A New York minute - Rage Against The Minivan

This past weekend, I spent a very quick two days in New York City visiting with my nephew and my friend Heather. I was on the East Coast for the Red Letter Christians gathering in Philadelphia, which has become a highlight of my year every year. I will post more about that later. But any time I have the chance to be that close to the city, I feel like I have to make a quick visit.

I know this is nothing unique to me, but I am in love with New York City. I would never want to live there, but man do I love to visit. And having a nephew who lives there give me such a good excuse. I have blogged about Austin here before, with my invisible line campaign. He is a theater student at NYU and it is so much fun to visit him and geek out on shows. My friend Heather is also a fellow theater geek, although she denies it because, in her words, being as C-SPAN fanatic is dorky enough. Sorry, Heather. I am letting your secret out of the bag.

Austin’s boyfriend Andre is also a musical theater major, so between the four of us, it was a perfect storm of theater geekdom.

In the day and a half that I had in New York, we managed to squeeze in seeing three plays. We saw IF/Then on Friday night, and then a matinee of Side Show, followed by an evening performance of Sting’s musical The Last Ship. We also attended the Millions March protest … more on that later.

(This is us being sad that Idina Menzel’s understudy did the performance we attended. Adele Nazeem, we miss you!)

My friend Isabel also joined in on some of the fun. I think my New York friends really love when I come in town and make them take tourist photos in Times Square. Right?

Apparently the Saturday I was there was also SantaCon, when a bunch of 20-somethings dress as Santa and do a bar-crawl all day. Sorry, kids. Santa’s drunk.

We had a lot of fun just fooling around and singing, too. Andre and Austin and I decided to sing O Holy Night on the subway. Because of course we did.

It was a bit of a schizophrenic weekend, between taking part in social action and then gorging ourselves on musicals. We also stayed out late every evening, having a lot of fun at the Ace Hotel lobby bar and then at one of their basement dance parties.

It was a blast, but also a reminder… I am no longer in my 20s. And barely even in my 30s since I turn 40 next week. I might still be paying for those 2 days in New York, but it was worth it.