New York 09: Part 2

Mandy and I had planned on spending most of our days working in New York, so we tried to figure out a way to pack in as much as possible in the evenings.

My older brother, Jason found out that they were doing open rehearsals of Othello on Monday nights. We got tickets last week and this was a really interesting thing to see. Alan Cumming was reading for Iago and Michael Potts was reading for Othello. They would read through the Act, then the director would talk about motivation, ask the actors questions, and then they would go through it again. It was a really neat thing to be able to watch and both of the actors were amazing. We had seen a good production of Othello at the Alley in Houston last year. This was a very different take. I really wish they would put on the play somewhere we can watch it. I did not know much about Alan Cumming, but he was terrific. Michael Potts had played Othello at Yale, and was just a wealth of knowledge on the play. He obviously had done a lot of research into Venetian military structures, and spoke on the subject with authority. This was a really fascinating and unique experience.

On Tuesday we were walking to the subway to make a dinner reservation and I stopped to buy a souvenir for one of the guys at the office at the NBC Experience Store. A woman walked up and asked if we wanted to be in the audience for the Conan O'Brien show. We took the tickets, canceled our dinner reservations and went to the show. This was interesting to see. It is a very very tiny set. They speed through these tapings. We were there for less than an hour and a lot of the time was spent with them pumping up the crowd. The guests were Matt Lauer and Steve Harvey.

Since we canceled our dinner reservations, we got a quick bite to eat at Sardi's (the restaurant with all of the caricatures) before going to see the Ibsen play Hedda Gabbler.

The play was not really my cup of tea. The Times had given it a blisteringly bad review in the paper that day, and it seemed to have affected the actors.

On Tuesday night a lot of snow fell on Manhattan, as a “Noreaster” blew in. This canceled my Wednesday meetings in Boston, and caused Powerhouse's New York agent to stick to his Long Island office in the morning, so Mandy and I walked through Central Park for a bit, trying to figure out what all this white frozen stuff was.

Since I thought I was going to be driving home from Boston on Wednesday night, we had not made plans, so we headed to the Soho area just to explore. We saw that Mike Birbiglia was doing a one man show, so we popped in and got tickets. The show was basically a themed stand-up performance about Birbiglia's issues with sleepwalking. It was really well written, and hilarious. As we were walking out, an older woman put an autographed poster on the chair she had sat in and walked off. I went to catch her, and when I told her she had left it behind, she said, “Oh, yes. I did not want that. Please take it if you do.” I wonder what happened in the play that made her go from buying a poster that was signed on her way in, to deciding that she did not want to have anything to do with it. It was very fitting to Birbiglia's self-deprecating sense of humor.

When we got back to the apartment, the cat's were having a party in the bathtub:

Today I have a lunch meeting with someone from another animation studio. Tomorrow I have to get up at 5 to be able to make the train to make my ride to the postponed meeting in Boston. Not looking forward to that.

One other thing I saw out there yesterday, apparently Matt Murdock's one man war against the Kingpin has not totally shut down his criminal empire:

Hehe. I am a geek.