Only in New York

Context: This post is about the seventh day of my New York City trip, which was our sixth day in the city.

When I last left you, Older Sister, Little Sister, Glory, Peeta, and I were standing on top of the Rockefeller Center.

That was Monday night. We bid Peeta farewell, walked back to our hotel, and slept. On Tuesday, we went on a walking tour of SoHo, Chinatown, and Little Italy. At least, that's what it was advertised as. In reality, it could have been the Tour of Death. Our scratchy-voiced tour guide pointed out the building on the site of the murder that precipitated the first recorded murder trial in U.S. history. She pointed out the SoHo apartment where Heath Ledger was found dead. She showed us the Bloody Angle, a hooked little street notorious back when the ax gangs terrorized the underground passages of Chinatown. She told us stories about Mafia killings, except she informed us that throughout the tour she was going to refer to the Mafia as "the Family" to avoid the ire of an elderly lady who apparently roams the streets of Little Italy looking for people who are talking about the Mafia so that she can shove her little dog in their faces and yell, "You're being disrespectful!" The tour guide's strategy seemed to work, for we avoided an encounter with said elderly lady, but every so often our tour guide would also talk about real families, as in saying things like, "When my family visits..." Some of the other people on the tour spoke English as a second language, and I wondered if they understood the distinction.

Oh, also, in between the official tour narration the tour guide told a story about a friend of hers who bought a house in Brooklyn. The friend was excited because there was a great garden space out back where plants were growing like crazy. Long story short, the friend was digging around in the garden and uncovered a human body.

Only in New York, folks. And only in New York do you get the chic of Soho mashed up against a little piece of Italy and then you turn the corner and surprise! Leftover Chinese New Year decorations everywhere.

SoHo is SoHo; I'm not sure what I would compare it to. I also have no real frame of reference for Chinatown, but I had an excellent time there. There were wares everywhere. Spices, seafood, silk dresses with mandarin collars. We bought souvenirs there; Glory was brave enough to actually bargain and haggle about the prices. I ate two kinds of dumplings there, fried pork dumplings and boiled seafood dumplings. I've never been a huge fan of dumplings, but Pepper, who is part Chinese, insists that dumplings/potstickers are the best and most authentic of Chinese fare. So I've been trying to get more into them. The ones I had were excellent.

What I do have a frame of reference for is Little Italy. I am pleased to tell you that Little Italy is a lot like Italy, just...little. We ate cannolis there, and they tasted like legitimate Italian cannolis. The gelato tasted like the gelato I ate every day during the two and a half weeks I was in Europe; the chocolate chip gelato in Little Italy was even called "stracciatella" like it is in real Italy. The men were flirtatious: as we walked through the streets, the ones advertising their restaurants called out to us, calling us "bellas."

We chose to eat dinner at a restaurant called La Bella Vita, where we were served the kind of Italian food you can't get in Hometown. There were even baskets of bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar at our table. "Only in Italy," I would have said before, but also, I now saw, in New York.

The final show that we had tickets for was Finding Neverland, a musical adaptation of the movie starring Matthew Morrison aka the guy from Glee and Kelsey Grammer aka the voice of Vlad from Anastasia. After our early, delicious dinner in Little Italy, we went back to our hotel, changed, and set out for Finding Neverland.

As a collective piece of art, Finding Neverland had a lot of issues. Mostly script issues. But individual parts of the show were astounding. The actors did a good job. Kelsey Grammer particularly was impeccable. There was a beautiful shadow dance scene, a song called "Play" that I fell in love with, and a perfect, perfect death scene for Sylvia. Peter Pan leads her out of the nursery window, leaving behind her shawl. The shawl was caught up in a mini cyclone of wind and pixie dust glitter, circling slowly, hauntingly. Perfect. Perfect. And only in New York.

That was Tuesday. The next day was Wednesday, the day we were going to see the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image. We would see artifacts that had belonged to a great artist. We would see Fraggle puppets.

What a marvelous city! Only in New York could there be a thing like this exhibit. I couldn't wait.