Eating and Watching Bernadette Peters Eat

Context: This post is about the fourth day (and third day in the city) of my third New York City trip.

Are you wondering about the title of this post?

It's pretty simple, really. On the Saturday of our trip, we ate a lot of delicious food. Older Sister had signed us up for a morning walking tour of Greenwich Village (a cute place). We grabbed breakfast at Lenny's Bagels on the way. I had a delicious bagel with cream cheese and lox, which I sadly do not have a picture of.

Lunch: After the tour, Older Sister had to rush off to an event her work was putting on, but Little Brother and I had a nice sit-down lunch. Turns out that Greenwich Village has an abundance of good Italian food, so I enjoyed tasty chicken piccata, my favorite Italian dish, at Trattoria Spaghetti. My chicken came with a piece of...what seemed to be...cornbread? But not exactly cornbread. Polenta?

Chicken piccata with potatoes and some cornbread-y stuff. There was also some garlicky spinach, not shown here. All very good!

We then grabbed gelato at a place called Grom. I had a flavor called crema di grom, which included chunks of cookies made from corn. Which also tasted like cornbread. Seriously, I'm not making this stuff up. Never have I ever had Italian food with so much corn!

Dinner: After Older Sister's work events and our matinee of Hello Dolly (more on that in a minute), we met up at Bann Restaurant, where we had a reservation. Guess what? Bann Restaurant serves Korean food! That's right. Older Sister, who has hated all "Asian food" her entire life, took us to not one but two Asian restaurants while we were visiting her! And they say people never change.

Older Sister ordered us a barbecue meal that we cooked ourselves over a tiny little grill.

Pork bun appetizer!

Rice and veggies and grilled beef, salmon, and shrimp! The meat was pre-marinated and so flavorful and good!

Older Sister grilling up some beef.

We ordered these pretty chocolate molten cakes for dessert! One for Little Brother and one for Older Sister and I to share.

What I'm trying to say is that we ate very well on Saturday.

And the Bernadette Peters part? Well, she ate very well on Saturday, too.

See, Little Brother and I had decided that our second Broadway musical for the trip would be Hello, Dolly. It featured Victor Garber (whom I knew from several made-for-TV musicals) as Horace Vandergelder, Gavin Creel (who was the original Jimmy in Thoroughly Modern Millie) as Cornelius Hackl, Charlie Stemp (a Broadway newcomer) as Barnaby Tucker, and Kate Baldwin and Molly Griggs (both of whom I know nothing about) as Irene Molloy and Minnie Fay. It also featured an actress named Melanie Moore as Ermengarde. Upon reading the playbill, I discovered that I have accidentally seen Melanie Moore in every one of her Broadway roles! She was Peter Pen in Finding Neverland and Chava in the revival of Fiddler on the Roof. I guess I'm her biggest fan or something?

But above and beyond all that, the show featured the one, the only Bernadette Peters as Dolly Levi herself! If you think you don't know who Bernadette Peters is, I promise you that you do. Find a clip of her voice on YouTube, and you'll likely recognize it. She's a mega star. Among all the other things she's done, she was a guest star in the first season of The Muppet Show and she played the voice of Sophie (the lady who sings "Paris Hold the Key to Your Heart") in the movie version of Anastasia. What a fun tie-in to the previous two days of our trip! In short, we were feeling pretty good about our choices because wouldn't seeing Bernadette Peters perform live be so fun?!

Yes, it would be! The show was great. The costuming was delightful. I thought the actors did a great job. Barnaby and Cornelius were classic Barnaby and Cornelius while Mrs. Molloy and Minnie were played as less uptight and less stupid, respectfully, than usual. Bernadette Peters and Victor Garber did a good job with their characters as well. My only real complaint was that apparently the director had asked them to be over-the-top and campy in places where it wasn't really needed. A funny line should be funny without too much of an affect.

The worst offender was a scene toward the end of the show. Dolly and Horace are eating in a a restaurant when a brawl breaks out. Horace leaves the table and joins the rest of the cast in a transition to a courtroom, but Dolly aka Bernadette Peters remained seated at the table and kept eating the stage food. I'd assumed the food was made out of plastic or cotton or something (some bits seriously looked like cotton balls), but she devoured every scrap while the rest of the scene went on behind her. Midway through the scene, Dolly is supposed to offer her services as a lawyer and join the rest of the characters, but even after the judge called for a lawyer, Bernadette Peters kept eating for, like, seven to ten minutes while the other actors waited.

It was one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life (and that's saying something). Some folks in the theatre were laughing hysterically, but I didn't find it funny, just odd. I found myself thinking things like, "Did something go wrong?" "Is Bernadette Peters messing with the rest of the cast?" and "Does Bernadette Peters have it in her contract that she has to eat a certain time?" and "Did we really pay $49 to watch Bernadette Peters eat lunch?" Finally, though, she finished eating to thunderous applause, and the scene continued.

Little Brother looked this up and confirmed that it was a director's choice and not some kind of mishap or joke. Ummmm okaaaaay director person!

The last thing about Saturday that needs to be discussed is the shower at Older Sister's apartment. Remember how we went on a tour of Greenwich Village that morning? We saw lots of interesting things on the tour, like the theatre where Barbra Streisand got started, New York City's skinniest house, the apartment building where Benedict Cumberbatch stayed when he was on Broadway, and the Stonewall Inn. One of the most intriguing, things, though, was the Hess Triangle.

When the city wanted to widen the streets, this fellow Hess, who owned an apartment building on one of the streets in question, refused to cooperate, so the government ended up seizing his land for the public good. However, Hess retained a tiny triangle of land. Being the Saltiest Person on Earth™, he decided that the only appropriate course of action was to put a plaque on the tiny triangle stating he never donated his land to the public. (At least, the tour guide said it was him. The Internet disputes this by saying it was his heirs. Who I guess would then be the Saltiest People on Earth™.)

This thing is tiny. One person can stand on it comfortably, and that's it. It's probably the most American thing I've ever seen (I say with affection).

Guess what? There were two showers in Older Sister's apartment, and one was the size of the Hess Triangle!

Well, I'm exaggerating. Slightly. It was about the size of three Hess Triangles put together. There were no walls or anything; just a shower curtain. I couldn't even have the shampoo bottle in the shower with me because there was no room.

The Hess Shower was the only shower available after 11 p.m. by the agreement of the apartment tenants. (The other shower, which was a more normal size, activated pipes that were too loud for people to sleep through.) Apart from that, because it was the less-preferred shower, it was more likely to be free in general during target shower times.

I first used it on Friday after we got back from Brooklyn. I was careful to keep the shower curtain tucked, but imagine my dismay when I exited it and discovered that I hadn't done a good enough job and the entire bathroom was flooded.

Granted, the bathroom was tiny, but there was still a couple inches of water spread uniformly across the floor. I did my best to mop it up with my towel and all of my clothing before humbling myself enough to leave the bathroom, trek past one of Older Sister's oblivious roommates who was doing laundry right outside the bathroom door, and approach Older Sister.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: So...the bathroom is flooded...

Older Sister was gracious in not hating me and in letting me take another of her three towels to mop up the floor.

So on Saturday when I had to use the shower again, I kept my body completely vertical so that I didn't nudge any of the curtains out of place! When I dropped something and had to pick it up, I was forced to do a very careful squat to recover it.

I made sure to nab the big shower on Sunday night.