Day 14: New York City

When I went on my mission to Rochester, NY, I never anticipated how many people would ask me how I liked New York City.

The truth was, I had never been to New York City. It was outside my mission boundaries (by several hours). It wasn't until this trip that I actually had the opportunity to see it.

The ridiculous thing about it was that we only spent a day there, part of which was taken up by a Broadway play.

For this reason, most of what we saw was from the inside of the bus.

Like Ground Zero:

Trump Tower:

And Radio City Music Hall:

We did take the Staten Island Ferry

to see the Statue of Liberty.

We stopped in Chinatown to do some shopping. We also stopped at a street vendor to get authentic New York City hot dogs:

And we got off the bus briefly, just to walk through a small corner of Central Park with a tribute to John Lennon:

When we stepped off the bus, I snapped a picture of this man:

Who I am pretty sure is this man:

Who is this man? His name is Noah Emmerich. I know him from Frequency, The Truman Show, and Miracle. He played the second banana in all of them.

I was so distracted by this celebrity sighting that I stepped in dog poop. I got it pretty well cleaned off my shoe before heading back on the bus.

Eventually, we headed to Times Square, where we killed some time before the Broadway show we were going to see.

We saw this:

Found ourselves on the Times Square camera (we're by the top of the 2):

Had a cupcake (even though, according to Jack Donaghy, people in New York are off cupcakes and back on doughnuts):

And had dinner and fabulous cheesecake at Junior's before heading here:

The sign is a little hard to see in this picture, so here's a better one:

Seeing a musical on Broadway is pretty high on my bucket list. I am a huge fan of musicals, whether they be new shows or old classics like The Sound of Music or Oklahoma. Add to that getting the opportunity to see Kristin Chenoweth (the original Glinda in Wicked) perform, and have the opportunity to see a cast originate a production, and you can imagine how excited I was.

Immediately after I snapped this picture of the theater, I was chastised by an usher. Note that the show has not started yet, and that the seats aren't even close to being filled yet. A look at reviews from regular Broadway-goers leads me to believe that this is how the ushers there are.

The musical was fabulous. This production was a revival, and it had the look of the 60's era for which it was originally written. It looked like Mad Men. The songs were written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the book was written by Neil Simon, and this production included popular songs like "I Say a Little Prayer" and "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." I couldn't get over the fact that I was actually watching Kristin Chenoweth. And while I wouldn't say that Sean Hayes (of Will and Grace) was much of an initial draw, he did a pretty good job with his part.

The only bad part of the whole day was that our show got out late, and we had to leave before the curtain call was over in order to make it back to our bus on time.