October 8 – Day 32: The Start of the Second Half
I won’t say this is my first day off (I mean, there was that two-week break before rehearsals started), but it was my first day off after the show started running, so it’s close enough.
I slept late (because I could) and decided that this was the day to visit the Houdini Museum of New York on 35th. I thought about walking, but the weather was crummy enough to dissuade me. (Both times when I went out today, I won’t say it was drizzling, but it was like the humidity in the air had congealed to the point where there were drops in the air—though not enough to call rain).
I took the N uptown, got off on 34th, and my unerring sense of direction had me go the wrong way not just once, but twice (I’m still convinced I was walking westbound on 35th when I was actually going east). I arrived at the office building the museum is in, and took the elevator to the 4th floor. There were two women going to the 4th floor as well, and when the one in front of my suddenly produced a deck of cards, I knew I was in the right place. (She produced them from her purse; not from thin air. Maybe they were defective.)
To call the exhibit a “museum” is a bit of an overstatement. To be sure, there’s a good collection of Houdini memorabilia; a prop table, a bust that was stolen from his gravesite, a strait jacket, a coffin, some posters and letters, etc., but it’s really just the front half of a small magic shop (apparently, a very good magic shop frequented by professionals). It turned out today may not have been the best day to go, since there was a television crew filming something about the exhibit. They seemed to be focusing on the coffin (into which a handcuffed and manacled Houdini was placed before it was nailed shut and secured with steel bands [needless to say, he got out]) and they acted as though they had the run of the place (and actually, they probably did). My favorite part was the tiny table they’d set up for craft services that had room for a few bottles of water, a couple of bottles of soda, and no more than a handful of snacks.
Some of the loot.
I didn’t expect it would take me too long to see everything, and it didn’t, so I was out in less than 30 minutes. Having nothing else to do, really, I turned around and came home, figuring the time would be best spent getting through some newspapers and watching the Dodger game, which I did until about 7:00, when it was time to leave for the show I was seeing. As soon as I left the apartment, I wondered if I should have taken a jacket. It was still a little wet out and what one might call chilly. I decided to not go back, though, since my weather app showed it was actually going to get warmer as the evening went on (as indeed it has; it was 66 then, 69 eight hours later). As it turned out (and as I expected), after I’d walked about halfway to the theatre, I was so warm that I would have taken the jacket off anyway.
On the agenda for tonight was Have a Nice Day, which had been a screenplay written by Quinton Peeples and Billy Crystal. The screenplay never went anywhere (and after seeing it, I can understand why), and it was set aside until, as Crystal said in his intro, he felt it was time for a play that highlighted honesty and decency in the White House. He approached Audible.com (who’s doing a lot of these things and turning them into downloadable radio plays, for lack of a better term), and they put it up last night and tonight. It was strictly a reading—scripts in hand, standing at music stands—but the cast was pretty impressive, headed by Crystal, Kevin Kline (as the President), Annette Bening (as the First Lady), with Rachel Dratch and Darrell Hammond (from SNL), Christopher Jackson (from In the Heights and Hamilton), Robin Thede (whom I’d really gotten to like on Larry Wilmore’s late night show), Justin Bartha, Irene Bedard, Chris Cafero, Auli’l Cravalho, and Robert King. Dick Cavett narrated (and, as usual, made it all about him). They even got John Rando to direct.
Nice cast.
The basic plot was that a Man With No Name (not Death; he works for Death) appears in the White House and tells the President he’s come for him. Because of a loophole in the way he states it, though, POTUS negotiates a last full day to do something meaningful before he goes. It was something of a mess (as I say, it was easy to see why it wouldn’t have worked on screen), but made a nice radio play. Even though the plot turns and complications were visible a mile away, it was ultimately quite touching and very well done. Crystal had warned the audience in advance that there might be times when they would have to re-do something or make corrections (and indeed there were), but that just added to the, well, fun. It’s supposed to be available for download at Audible on November 2nd.
As might be expected by my readers at this point, I needed to get some supper. I checked Yelp and, since I was in a mood for Italian food, searched for what was close and highly-rated, and ended up at Trattoria Spaghetto, a little place on Bleecker Street. It’s nothing if not plain-wrap, old-school Italian, and that was exactly what I wanted. I had a very nice bowl of minestrone (which was unusual to me in that it was green and tasted more like pea soup that what I think of as minestrone), chicken parmigiana (also good) with a side of linguine, and spumoni. Nothing fancy, nothing haute cuisine (or the Italian equivalent thereof); just good honest home cooking. It’s the kind of place that, on the wine list, shows “merlo” and “carbernet sauvinon,” and I found that endearing, rather than showing a need for a copy editor. Service was efficient, if not overly friendly (which was probably just as well, since the table next to me got a birthday dessert, and the wait staff—all Italian-speaking men—sang the single-worst rendition of Happy Birthday to You I will ever hear. So much for the idea that all Italians can sing). I had a fine time.
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