You Can't Say No to Vampires

Up until yesterday, I had been in New York this week for work. It was my first time to the Big Apple, and I was staying right on Time Square at the Marriott Marquis, so I wanted to definitely do some New York-ish things while I was there during my free time. One of the first things I did was walk up and down Broadway, just taking in everything from a real life perspective as opposed to the glamorized version seen on tv and in the movies.

In my walks I was attempted to be taken aside by numerous men and women dressed in suits and dress clothes asking me if I wanted to see a movie about some book called Dianetics. Yes, my friends, I was attempted to be converted to scientology! (I don't capitalize the word because, frankly, I don't think of it as a religion, I think of it as stupid. The end.) It was crazy how pushy the scientologists were to everyone out on the street that was in dress clothes. Since I was in my work garb, I was dressed pretty nicely. The average, everyday Joe's the scientologists just let go by, probably because they figured they wouldn't have enough money to simply throw away to some moronic scheme thought up by a dead sci-fi author.

After browsing Broadway, I stopped in to the Virgin Records Megastore just to see how much things cost in New York, which happens to be a lot more than Minnesota. Clearance CDs were $10 as opposed to the usual $5-$7 here. New releases were all $20. Video games were about the same price. DVDs were slightly more expensive, but not by a lot actually.

Anyways, while I was there I saw a plethora of 12-15 year old girls hanging out. I didn't know if this was a hang out for young girls or what was going on until I saw that Nick Lachey was there. It took me a bit to remember what his actual name was because I only thought of him as Jessica Simpson's husband... well, now ex-husband.

I later decided that it would be a sin for me to be in New York, staying on Broadway and not attend a play. Thankfully on the ground floor of the Marriott is the last minute ticket sales booth where all the seats that are left open for the day are sold at half price to fill out the seats. Unfortunately my first two choices for plays to attend, Spamalot and The Producers, were sold out for the night. When seeing what else there was that might be appealing, I stumbled across Lestat, a play based on the Anne Rice vampire novels. It was a musical, which I tend to loathe, but it did have vampires, which friggin' rule, so I tossed the dice and decided to go.

Turns out that some pretty good seats were available so I ended up in the 12th row right on the middle aisle so I had a great vantage point for the show. The show itself was ok. The stage, costumes, and special effects were ridiculously awesome for a play (at least in comparison to everything I've seen on stage), but the music was a little weird. The music was written by Elton John, so it was definitely upbeat, which I didn't think fit all that well with a dark vampire fantasy.

Most of the songs felt like Lion King songs with vampire lyrics. All of the performers were tremendous, however, so they were performed quite well. I just got a little bit of weird-ish feeling when watching the show and having to deal with the constant shift between dark, brooding speaking moments and the upbeat musical numbers. I don't know if it was worth the Broadway ticket price, but it was pretty good for a play if you don't mind upbeat vampire singing.

It was nice to be able to do these couple of things while I was out in New York, but there is so much to see and do out there that I should never run short of things to do when I'm visiting. I'll be going back again in a week and a half and I'll probably have to be out there or in Chicago once every month or month and a half because of the nature of my job. So it's good to know that I'll always have stuff to do. Like for my next trip I'm going to try to catch a concert at CBGB's and hit up a nice restaurant or two.