can't...focus...need...zzzzzzz

2 weeks of straight work....

6th 18 hour day in a row...

next day off is next Monday

this is Tuesday (I think)...

I go to bed and fall asleep instantly and wake up feeling slightly drunk from the lack of sleep and thinking about shoes and gloves and whether I pulled the showgirl costume so that it can get altered.

We're supposed to open tomorrow night.

Everyone on the crew has started to talk about sleep like it's some kind of mythical land we'll never visit again.

Living the dream...

Goodbye, for now

Oh, my good lord. It's been the longest couple of days.

This is what our room looked like yesterday. Mike is sitting at the computer and our amazing stitcher Ana Marie is on her knees cutting out patterns on the floor. Those black boxes behind are the gondolas.

Please note the complete lack of space...

I did dyeing this room. You can see my dye pot straight ahead on the floor, on a portable single burner butted right up next to the dry combustible wooden gondolas... This is the state of my last week of work in NYC.

And this is me sewing the sausage panniers, show girl stuff. One of the girls wears sausages, one wears pretzels and one is a Valkyrie with an enormous beer stein. German humor :)

And speaking of humorous, I witnessed a funny My Fair Lady moment the other day. The Wardobe assistant, Heather, came in looking for their shoes. The costumes for this show came from Britain so all the shoes are in British sizes, which are lower numbers than ours. An American woman's 7 is like a British size 5. So she's hunting through all these shoes trying to compute the British sizes to American and find shoes that will fit her actors with no luck. She needs 8's and 9's and can only find the equivalent of 5's and 6's. She goes to tell Jim and then comes back in the room with a look on her face. I asked her what was going on and she says "Jim says, 'these are all custom made shoes! Can't they just squeeze in??' So now I get to go to rehearsal and ask the actresses which of Cindarella's stepsisters they want to be. Heel or toe??" and she mimes brandishing a knife.

So while I'm laughing Heather starts hunting through her ipod muttering "what kind of music do I need here... ah... Bookends. 'time it was and what a time it was...' indeed..." And then she heaves up the bag of shoes and says "and now I have to plow through NY traffic with this huge bag. And By The Way! Who thought that giving New Yorkers umbrellas was a good idea??" she drops the shoes and puts her hands over her eyes and says "I'm like this all week 'my eyes my eyes!'" And she's so right about that. We've had torrential rain for days and New Yorkers are abrupt and "move over!" enough without umbrellas. Now the sidewalks are like a gauntlet...

So that was yesterday and today was load out, which means that we move all those gondolas onto a truck and then go over to Chelsea and help Ingrid load out all the props and then all that stuff goes to Atlantic City so we can load it in to the theatre there tomorrow. Well, the gondolas are heavy and the sidewalks of NYC are crowded so you can do the math there. Fortunately we had a slew of unemployed actors helping us - all funny and fast moving and willing to work really hard for their $100.

We moved our costume gondolas without issue and then moved the truck to Chelsea and couldn't find a parking space for a semi (no surprise when finding a parking spot for a Vespa means high fives and congratulatory drinks all around). It took 2 hours of the truck circling the block and the driver getting crabbier by the moment before someone moved and we could park the truck.

But even then, our loading ramp is right in the crosswalk, as you can see. And the studio is half way up the block. You haven't lived until you've seen a girl hoist a styrofoam tank - decorated with sequins - onto her shoulder and walk down the block to put it in the truck. And the experience is completely enhanced by the blase looks of the new yorkers around her. I don't think she got many second looks. No matter how weird it gets the new yorkers have seen weirder...

I'm just glad that our ranks of Nazi soldier puppets - for the play within this play - were nicely covered. The idea of explaining the swastikas to the passers by gives me a headache.

Here's Mike hanging out with the prop trash can...

It took 2 more hours to load the props into the truck and then we were on the road for AC. So far we've walked through the theater and I've met more people than I can remember. Tomorrow we load in at 8AM. Yawn...

It's after midnight so I'm out. More later as I have time...

It's like Christmas, only with cheese

Woke up this morning, not so hungry. No surprise...

Ate a little breakfast and then had mostly pretzels and water the rest of the day and then Bet wanted to go to Harlem for dinner. She kept saying "doesn't chicken and waffles just sound amazing??"

So I tell her to research a couple of places, since I had to work, and we met at the subway station and trekked up to Harlem.

It's very weird to be the minority in the space of 10 minutes. Such a dramatic shift from one subway stop to another.

So we're walking around and I'm acutely conscious of being completely out of my element. Whereas Bet is wandering around wide-eyed, pointing out the architecture, telling me little stories about the Harlem Renaissance and generally acting like it ain't no thing... How great is that?

The first place we tried was closed - the M&G Diner - but the second place was sensational, Sylvia's on 127th and Lennox.

We had barbequed ribs and fried chicken with mashed potatoes and collard greens and macaroni and cheese with Harlem beer, called Sugar Hill. Neither of us could even finish our food, I think we might still have been suffering from the eat fest of yesterday (though I did forget to mention that we spent several afternoon hours between meals in The Strand, the largest bookstore in the nation boasting 18 miles of books on 4 floors. And frankly, looking at books is hungry work... So it wasn't all eating. It was eating and reading and walking and more eating and then talking about the eating and reading...)

Anyway, we had to try dessert (it's soul food! You have to have dessert!) so we had the homemade banana pudding, which was good but not great. Needed more wafers... And then as we're sitting around the table letting our food setttle I suggested maybe another beer? and Bet wanted to go to The Sullivan Lounge, a landmark neighborhood bar. So two white girls walk into a Harlem bar... which sounds like it should be the beginning of a joke.

Tiny little bar, all painted turquoise blue and decked out with blue and white streamers and balloons and silvery tinsel and wall to wall photographs of every famous person who had ever walked in the bar. P. Diddy, Rev. Al Sharpton, Dizzy Gillespie, Bird Parker, etc. etc. etc. Crazy place and they weren't expecting us. The bartender - Bobo - a tall statuesque woman with the longest fire engine red nails asked us what we wanted to drink. And I'm thinking low-key, we've already caused enough of a fuss, just get a drink and sit around quietly. But my lovely little sister is looking around - wide eyed - and asking for all these drinks that the bartender either doesn't know how to make, doesn't have the ingredients to make or just doesn't want to make. Finally I said "I think I'll have a Heinekin." and the bartender just looks at me with relief and says "thank God! I like you already!"

Finally Bet ordered a corona and watching the bartender try to stuff the lime slice in the top without getting her nail stuck in the lime and jerking it back out, well, that was funny :) So the girl next to us strikes up a conversation and people come and go and occasionally there's a small group of men outside the window peeking in at the white girls in the bar but overall it was totally cool and without any drama.

So then we came home and ate cheese. Well, we made a brief stop at the Empire State Building but decided that $18 on a cloudy night was too much to pay for the observation tower so we looked at the commerative plaque and then...left.

And then ate cheese.

Bet is taking some cheese with her. Chris, enjoy!

Is that Babbo or booby??

It's been the longest week where work is concerned and we aren't going to dwell. Let me just say this for the record: Atlantic City will be fascinating... I'm not sure how much I can write about it but I'll do my best.

Also, for the record, I may need to password protect this site. I'll let you know before that happens.

And also for the record, I turned down a job with Cirque du Soleil last week. I may live to regret that...

So in other news, Bethany has been in town since Thursday night. I had to work on Friday and Saturday so she amused herself - I'll let her write about that and you can read about it if you go to her site next week sometime after she gets home (you know, maybe...). And note my cute earrings! You can buy them from my friend Kateri here.

But today - Sunday - we had the day off and the whole city to explore and WAY too much to see in the time we had. So we made up for it by eating our way from one part of the city to another. And what better place to start than where Chinatown meets Little Italy.

Our breakfast motto.

And we did it proud.

Yes, mom, that's pie and cake and cookies for breakfast (I didn't put sugar in my coffee, do I get points for that?). Even I felt a little bit bad about it - and certainly more than a little bit bad once I had finished my 5 pounds of breakfast sugar.

To readjust our blood sugar we walked around Chinatown.

Little Italy and Chinatown literally run up against eachother.

On one side of the street you see Chinese characters on the signs and on the other you see Vicente's Pizza Parlor.

On the Chinese side are frogs in a bucket awaiting execution. On the Italian side are women named Marcy selling us tiny t-shirts for Pippa that say "Little Italy" with a fuzzy rose underneath and commenting on all the "gorgeous foreign men" she gets to see on a regular basis.

Bet and I agree that if we lived in NYC - or "when" on my part - we would choose this neighborhood because it's fascinating and all the good eating is down here.

About an hour later, Bet needed something savory so we started looking at all the Vietnamese Bahn Mei places and talking about pork sandwiches, but then we stumbled on this place.

And the day really picked up . Bet saw the sign and decided that what her palate really needed to clear all that sugar was a piece of cheese. Well, it was a busy place but the brothers in charge weren't in any hurry. They happily greeted regulars and answered questions as if there was no rush.

We wandered over to where we could see the counter and wait our turn and had the incredible good fortune to stand next to two women who were regulars and were buying their weight in cheese. The first time Sal, the guy behind the counter, cut off samples for them he looked over at us and cut us some samples too. Well, we were off to the races! So Bet and I sampled just about everything in the shop as the women bought their cheese, asked questions about how to eat everything and got all kinds of advice.

By the time our turn came around, we sampled the few remaining cheeses we hadn't tried, got the low down on the shop itself - it's been around since 1910 and was originally owned by the brothers' great-grandfather. Now two brothers and their sister run the place and make all the cheese on site.

The sausage is local, but they don't make it there. (note the pressed tin ceiling!) So we bought several pounds of cheese - do I have access to a refrigerator?? no. Will I even be in my hotel room anytime soon?? no. Was it simply impossible not to purchase several pounds of cheese? Clearly, yes. So we walked out with our cheese (smoked mozarella, crucolo, aged provolone and dolce gongonzola) and bread and antipasti... and while carrying our cheese and bread and antipasti walked straight to the pizza parlor for lunch. It seemed very reasonable at the time.

Watched the guy make pizza as we ate his pizza - fresh mozarella, fresh ricotta, thick tomato sauce and super crispy wood-fired crust for $2.50 a slice! Delicious. I had a local Brooklyn lager and Bet drank wine and we talked about how great the cheese shop was. There's nothing better than eating great food while talking about other kinds of great food!

After lunch we hit Chinatown again and walked past 2 guys with bubble tea. "Bubble tea! that sounds fantastic!" so we tracked the place down and had some flavored milk tea (Bet had taro, which I think tastes like I'm sucking on a chalkboard eraser, and I had black sesame, which was delish) with big black tapioca beads in the bottom and a huge straw so you can slurp them up. At this point, believe it or not, we're talking about how full we are... Crazy, right??

So Bet suggests coffee - seriously. She wanted to go to this place in Greenwich Village, supposedly the best coffee in NYC. We take a train downtown so we can switch to the uptown train and then walk several dozen blocks - in the rain - and as we're walking through this residential neighborhood we walk past a door that says BABBO.

Bet stops and says "Babbo? Like Mario Batali's Babbo??" I say, "maybe..." we look at the menu and sure enough, it's Italian and the prices look right (expensive). So we look at eachother and say "maybe for dinner?" And Bet says "if we eat early enough, we can save the cheese for a late night snack!" Clearly we're related.

So we go to Joe's and have coffee and a snack and discuss whether we should go drop $300 on dinner. Somehow the fact that we weren't seeing a broadway show that night factored in (we're actually saving money!) and I think the sugar and cheese also factored in because we verified that Babbo was indeed Mario Batali's restaurant and that it was our dinner place for the night. We finished the coffee, decided we didn't time to go home and change out of our jeans and flip-flops so we'd have to see if they'd take us the way we were.

Here's the main thing I have to say about Babbo. They were incredibly gracious, they treated us like we had come in dressed in black tie and there was no snobbishness. As we walked in, the hostess looked at our bag of cheese and said "would you like us to check that?" Um...ok. So we checked our cheese. Really. I kind of hoped it was not warm in the coat check room, but it seemed unreasonable to ask Babbo to keep their rooms at a crisp 56 degrees in case their customers needed to check groceries...

And wow. Crazy good, that food. 8 courses, 5 different kinds of pasta and 3 desserts, each with a wine pairing. An amazing smoky red wine with the pasta bolognese was our favorite and the first pasta was black tagliatelle - made with squid ink - with roasted corn and budding chives. I am out of words to describe how good it was.

However, between the 5th and 6th courses, Bet looks out the window in the apartment across the street and then gets a weird look on her face and says " oh my gosh, the woman across the street is walking around in her bra - no scratch that, she just took it off. She's naked. There's a naked woman in the window!"

Apparently, the exhibitionist across the street takes her clothes off in front of her plate glass window in full view of every guest at Babbo approximately once or twice a week. No reason, just does it. The waiters all just shrugged when we asked about it. Yeah, she does it all the time. yeah, she knows there's a restaurant here. No, she doesn't seem to care.

Alright then. Welcome to NYC, where you get dinner and a show. So if you come to the city, you want the top floor dining room at Babbo to get the full view :)

I'll be sad to see Bet go on Tuesday. It was a delicious day.

And I now have a bunch of cheese chilling in front of my air conditioner. We almost forgot to get it from Babbo's coat check. Can you imagine??

in lieu of something interesting...

I give you, my hotel room:

And while you are saying to yourself 'If I imagined living inside a dinner plate, this is probably what it would look like..." I have to then say "Au Contraire!"

Because these are monkeys...

Why oh why oh why would anyone make monkey wallpaper??

I have no other news today. It's been a little crazy and we now have a lot of work to do. I'm reserving some judgement and seeing how this all pans out.

Bethany comes in tomorrow!

7 different kinds of annoying

Problem list:

1. We now have two shows. One is the regular show and the other is the 90 minute version that will play in Atlantic City.

2. Each show requires a different tracking system to figure out where actors will be when they need help with costume changes.

3. We have 2 fewer dressers than we need to actually do this job in Atlantic City because someone who cannot be named sent in a contract with 10 dressers listed instead of 12 and no one checked it before signing off. And now they (the production company) say they have no money.

4. They are taking us out to a free happy hour tomorrow. Could we cancel the happy hour and hire a dresser instead?

5. Mike has to do all the tracking by himself because I haven't worked the show and thus don't know where the costume changes happen etc.

6. He spends a lot of time scrunched in a chair staring despondantly at his computer screen while I listen to my ipod and sew on labels.

7. I have a Master's degree. I'm just saying...

8. We actually bought a bulletin board and push pins with numbers on them and now we are going through the show scene by scene figuring out where the actors and dressers are actually located in an attempt to visualize potential catastrophes.

9. It might be helping but it requires 14 different lists of Mike's and he has to reference them all and dictate to me while I stick pins in a board and say things like "dresser #1 is now dressing 4 people simultaneously and 5 people have exited stage left with no one to help them... oh, and dresser #4 has somehow disapparated on stage right and reappeared within seconds on stage left. she's clever..."

10. This is the last show where I work as an assistant... And right now Mike is getting paid too little and I am actually overpaid for the amount of work I'm doing.

NYC? still beautiful. My sister, bethany? visiting in 2 days! Excited? yes!

later ya'll...

On my own, pretending you're beside me

Had a baby bear/Goldilocks sort of day today. Earlier this week it was the "damp inferno" that Kateri referenced. Then yesterday was buckets of rain and I actually bought a sweatshirt because it was too cold to be out without one.


Today? Just right... Absolutely gorgeous day. So I walked up to the Guggenheim.





The building is famous, and rightly so. It's almost the best part of the whole deal.





The art collections aren't that well curated, in my opinion. You can tell the difference between the permanent collections (old tired looking arrangements with bad lighting) and the newer temporary collections that have much better curation. Which is weird, because the building is designed for viewers. You just follow the curving walkway and see everything as you go, ducking occasionally into the offshoot rooms. And yet still...


It's particularly noticeable in contrast to the Met, which is so beautifully curated that even squashed by 2,000 damp strangers, some pieces still take your breath away.

It probably didn't help that there's a lot of Kandinsky in the Guggenheim and I don't care for him. But there were some amazing Picassos and a couple of Renoirs I had never seen. However for every great painting by a renowned artist there was a strange contemporary "sculpture" installation. The kind of art that isn't. A wicker basket with a big metal tube through it. A sheet of gold leaf on the ground. A series of fluorescent lights installed on the ground in a half circle. This is why people think contemporary art is a joke.

And you can't put that stuff next to anything byPicasso, Miro, Calder or even Kandinsky and think that they all belong in the same category.

And unlike the Met, you aren't supposed to take pictures in the Guggenheim. However, everyone had their cameras out and the guards were just watching and looking bored. So, here's my boldly defiant self portrait in one of the installations, a room of steel and chrome. I also have a video of one of the installations, and when I figure out how to upload it, I'll post it.

Since it was such a beautiful day, I walked back through Central Park - where everyone in NYC had decided to spend the day. There was quite a bit worth seeing...

Including this fine gentleman, Thoth (who, I found out later, had his moment in the sun on "America's Got Talent!" Since Thoth is playing in Central Park, I'm guessing he had no talent...) But he does have a gold lame loincloth and his performance consists of dancing, while singing in a sort of primitive yodel and playing the violin. I think I can safely say there's nothing quite like it.


These guys were astonishing dancer acrobats who had a routine all worked out. They call their style "afrobatics"' and themselves Meek da Freak and Sugar Ray (so when they show up on David Letterman, you will have heard about them here first!). The picture right above is Sugar Ray jumping down the steps on his hands and the one above is Meek da Freak doing a handstand on Sugar's back. Very cool. And then their show ended and I hung around to see the beginning that I had missed and was privy to a very violent argument between the two performers about who had gotten the most laugh lines and who was stepping on whose jokes and who needed to 'represent' to make this whole thing work. Just like being backstage...

And walked home via Columbus Circle, above.

Lovely lovely day...

New York Street, Rainy Day

Woke up today to a downpour. Yesterday, my NYC friend said "you enjoying this little global warming thing we have going on here?" Indeed...

Mike and I only wished we looked like this...

Instead, we made a stop at our shop and really had very little to do so we decided it was the perfect day to spend in a museum... along with apparently every other tourist in NYC.

This was the line outside the Guggenheim that wrapped around the corner and down the block.

So we went to the Met.

This was the scene outside

And this was the scene inside... It looked like Grand Central Station.

but despite the crowding and chaos, it really is a most incredibly lovely museum. They have a huge Egyptian wing where they reconstructed an Egyptian temple (brought over in pieces from Egypt), the Temple of Dendur.

And while temple is incredibly cool and you can walk through it, the room it's in is even more amazing.

look at those windows!

And the whole temple complex is surrounded by a moat.

Remember that book From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler where the kids live in the Met? I would live in this room in a minute!

they've recently expanded their wing of Roman and Greek Art

with gorgeously preserved Roman mosaics

Greek statuary in their own hall

Cupid and Psyche (not a Greek original, I don't think. Maybe Rodin??)

An odd mermaid type creature

A huge display of medieval armor. There were some beautiful medieval stained glass windows but my pictures are crappy. They allow picture taking - obviously - but no flash (the guards main job, to all appearances, is to yell "no flash!" and give directions). And everything is all dimly and artistically lit, so my camera struggles to focus...

The modern art wing also had some beautiful sculpture

including this one called "Lillith." She's attached to the wall, facing down, crawling like a spider.

And I love this one by Lichenstein. I didn't know he did sculpture...

And paintings. This one, called "plastic wrapped dolls" is just mesmerizingly grotesque...

Some New york color... Please note the boxers and the green latex gloves. And the basketball was mostly flat, thus it only bounced up about a foot and kept going a little sideways. He was quite persistent, however, and maneuvered it down the block...

And another attempt at Times Square. I don't know if you can read that above sign, but it descibes my current life perfectly:

Traveling at the speed of awesome.

And tonight?? Don't know, many plans... We'll see what happens.