Cousins

It's Saturday morning fairly early and Craig is asleep. I worked out to my new Express Pilates dvd this morning (thank goodness no one can see that happening - what a twisted limb mess!) and I've eaten a fiber bar (not too bad, actually) and am drinking coffee and feeling utterly relieved that today and tomorrow are non-active weekend days for us! And thus begins the recap of events. I will try to limit this to the significant details and include favorite photos only. Thursday, July 19th Craig's cousin Paul and Paul's wife Angie landed at Kennedy Airport. Craig and I worked, so those two cabbed it to our apartment - we had mailed them a set of keys - and let themselves in to begin their first day in New York (they had never been). After work we hurried home, greeted them and showered for our first activity: Xanadu on Broadway. Basically, seeing as much of their week would revolve around baseball, Paul had permitted Angie to choose which show we would see - her first choice was Wicked, which would be impossible to get tickets to on such short notice, and her second pick was Xanadu. I've got to admit - I had my doubts going into it. I loved Olivia Newton John as much as the next 5 year-old girl back in the day - her album Let's Get Physical was practically all I ever listened to in my cassette player (old lady me) but nevertheless I had never seen the campy roller-skate disco movie from 1980 and I couldn't imagine it performed live on stage. No! It was fantastic! In fact, it might rank as the most entertaining show I've seen! Hilarious - the lead mimicked Olivia Newton John to perfection, especially singing the breathy intro to "Suddenly" - and it was really overall quite the performance. And yes, we saw Chris Fowler (ESPN College Game Day) and Whoopi Goldberg (newly announced to co-host The View on morning talk tv) live and in person. Craig and I actually brushed by Whoopi on our way out. See - celebrities do what we do. I still felt a little star struck...moving along, after the show we ate at Becco - I had a delicious (I can still recall the half hour I spent with it) halibut with mashed potatoes and asparagus. Friday morning we woke up and ate bagels. This was our first bagel in over a month and a half, after nearly a year of bagels once or twice a weekend, and to be perfectly honest, it didn't blow my mind the way I anticipated it to. I think our diet has been good enough for us in many respects that really, cravings for heavy breads and pizza and grease and french fries have been reduced - I say reduced because I did tear into a bag of jalapeno potato chips that were leftover from a lunch at work earlier this week! But I tossed half the bag at a co-worker and begged her to finish it. Anyway, our Friday fairly much consisted of sight-seeing: Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street, Washington Square (as seen above), Ground Zero (which has now undergone a total personality shift - because of the construction of the Freedom Tower, the mournful air has lifted and now it's a buzz of construction activity), SoHo, the Village, lunch in the Village, and then a return trip to the apartment to get ready for our Friday night Yankees game. Saturday morning we woke up early to get ready for our road trip to Boston. Because our tickets to the Yankees game were free, as well as our tickets for the following week's Mets game, we splurged on Red Sox tickets (although, as it turned out, Paul and Angie paid for ours generously because we let them stay here with us). I had been to Boston twice before. Once Craig took me to Fenway - we arrived late and left early, and another time we went and toured around a bit - went to Cheers, saw downtown, but I never walked away from a Boston experience feeling the way I felt after this Boston weekend.
I fell in love. Oh, New York - you are my truest City love but Boston might have to be my affair! It is unbelievable there. Craig had rented a Dodge Charger and we traveled for about 4 and a half hours to get there (by train it's more expensive for two couples but takes substantially less time), checked into our hotel in Cambridge (soaking in the brainy energy of MIT) and changed clothes to grab a cab to Fenway Park. Dear St. Louis, you have incredible baseball, but you have nothing on Boston baseball! Take this from a girl who spent an entire year at Old Busch Stadium, all the way through Play-offs and a World Series! No wonder Boston Red Sox fans are so happy all the time - they have the best ballpark in the country, possibly in the history of baseball?? The atmosphere before the game outside on the street was high energy. We loved it.
It had become time to cheat on the diet so Craig and I ate juicy ballpark sausages and drank baseball beers. Our seats were really not too bad - out in right field, but Paul and Craig had somewhat of an obstructed view for a few innings.
During the game we got up and walked to better seats nearer home plate. The Red Sox were kicking the pants off the White Sox (the big thing of going was to see Fenway but also for Paul, a White Sox tried and true, and Craig too, of course, to see their team in Boston) so some of the ballpark had emptied a bit and we were able to duck into better seats. After the game, we headed to a bar for dinner (the game had started at 3? 4? so by the end, we were famished).
Across the street from Yawkey Way is a place Craig has seen on a tv show called Beer Nutz, a place that serves blueberry ale, with blueberries bobbing in the top.
Following dinner, we went to a couple of other bars and spotted Hanson and a streetful of screaming girls during the later part of the night. Sunday morning we woke up early and decided to tour MIT and Boston. Cambridge is so lovely, I have no idea (as a dreamy art major and poet I suppose this makes sense that I'm like this...) how students discipline themselves to go to class with all of that landscape to gaze into. The atmosphere of Cambridge and Boston is so laid back, very peaceful. Granted, we were tourists in mid-July on a Sunday. Still, I really liked it.
This is the Gehry MIT building that was under construction the last time Craig and I were in Cambridge, Mass. We walked across the Charles River to the Back Bay, walked the length of the Commonwealth Avenue Mall (long tree-lined boulevard), stopped to take in the Public Garden, which reminded me very much of London by Buckingham Palace,
and we walked through the Beacon Hill neighborhood, which I joked to Craig would be a suitable place for us to raise babies (suitable if you make several million dollars a year, that is!)
Boston impressed me, needless to say. I suppose there are many elements of Boston that win me over: the accent of its people, the number of intelligent universities nestled right there, the sky over the river, the old feel to the architecture - it definitely made me envious of being an East Coast native. I've probably wanted to be an East Coaster forever and it's now fully surfacing as I get older. I've got time here, obviously, but I consistently massage Craig into realizing how unimaginably amazing it is to live here. He feels very much the same, I think. We're proud New Yorkers.*After checking out of the hotel, we drove to Harvard's campus so that Paul and Angie could see it. We'd been there before, also, but again, I felt more in tune and content there than last time (is this because now I qualify as a local to this coast? whereas last times there I felt so foreign?) We walked through Harvard, snapped some photos and then stopped in a Harvard hot spot for lunch. I ate a delicious tuna wrap with yellow tomatoes and a mesclun salad with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and Paul ate Eggs Benedict with salmon and drank a bloody Mary, Angie ate crabcakes and Craig had a chicken sandwich on focaccia with yellow tomatoes and pickled red onions (he had me try one - it was fantastic). Following lunch we headed out to the Mass Pike and back to New York*An hour has passed and I've exhausted the trip so far, so I will continue chronicling their stay at another time. I think I'd better check on sleeping Craig. He told me he intended to sleep in this morning but this is getting to be quite the lazy morning for him! It's nearing 10.30! I believe we might go to Park Slope tonight for dinner at my friends' apartment, Laura and Brian. We've had tentative plans with Paul and Stacy and Alison and Scott but nothing definite, so I should get that figured out. I'm also planning to submit a manuscript to the 92nd Street Y for admission into an Advanced Fiction Workshop to begin in October. I'm still not sure if I will be working with Sharon this fall - she doesn't know if she has a spot open yet, but if I can get into the shorter and more affordable workshop at the Y, I will not attend the New School this fall. I'd like to return in the winter when I have a little more money to toss around (the last part of this year I will be wrapping up old debt, thankfully). So anyway, our schedule is taming down again. Last night was lazy and back to normal. Ah, summer.