Wicked Cool

My parents gave me tickets to see Wicked in New York for my birthday last weekend. (THANKS MOM AND DAD!)

So, after price-lining a hotel to no avail, and finally agreeing to pay out the *@&#*O&! for a hotel, we jumped on a Bolt Bus and headed up.

Here we are, waiting for the bus, minding our own business and taking arm-extended pictures of ourselves.

We got up to NYC around 2:00 p.m. and headed to our &#*@#* expensive (and supposedly nice) hotel...which wasn't ready for us. So, we headed off into the city with Alpha May, who is a great friend (and great tour guide, I must add).

Here we are taking the classic tourist picture in front of "the Rock." (I prefer to think of it simply as "the place where we may see Liz Lemon.")

After eating a heap of tacos from La Esquina (a Soho favorite thanks to Allie and Jenna) and topping it off with Pinkberry, we headed back to our hotel to get ready for the play.

Side note: We learned, at Pinkberry, that Allie is sometimes really dishonest. Like, for example, she paid for a mini, but when they gave her a small, she didn't protest. Just kidding, Allie, that's not dishonesty, that's just serendipitous (hey, don't you love that movie?).

Anyhow, we got back to the hotel at 7:00 p.m. to iron our clothes and head out to the play. But, as luck (or lack thereof) would have it, our room still wasn't ready. The offered us a drink in compensation (wait, is our time really that un-valuable to you?), and we strongly declined in favor of getting $100.00 off and free breakfast.

So, we changed in the public restrooms, where we tried not to touch the floor with our feet or our clean clothes. And we went to the play with wrinkled clothes. Oh well, it's dark in there, and I'm pretty sure that the wicked witch of the west could care less that my cotton skirt looked like it had been rolled up at the bottom of a backpack all day (oh wait...it was...).

Wicked was really cool. It wasn't life-changing like Les Mis or My Fair Lady, but the theatrics were amazing and it was really fun to see.

We didn't get the obligatory shot of us in front of the Gershwin with the Wicked sign in the background, but we did get the oh-so-necessary shots of us in Times Square.

We checked in to our hotel (finally) at 11:30 p.m. Yep, that's right.

We learned our lesson. Never go to NYC on the same weekend that the Salute to Israel parade is, well, parading.

After our wonderful, and wonderfully free, breakfast, we headed out into the city to do some walking around. Here's a picture of Blake at the public library and of me at Bryant Park. (I thought of doing some sort of model pose in honor of the fashion week locale, but opted for the I-am-looking-confusedly-at-a-map pose instead. Happy?)

It was sometime after this point that Allie joined up with us. And we all got stuck on the East Side because 5th avenue was absolutely packed with Hebrew-singing, drum banging, banner waving Israel supporters.

After finally making it back to the hotel, picking up our bags, waiting 18 minutes for a metro that never came, jumping on the wrong metro, getting off 5 avenues away from where we needed to be, sprinting across those 5 avenues with our backpacks swaying (and large earrings dangling..note to self: big earrings are not good for exercise or related activities), we got to our bus just in time. Just in time meaning that we jumped on the bus, sat down sweatily, and 30 seconds later the driver closed the door and pulled away from the curb.

We made it.

Did I mention that we learned our lesson about never going to NYC on the same weekend that the Salute to Israel parade is, as I said before, parading?