And now, more from the trip-o-logue

Each day during our trip, we kept telling ourselves we'd wake up early and go to see The Today Show or The Early Show, but as of Sunday we still hadn't managed to get enough get-up-and-go.  In fact, we barely grabbed some breakfast to go before heading off to St. Patrick's Cathedral for Mass.  It's one of those churches where you really can't see the altar very well and therefore has TV monitors attached to the big pillars so you can see what the pillar is blocking.  It's also one of those churches where you can't hear terribly well at times.  But, it's also one of those church experiences you need every so often.  It's such a grand tribute to God that you can't help but sit there in awe and take the time for personal meditation.  I can listen to the priest's sermon at home any week, but once in a while it's good to sit in such a place and see where your own meditations lead you.

After some good meditation, it was back to the busyness and gaudiness of Times Square -- what opposites!  We had lunch at one of the countless McDonald's in Manhattan (I'm sure the movie "Super-Size Me" told me exactly how many there are) overlooking the TKTS line and decided that the line wasn't bad at all.  So after our overpriced McNuggets, we hung out in the half-price ticket line for about 10 or 15 minutes and got tickets to a matinee of "The Producers."  This left us somewhere around 2 or 2 1/2 hours before curtain time -- just enough time to squeeze in the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty.  Since we were short on time, we took the subway to the Chambers Street stop, skirted around two sides of the WTC site, walked through Battery Park City and Battery Park, saw the Statue of Liberty from afar, and took the subway back from the South Ferry stop.  As has been our unintentional tradition on recent vacations, we ran into controvery on yet another trip.  We went to San Francisco in the middle of the gay marriage protests, we saw protesters in South Carolina about the Confederate flag, and while in New York they laid the cornerstone for the new Ground Zero memorial, amid protesters of course.  We couldn't quite see the cornerstone, but I later figured out it was on one of the two sides of the site we didn't walk along.



(As a side note, along the way we also ran across a little church/shrine to my patron saint, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.  It's tucked in strangely among the office buildings, but of course it predates everything around it.  We didn't have time to go in, but I'm glad we found it.)

We made it back in time for "The Producers" and it was amazing how poorly dressed we all were for the theater.  Matthew and I were in nice shorts and tops and we were probably one of the better-dressed couples there.  Matinees are definitely more relaxed than evening theater, and I think full of tourists just like us.  We chose to see the Producers fairly randomly when we were in the TKTS line and had to make a quick choice, and unfortunately I think we made the wrong choice.  Despite winning something like 12 Tonys, neither Matthew nor I cared terribly much for the show.  It wasn't the acting or production per se, but it was really just the whole script.  Of course we knew the general premise before going in (two producers set out to make the worst musical ever -- "Springtime with Hitler" or something like that -- in order to scam investors out of money but it becomes a surprise hit) so we were prepared for the Hitler and Nazi stuff.  But it wasn't that part that offended us; in fact that was the funniest stuff.  Rather, it was the over-abundance of cheap laughs -- the too-long gay director scene, the bad one-liners, the bodily function humor.  The rest of the audience just ate up the cheap laughs; we were much happier at the higher humor of "Assassins."  Thankfully the second act had far more big musical numbers and far fewer speaking scenes than the first act since the musical numbers were quite good.  Still, we probably should have chosen something else.

Following the theater, we grabbed a quick bite to eat -- authentic New York pizza -- and ran off to the East River to get a place for the fireworks.  They close off about 4 miles of the northbound FDR Drive and fill it with pedestrians to watch the Macy's fireworks.  We were at the farthest north section of the road (around 48th Street) and it turns out that was a lucky choice.  It wasn't very crowded in our section, but we heard that further south the crowds were much bigger.  We were there about 2 hours early and in retrospect really should have brought a blanket, snacks, a radio (to hear the music that went with the fireworks) and maybe a deck of cards.  I guess we weren't thinking ahead about that but were rather caught up in the excitement of seeing the largest fireworks display.  And it was quite the fireworks display!  There were three barges in the River and they all shot off the exact same show.  It was really pretty to see everything in triplicate and from the angle we were at it really looked like the ones closest to us were bigger, adding to the beauty.  We tried to take pictures, but I don't think they came out very good (especially the ones towards the end after the sky got really smoky).  Every time I see a fireworks show I try to take pictures, but they never capture the grandeur of the real thing, nor the atmosphere.  With the digital camera I realized this partway through this year's show, so I gave up on photos and just enjoyed the show instead.  Probably a wise move to live in the moment, and definitely a worthwhile moment.  One of the best fireworks shows I've ever seen.