The City That Doesn't Sleep

It seems like such a cliché to write  a post about New York City. Everyone who’s ever gone there has written a story, or a song, or a poem, or something about hustle, bustle, never sleeping and being completely nuts. Yeah, well… I went there and I had a great time, so I guess I’m adding to the cliché. Deal with it.

Kim and I were there about four days all up, and we managed to cram a fair bit into those four days. Day one was mainly taken up with just getting there from Ohio and finding the people we were staying with, but we found some time late in the day to get out and find a dodgy underground comedy club. That was really fun, and really encouraging because it turns out that dodgy comedy clubs in New York City run their nights almost the same way we run our dodgy comedy club back home. We must be doing something right.

The next day started with church with our billets. I wasn’t sure how I was going to go in American churches, but this one was a traditional Methodist congregation, so this Darwin Uniting boy was right at home. They even had a digital organ and a guy who knew how to handle it.

After church we took the train into town to visit the Ground Zero memorial. The museum was still under construction, but the memorial pools that sit in the ground on the site of the original two buildings are open and quite moving. They’re inscribed with the names of all the victims of the 11^th of September attacks, and they sit in the shadow of the buildings that have been redesigned and rebuilt.

There was a lot of talk about renaming the new towers things like “Freedom Tower” and “Liberty Tower”,” which each have their merits, I guess. But I really love the new tower names. The old towers were called World Trade Centre 1 and World Trade Centre 2. So what are the new ones called? World Trade Centre 1 and World Trade Centre 2. Suck it terrorists.

To make our contemplative morning complete, we had lunch in a pub across the road run by firefighters. As luck would have it, the firefighter serving drinks that afternoon had been one of the first responders on the ground on the morning of the attacks. He had a scrapbook full of photos and clippings of stuff that was going on that day, but it was just fascinating to hear a story from a guy who found himself buried alive under tower 2, and against all the odds survived, only to have to dig himself out. Then he went back for the others. Crazy heroic stuff.

After Ground Zero we headed for Broadway for our first show of the trip: The Lion King. I hadn’t seen the stage version before, although I loved the movie when I was a kid. I enjoyed remembering all the old songs, but more impressive than the music (apart from old Rafiki, who was sensational) were the sets. The elephant graveyard, Pride Rock and the stampede in the gorge were all very cleverly designed, particularly the way they would appear and then disappear into the floor.

It was a matinee show, so we had some time to kill in town that night. We grabbed some dinner and then caught another comedy show in town. It was a slightly more professional set up this time, but at the same time the comedians were not as good. We still had fun.

The next day was a New York icons day. We started out with a trip up the Empire State Building. That was pretty cool, and we stayed up the top for about forty minutes before riding the lift back down again. Then we caught a subway down to the Statton Island Ferry to get a look at the Statue of Liberty. We would have had to have booked months in advance to actually go over onto Ellis Island, but the ferry ride passed close enough to the statue to get a good look.

We had lunch on Statton Island and then rode the ferry back to Manhattan and walked along the High Line, which is a raised walkway with plants all along it constructed up above the streets. It was really nice walking along there, particularly at sunset.

That night we saw an off-Broadway show called Sleep No More. We were quite excited about the concept of the show, which was based on Macbeth. It was set in an old abandoned hotel, with different scenes of the play being played out in different orders in different rooms of the hotel. Or so we thought. The different levels were all there, the random order was all there, but someone had neglected to let us know that there was no Shakespearean text being done; it was the Macbeth story presented through interpretive dance. I’m sure it was all very modern, cutting edge and symbolic, but it didn’t really impress either of us, so we headed home and got ready for our last day in the Big Apple.

We spent that day strolling through the Museum of Modern Art and Central Park. We hadn’t really been finding time to eat properly with all the sightseeing and show taking-in we were doing, and having had ice cream for lunch we were feeling a bit zonked, so we had a nice dinner at a favourite restaurant of Kim’s before we saw our final show for the trip.

This was probably the highlight of the whole trip: We saw Pippin, which has been revived from its 1970s form and brought back at the Music Box Theatre. I hadn't realised it was a Stephen Schwartz show before we went in, but in hindsight that does explain why the songs were so catchy, original and fun. But the music wasn't the whole event, the show was a combination of cabaret, acrobatics and magic, like a blend of a circus and a Broadway musical. There was always something different happening and some of the acrobatics were astonishing. You can always tell when a show has impressed me, because the first thing I do is look for the music score, which I found in the Broadway souvenir shop. Nice.

And then before we knew it the whirlwind had blown itself out and it was time to head for the beach. But I'm pleased to announce that New York City really was one of those rare places in the world that can live up to its own hype.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs

Cross Cultural Cuisine

I like food.

Often one of the most interesting parts of traveling to other countries is sampling exotic flavours and different ways of cooking and serving stuff. But to be honest, I hadn’t expected my culinary adventures in the United States to be quite as educational as they were. For a country with so much in common with ours, they have some crazy ideas of how to eat.

First of all, of course, were the famous American portion sizes. A small size of anything in America is likely to be slightly bigger than the equivalent medium size in Australia. So when you couple that with the sort of masculine insecurity that won’t allow me to order a small of anything, anytime we went out for ice cream (we seemed to do that a lot) I ended up eating enough of it to float a small frigate. Or at least submerge some insanely large chocolate chips. Chocolate nuggets would be closer to the truth.

That was awesome.

Americans are famous for consuming too much sugar, but I don’t think it’s just because they eat desserts the size of basketballs. They also haven’t quite got the same sense of savoury and sweet that we do in Australia. Asking for sweet pancakes for breakfast smothered in maple syrup is no guarantee that those sweet pancakes won’t have bacon in them. There's a chance your basket of dinner rolls at a restaurant might also have blueberry muffins in it. And any land that has such thing as a jello salad (which is exactly what it sounds like – fruit suspended in green jelly and masquerading as a salad alongside your coleslaw and hotdogs) has obviously let the line between lunch and dessert get a bit wibbly. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Even the steak sauce over there can’t make up its mind. They have a sauce called A1, which would best be described as sweet and sour gravy. Give it a go, but maybe order it on the side for your first attempt.

And finally while on a beach trip to Ocean City, I was introduced to a product called salt water taffy. Quite naturally, I expected it to be salty, or at least tangy. Not in the least. Taffy is basically edible blue-tac with flavours and sugar added. Apparently it’s called salt water taffy because it is generally associated with the beach, but rather like its close relative the salt water crocodile, it can show up in just about any environment, saline or otherwise. At least if it doesn’t turn out to be as delicious as it’s supposed to be, you can use it to stick your postcards to your bedroom wall.

I'm not really sold on the whole root beer thing either. It's sweet and fizzy, which are usually a good start, but it has an after taste that makes me think of cough medicine for some reason. But without the health benefits, I suspect.

I had a hot dog at the baseball stadium. Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Last Australian summer I had the privilege of taking Kim to her first ever cricket match. We spent the whole first fifty overs teacing her how the game worked and we were ready to knuckle down and enjoy the second innings when the skies opened and the game was washed out. But at least we tried.

This week Kim returned the favour spectacularly by taking me to my first ever baseball game. Her lcoal team, the Cincinnati Reds were playing the Arizona Diamond Backs at the fantastically named Great American Ball Park in downtown Cincinnati.

I had always been under the impression that cricket was a lot more complicated that baseball. Well... I still think it is, but I will say that baseball is also capable of producing entire scoreboards full of statistics that make absolutely no sense to an outsider. I got the number of strikes and balls sorted out easily enough, and even the batting averages, but the rows and rows of percentages and figures used to describe how well a pitcher was or wasn't performing made my head swim a bit.

Meanwhile, I was having a great time taking in as much of the great baseball traditions as I could. We all stood and sung the American national anthem (well... I stood) despite the fact that it was only a domestic game (although it's still called the world series make of that what you will) and then settled in to eat our dubiously prepared hotdogs. The Reds' opening pitcher seemed to be doing well, although the numbers after his name might have come from the stock exchange of the train timetable for all the sense they made to me.

But by far the most impressive job being done by anyone at the stadium was that of the guy playing inspirational riffs on a theatre organ between pitches. Okay, it was a small plastic keyboard made to sound like a theatre organ, but the effect was the same. I don't care how many stops, voices, presets or effects a church or concert hall organ might have; that guy had reached the absolute peak of the professional organist's musical career path as far as I was concerned.

Baseball matches come in nine innings, unless there's a tie after nine, in which case they keep playing until one team either loses or dies. But that's it; there's only one format of nine innings a side. There's no twenty-twenty baseball, and disappointingly no format or baseball lasts for five days, After six innings they have what's known as the seventh inning stretch, which is where everyone in the stadium stands up and stretches, to make sure no one in the crowd has fallen asleep, died, or in anyother way stopped passionately supporting the home team. They also sing a song called 'take me out to ball game,' the first line of which is 'take me out to the ball game,' and the rest of which is completely forgettable, as evidenced by the fact that I've completely forgotten it.

We eventually made it to the bottom of the ninth and everyone dutifully and apparently prognostically stood up to witness the last out, despite there being no guarantee that it was necessarily going to be the last out.

It was.

The Reds won five runs to three, which seems a preposterously low score for a game with nine innings, but is, I'm told, fairly typical. Fireworks went off, the organist went ballistic, and President Obama parachuted in wearing a 'kiss the cook' apron and waving an inflatable oboe.

Okay that last one didn't really happen, but it wouldn't necessarily have been the most bizarre thing I'd seen all day.

Make of that what you will.




Garry with 2 Rs 0.359, 79%, 3389/120, 0.0023, five.

Stateside

If you had told me two years ago that one day I’d be excited about a trip to the United States of America, you might have got a multi-faceted reaction from me. One facet would have been scoffing at your obvious miscalculation of my enthusiasm of the US. Another facet would have been wondering by what authority you purported to be bringing information from the future. Weirdo.

However, here I am in 2013 and I’ve been dating an American for over a year now. And next week I’m off to meet her family in Ohio. It’s likely the blog will take a brief hiatus in the meantime, but rest assured I’ll be back with tales of trans-Pacific adventures sometime in September.

Wish me luck.

Garry with 2 Rs

Headliner

Last night I checked a major goal off my checklist of stuff to do at some stage by headlining Happy Yess Ccomedy. When we put the program for the year together earlier on, we decided a musical comedy night would be fun, and the committee (which at that stage consisted of a few friends sitting around in a pub thinking about what we wanted to do (actually, it still does)) immediately suggested I headline it, and we locked it in for August. I was flattered at the time, because I can think of at least two other local comics who are a) better musicians and b) arguably funnier than me. But I definitely grabbed the opportunity with both hands and set about putting some material together. I really didn’t want this one to be the sort of gig that I threw together at the last minute. I’m done with that lifestyle, remember?

So I finished writing my material the afternoon of the show. Yeah, well I’ve always maintained that the last minute is the most powerful moment in all of time and space. Deal with it. On top of that, I also realised that I hadn’t really written an appropriate song to finish with, as the song I had managed to compose that afternoon was not sufficiently uppity. So I resolved to write an extra one between the start of the show and when my set came up. No biggie.

Actually, I had plenty of time in the end; Happy Yess Comedy is usually done by nine, but we kept on rolling until nearly ten o’clock, mainly due to extra set-up time and a few acts with a creative interpretation of ‘five minutes’. But I finally got up, did my set and got down again, without causing too much damage to myself or anyone else, so that was an achievement.

Happy Yess Comedy has really come a long way this year, to the extent that we’re now looking at shows in other venues and have rebranded ourselves “Top End Comedy”. We’ve got shows, gigs and maybe a trip to Adelaide in the pipeline, so make sure you keep an eye out for us.

Make of that what you will.

Garry with 2 Rs