He performed some songs with a backup band and 3 female backup singers he referred to as his "Menkenettes," and some were just the man and his piano.
In between songs, he told short stories about what was going on his life when a certain song was written. Some of the most interesting stories came when he mentioned that his late lyricist partner Howard Ashman had wanted to work on Newsies, but he was too sick in the late stages of AIDS that he simply wasn't able to. Another interesting insight was the story that when he was writing the beautiful song, "Will the Sun Ever Shine Again," (from Home on the Range) in the months after September 11th, that everyone at the studio connected with the song and really felt like it put into words what everyone was going through.
Basically, it was probably the best night of the quarter. Needless to say, I got chills when he performed one of my all time favorite songs, "Suddenly Seymour," and the night made it very clear, Alan Menken is Seymore Krelbourn.
You don't get to have nights like that one in many other cities. An intimate evening with one of today's greatest living songwriters. Good work, New York.
That Saturday consisted of some fun stuff, including Emily helping me take some pictures of myself in front of the giant Ashley Brown/Mary Poppins poster in the Marriott in Times Square. I also went up to check out Columbia University, and walked through a bit of Harlem on my way to the Museum of the City of New York. After dinner at the very tacky but fun Starlight Diner (The waiters and waitresses get microphones and belt out songs when they aren't serving tables), Emily and I saw Oliver Platt and Lauren Graham in the new revival of Guys and Dolls. It was great. They were both actually really good, and "Sit Down, You're rocking the Boat" brought the house down as it well should. Check out pictures from the weekend in this facebook album.
Then Sunday night, as most of you probably know, I lost my wallet. It was a bummer. I was stressed and never found it. Now it's just a pain having to get everything replaced. Oh, and it was especially bad since I had my social security card in there. Hopefully nobody steals my identity.
I've gotten by borrowing some money and writing Dan a check. Hopefully by tuesday my new atm card and passport will have arrived. Life will be a little easier then. It's weird to not have any identity. If I get hit by a bus, they might not even know who I am.
Let's see now, this weekend Dan's friends Alex and Julia came down from their co-ops in Boston for a visit, and yesterday we met Drew and went to the MOMA, which was quite cool, especially Broadway Boogie Woogie. Is it bad that's almost the only thing I remember from Art History? Just kidding. I do wish I could go here with Cindy Damschroder, though.
After the museum, we met up with Emily and went to Mars 2112 for dinner. Basically its this ridiculous restaurant themed to Mars. You even ride a motion simulator to get into the place. It was very fun in it's absurdity, but service was bad and the food was eh. If I'm going to pay that much for a themed dinner, I'd like to go somewhere I know the atmosphere and food will be good like my old friend, the Hard Rock.
After we wandered through Times Square a bit, we headed down to Soho but I guess technically ended up in Noho. We all got drinks at a cool little place called Think Coffee and played a mean game of scrabble before deciding it was time to head home and crash.
Today I got up and took three trains to get up to Flushing Meadows to check out the old World's Fair site. Most of the buildings and structures were unfortunately torn down after the fair ended, but a few are still around. Also, my pictures don't do justice to the size of any of these things. The Unisphere for instance, the giant steel globe, is 120 feet tall. It's huge!
The ruins of Philip Johnson's New York State Pavillion are pretty crazy too. All rusted and retro futuristic. It's pretty sweet.
What else do I need to explain? Ahh yes, inside the old New York City Pavillion, now the Queens Museum of Art, is the New York City Panorama. It's a 9,335 square foot model of the entire City of New York, outer boroughs and all, in a giant room. It's pretty insane. You could probably stare at it all day. I found my neighborhood and everything. Apparently during the fair, it was a ride and you got in these helicopter cars and "flew" over the model while an audio track explained what you were seeing. Now you walk on a walkway with a glass floor. It's still sweet and very impressive.
Well, after building a little structure out of pipe cleaners and straws to add to an art piece they wanted everybody to add to, I headed back to the train. It was cool to visit the park and see the remnants of something as sweet as the World's Fair. It'd be great to have another World's Fair soon. I guess the internet and Epcot kind of killed the World's Fair concept, though. Oh well. I do love Epcot. I'll probably add these and more pictures from the park to facebook at some point.
While riding the E home I missed the stop to transfer to the G, so I decided to just stay on the train all the way down to the L at 14th street. Instead of getting right on the L, though, I went up above ground in Chelsea and went into Chelsea Market which absolutely blew my mind in it's coolness. I think I'll be taking Mom back there when she comes out for her mini-visit.
I went back to Apostles for church tonight which was very good and it was great to see Amber there. She offered to make me dinner next week! Amazing, I can't wait.
Tonight we're supposed to get like 8 or 10 inches of snow in the biggest storm of the winter. We'll see. I hope not.
I know this post is obscenely long. I'm really just writing it for myself. I had a lot to chronicle. And I didn't even give details!
Oh well, I hope everybody has a great week. I'll try and have a midweek update of some sort, maybe where I can give some progress on the Good Morning Experiment.
Have a great week everybody! I know I plan to!
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