A Hobbit's New York Tale, Part the Second

In which I see dinosaurs, eat lots of salmon, and embarrass myself at the theater

After my full Saturday in New York, I did precisely nothing on Sunday, being deprived of my public transport guardian angel (Bethany), whose church work kept her out into the afternoon. I soothed my conscience with our plans to attend an Ash Wednesday service at an Anglican church. Meanwhile, I’d brought my laptop with noble ideas of getting some writing done, but as I should have predicted, these were vain. I slept, sampled my book haul from The Strand, slept some more, and watched TV with Bethany and her sister (Person of Interest, a show that ended badly but for which I will always have a soft spot). In the evening, Bethany continued my ongoing initiation into Bollywood with an Indian film called Newton, a wry, tragicomic little piece about Indian elections. The titular Newton is a pure soul determined to help the poorest rural Indians exercise their voting rights, but police corruption makes the whole process farcical. I was worried that things would end badly for poor Newton, but thankfully he emerges intact, as does his love interest.

It was just as well that I took the sabbath rest seriously, as Monday would be yet another jam-packed day, ending with a bang as we took in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. I used TodayTix for tickets, which informed me that last-minute seats had opened up for Marcel on the Train, a small play about how the great French Jewish mime Marcel Marceau smuggled orphan children away from the Nazis over the Swiss border. I literally made this discovery in my Broadway seat and impulsively decided to buy a ticket for Tuesday night. I’m not a regular theater-goer, so it was a real treat to enjoy these two very different theatrical experiences back-to-back, from lavish spectacle to intimate blackbox performance. Paid readers can enjoy both of my reviews after the free preview.

Monday the 16th: The Breaking of the Fellowship

That’s an overdramatic title to capture the fact that we had to say goodbye to Duncan today, but not before getting in a last little burst of sightseeing. Bethany and I endured the molasses-slow President’s Day morning commute to meet him at the Museum of Natural History. Bethany told us that half the fun of this museum is watching kids react to it. One little girl was very excited by this picture: “It looks like a shark!”

The highlight was, of course, the dinosaurs, which made Duncan think about his little brother back home.

Behind the T-Rex, you can see the Apatosaurus, which is so massive it’s impossible to capture in full when you get close enough for a good look.

One wonders how these enormous creatures could sustain themselves on an herbivore diet. So much of the deep past is shrouded in mystery. You can see why some mad scientist might scheme to resurrect it, even as you very much don’t want him to. The dinosaurs don’t tempt me personally, but this mammoth on the other hand…

Of course, there are giants walking (or swimming) among us still. “IT’S SO BIG!” one little boy kept squealing. “MOM, IT’S SO BIG! IT’S SO BIG!”

Other parts of the museum lacked a comparable thrill, although there were things I didn’t expect to see. I liked this visual timeline of the history of Middle Eastern nations:

I enjoyed the bird section too, particularly when baby birds were involved. This might be my favorite: Lunch on a cactus.

One more dinosaur awaited us in the Roosevelt rotunda, along with some inspiring words from the man—words that now seem out of step with the times, in the best possible way. (Don’t ask me why there aren’t any apostrophes, maybe they were hard to carve or something.)

For the rest of the afternoon, we relaxed in the Marlton Espresso Bar at Susannah’s invitation. I treated myself to some salmon and toast, which I ate so fast I didn’t fulfill my millennial obligation to take a picture and post it. But I did take this picture of my coffee and Kindle, open to Eli Sharabi’s gripping Hamas captivity memoir Hostage. This was apparently Susannah’s first time seeing a Kindle in the wild, which she mistook for “the biggest phone I have ever seen.” Here Bethany chimed in that in fairness to Susannah, I do make it look bigger.

Somehow, Susannah was able to simultaneously edit an essay and gossip away with me about various New Yorky/very onliney things, about which I will not blog because what happens at The Marlton stays at The Marlton.

Eventually Duncan had to go his own way, leaving me and Bethany with a couple of dog tags to remember him by. We took one last trio selfie and bade him a fond farewell.

Thus concluded our weekend with Duncan. But for me and Bethany, the week was just beginning. To hear all about my back-to-back nights at the theater, the first of which landed me in some hilarious embarrassment, consider becoming a paid reader!