The Producers, and Other Recent Excursions

On Wednesday, after a bit of misadventures (shock at price, lack of cash) managed to by half-price same-day tickets to The Producers. (Half price was still $50+.) Many of you may recall the Mel Brooks film and the classic song Springtime for Hitler. Well, the broadway show was an accurate, equally entertaining, musical (with high production values) based closely off the film. I went with a googler friend of mine (that I first met because he played in a Game I ran in Washington state (Mythos)) and some of his friends. Decent drinks and food at the times square brewery afterwards, then a nice walk home alone after midnight. (It was a nice night for a walk and NY is much safer than Berkeley. :)

It's insane how there are SO MANY theaters in the broadway/times square area and how they can fill almost all of them every single night. So many people, my god!

Thursday I grabbed take-out Cuban sandwich at a chowhound recommended place a few blocks from my apartment. Pretty decent. I plan on going back and eating there when the food is still warm instead of taking it and walking it across town before eating. Then it should be yummy.

This morning is overslept (the alarm in my room in the apartment is broken so I wrote a program on my computer to act as an alarm which was working fine but last night my volume was too low for it to wake me up) (take a breath) and then decided to skip out of work on the morning and go exploring. I finished off most of downtown: wall street, trinity church, federal reserve bank (with exhibits about monetary flow and, interestingly, counterfeiting), federal hall historic monument (with the bill of rights, supposed to be open but had a note that said ring the bell but no one answered the door!), battery park (not as nice as the shoreline along battery park city, but has lots more memorials and locals selling artwork (mostly to tourists going to ellis island or the statue of liberty)) and bowling green (with free wifi). The NY stock exchange was closed today (Reagan remembrance day) and had a one block radius around it roped off with lots of police; don't know why but doubt the two events are related. I'll have to go back. The neatest thing I saw today, which I suppose shouldn't be the last item in this paragraph, was umbrellas at Battery Park. A large field in Battery Park was covered with lots and lots and lots of umbrellas with butterflies painted on them. It was quite a sight. Sorry I don't have a picture; the closest I could find online is the pictures of that exhibit, Beyond Metamorphosis, but I don't think that first picture does justice to its scope.

Oh yeah, and one more neat fact: Castle Clinton (in Battery Park, at the tip of Manhattan) used to be on a small island. But landfill filled in all the land from Manhattan to the fort -it was a military fort- in the 1800s. Almost all of Battery Park is now built on this land. Looking at old pictures of this transition is neat.