I do not believe that you could find two people more unsophisticated than me and my husband George. So when we decided to get tickets to a Broadway show, which would entail us boarding a train and going to New York City, it sent shockwaves through our family.
We succumbed to the almost-constant TV commercials advertising “Motown: The Musical.” I went online and bought tickets, and then over the next few weeks, researched restaurants (with help from NYC-savvy friends Sue, Marcello and Sharon), Penn Station, maps of the city, maps of the theater and how far it is from Rockefeller Center, train schedules, bus schedules (just in case we couldn’t find Penn Station after the show) and how much a hotel room costs (again, just in case there were no buses and Penn Station disappeared off the face of the earth.)
For about a week before we went, I would casually mention that George and I were headed “to the city” to see a show and have dinner. It sounded so worldly, so sophisticated.
The day of the big city venture dawned sunny and relatively warm. I loaded my purse and pockets with all my maps and off we went.
What do they say about the best-laid plans? I had counted on us taking an 11 a.m. train from the Hamilton station. This would have gotten us into Penn Station by noon-ish and we would have had two hours to navigate to the theater (which turned out to be a 10-minute walk).
Instead, we were met by hordes of enthusiastic Penn State football fans who were taking the train to New York because their team was playing at Yankee Stadium. The lines to buy tickets for the train stretched across the parking lot.
We finally got on the train. By the time we got to New Brunswick, there wasn’t even standing room on that train. Penn State fans, some more sober than others, lined the aisles of every car. And when we reached Elizabeth, the conductor was yelling over the loudspeaker, “This train is FULL! There’s another train coming in 10 minutes. 8 minutes now. Now it’s 7 minutes. How about 6?”
So we got to Penn Station. To say it was crowded is like saying that Antarctica gets a little icy in January. We make our way outside and voila! The Okefenokees have officially hit the Big Apple.
Already I am confused. The trouble was that my map did not reach out and point the correct direction we had to take to get to the theater. So I stood there, turning the map this way and that, trying to figure it out.
George was pacing and asking, “Which way do we go?” After about five minutes of me consulting three of the maps I had brought, George approached two New York City cops and asked them for directions.
Fast forward to post-show — I insisted on going to Rockefeller Center to see the tree. Very bad idea. It seemed that everyone in the tri-state area, plus their extended families and colleagues and classmates, had the same notion.
We got to see a glimpse of the very tip of the tree and then swam upstream out of the crowd, and then had dinner in a great Irish pub.
By this time, my feet were so sore (I got boots for Christmas and wore them. Yet another very bad idea.) So we hailed one of those bike-carts and rode back to Penn Station in style. (I won’t mention that the cost of that ride almost exceeded the price of our tickets for the show, mainly because they charge by the minute and I believe our guy took us to Penn Station via Connecticut).
We boarded our train to Hamilton and spent the trip alternately trying not to fall asleep and avoiding being sprayed by the little kid sitting across the aisle from us who was apparently suffering from a nasty upper-respiratory infection.
We made it home in one piece and I promptly threw out all my maps. Now, we talk about the show and our day “in the city” and we feel a little less like hayseeds. A very little.
Ilene Black has been a resident of Ewing for most of her life and lives across the street from her childhood home. She and her husband, George, have two sons, Georgie, 32, and Donnie, 28.
