Summer in the City: Broadway and Brooklyn

The time has finally come to post some of my own pictures on here! Starting with the previous weekend's events (June 5-7):

Natalie (the girl I should have met before now- same school, same major, same church, etc.), Emily (Natalie's suitemate from London), Jessica (one of my suitemates) and I headed down to Times Square for our first Broadway show of the summer.Tony award-winning August: Osage County was our pick and it was a good one! I had heard great things from others who had been to the play. I didn't know much of anything about the plot, but it's Broadw

ay, c'mon! The show was splendid- a "tragicomedy" with a twisted plot of a dysfunctional family. As Natalie posted, it was "moving, thought-provoking, and darkly humorous"- a description I completely agree with! During one of the two intermissions (3 hours of show requires 2 intermissions), we realized that the lead actress who played the grandma/mother in the show was Phylicia Rashad, the mom from the Cosby Show! After the show we walked over to Juniors, a restaurant in Times Square, to get pieces of cheesecake to go that would take each of us days to devour!

Saturday, I trekked up to Harlem to the gym I joined thanks to Meghan, one of the girls I lived with for those first 2 weeks. She is out of the city on a trip to Italy for some time in June so I paid her to use a month of her gym membership- a great way to get around the costly start-up fee at most establishments. I have really enjoyed getting into a routine of attending a couple of classes each night after work and then on Saturday mornings. It's something to do on weeknights and makes me feel better about myself since this new lifestyle of sitting at a desk for hours on end doesn't get me moving around much like walking from class to class on campus. The classes range from the Total Body Conditioning with Gussie- a Jamaican fellow who I swear was a dancer in his former life, Spinning- a stationary biking class with Margot where we ride "hills" by increasing resistance on the bikes (wannabe RAGBRAI, ha!), Core Conditioning with CiCi, Boxing, and even Pre-Season Sports Conditioning- a class that took me back to my days as a high school athlete with agility drills, weaving in and out of those orange cones, and getting low to shuffle back and forth like we were training to play defense in a basketball game. Something we didn't have at Ogden High School were treadmills, each with their own TV and spot for you to plug in your earphones to catch something on the tube while your run for a few miles. I miss being able to run outside, but this will have to do until I get back to a place where there aren't crowds of people on the sidewalks everywhere you go.

Saturday afternoon, Natalie and I caught a different subway train (that went UNDER the river-weird!) and made our way over to Brooklyn. It is odd to go down into a subway stop and when you come back up, the landscape is completely diff

erent. Not quite the same as riding in a car and being able to watch what is going on around you outside the vehicle. Our destination in Brooklyn was McCarren Park in the Williamsburg neighborhood. The Renegade Craft Fair had been recommended to me by one of the editors at work so we decided to check it out. A collection of hip, modern artists from the New York area were set up in hundreds of white tents on the track that went around the field in the middle where soccer games were being played. All of these vendors had come with their creations- tshirts, jewelry, purses, handbags, paintings, photography, you name it, they made it! One of my favorite displays was this lady who took old hard-covered books- cookbooks, sewing books, novels, etc. and made them into purses by ripping the pages out and then sewing fabric on what would be the top and bottom of the book. Genius! Another one of my favorites was a guy who created t-shirts with chalk boards on them. The shirts even had a handy little pocket at the bottom to hold he piece of chalk. Natalie and I made it out of the fair with tons of photos and handmade hand purses.

We decided to finish off the afternoon by visiting the Brooklyn Bridge. We caught yet another subway and headed back over to the Manhattan side and walked across the classic icon of New York City. The most exciting part of all this was the fact that my camera arrived in the mail on Saturday morning so I was finally able to photograph the things I saw during my outings! We headed down to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant near our residence called Blockheads. It was nice to dine with the roommates and new friends!

With one of my suitemates, Jessica at Blockheads

Sunday morning we went down to the Times Square area again to check out a church that actually meets in The New York Times building. Jen Spencer, an Iowa State alum and past roommate of an Ogdenite, was our connection to the church- C3 Manhattan(Christian City Church). It had a congregation of young adults and a service that was satisfiying to the soul. It was great to be in an environment that even though the people were unfamiliar, the music and teachings were like church in Ames.

Sunday night was spent on the phone catching up with family back home. I walked around the 5th Ave area as I talked to Grandma Jolliffe who had so many questions we kept up convers

ation for several blocks of strolling! As darkness fell, I made my way back to the residence hall to catch the Tony Awards on TV. It was a little odd to think that the awards event was taking place only a few short blocks away at Radio City Music Hall. I called home when the Rock of Ages cast was performing on stage. I got Zane on the phone and shared with him that I had gotten my picture taken with the lead actress who was on the TV at that moment- I admit it, I am so "small town" when it comes to any interaction or sighting of a celebrity- big or small. Zane and I talked on the phone for another hour as he caught me up on all the events in the Satre household from his 14 year old point of view- necessary, indeed! He filled me in that now with his new driver's permit, he drives MY car to short destinations with Mom and Dad in the front seat, of course. Not to mention he regularly rides MY bike into Ogden for baseball practice. I plan to reclaim my modes of transportation upon my return to Iowa in August. Enjoy them while you can, Zaner!

Besides the pictures I have mixed into the text of this post, here are a few more from the weekend:

Baseball "field" in Brooklyn with the Mahanttan skyline in the background (Can you tell I'm missing my usual summer dose of baseball with the brothers back home?)