serendipity now!

New York City continued...

Serendipity:

1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
2. A very trendy food and dessert cafe in New York City made famous by the movie of the same name.

So in a strange bit of coincidence, I went on vacation to New York the same weekend that my best girl pals Laura and Maria went. They had actually planned to go for months and months, so to an outsider, it would appear that I merely followed them there. The truth is, my other girlfriend Kristi demanded that I go to New York with her that weekend to see Sally without any clue that I would have another couple of girls on the side. So spending time with Laura and Maria wasn't necessarily on my agenda, but they suggested that we meet up at Serendipity on Sunday night. Apparently, Serendipity is a very popular tourist spot in New York and is famous for their frozen hot chocolate (or as I like to call it, chocolate milk).

Anyway, on Friday Kristi, Sally, Sally's boyfriend Tim and I decided to go to the lottery for a broadway show. For those of you who don't know, many broadway shows have a mini-lottery an hour or so before the show to award winners with a chance to purchase cheap tickets for that day's sold-out show. Many locals do it, because they can try to win and if they don't they can just go home and try again later. Tourists don't have that option. If you want to see Wicked you need to book the show months in advance for about 100 bucks (or in our case $225). Odds of winning the lottery aren't incredibly good. They pick ten people out of about 60. That's why it's a good idea to bring all your friends so that they can have their names in as well and whoever wants to see the show the most gets the ticket if someone wins. It's a nice thing to do. Tim won. According to Sally, he always wins. She thinks the lottery girl likes him. I guess that's not much of a coincidence.

The tickets Tim won for Kristi and me was for a play called The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. For this particular play, they choose four members of the audience to participate on stage in the Spelling Bee. Guess the first person they chose was. Hint: it wasn't Kristi. Another hint: it was me. I'll probably go into excruciating detail about the experience in my next entry.

Have you ever watched Letterman or some other talk show and the celebrity talks about how he or she just happened to run into another celebrity on the street one day? Maybe I notice this more than everyone else, but I tend to think that it's strange that celebrities just happen to run into each other, especially when they live in giant cities with populations that triple the population of Utah. Anyway, on Saturday we bumped into Tate Donovan at Central Park. He was jogging. He looked okay. A bit out of breath. If I had myself together I would have told him how appalling I thought it was that his character was written out of The O.C.

In another strange coincidence, Laura, Maria and I bumped into Lucy Liu whilst eating at a British food place called Tea and Sympathy. I thought it particularly odd at the time that we decided to even eat at a British place.

On Sunday, we took a stroll around Sally's place in Harlem. I think that's where we found the Duke Ellington statue. Sally thought it was funny because the sculpture of Ellington is actually held up by sculptures of naked women. Naturally I wanted a picture and the guy who took the picture below said that he was visiting from California because his father is the sculptor of that particular work.
I've mentioned before that Nellie McKay was a huge reason for me to go to New York. This is despite the fact that seeing her broadway musical wouldn't be in the group's plans. Fortunately for me, plans fall through and I found myself alone in the city with little else to do but see Threepenny Opera all by myself. I went to the box office and, under Sally's advice, asked them for a student discount ticket. Fortunately, I still carry my BYU i.d. with me all the time for just such circumstances. They told me that since I was just buying one, they'd waive the fact that I needed to utilize the student discount a half hour before the show. When I showed up for the show, I was surprised that my seat was row C, seat 111 -- pretty much front and center. The picture below was taken from my seat while I was waiting for the show to start. Nearly the best seat in the house. Minutes after taking my seat, a woman came and sat next to me and exclaimed how glad she was that she just turned in her extra seat to the ticket office a couple of hours earlier and that it was fortunate for her that I was the one who picked it up. Apparently, the ticket office told her it was unlikely that a single would grab the seat so soon before the show. Lucky her. Lucky me.On the way back from getting my Threepenny Opera tickets, I bumped into a flier distributor who yelled something extremely interesting. According to him, my very favorite comedian, Jim Gaffigan was in town playing near the Hello Deli. Alas, it turns out I missed him by a day. Still quite a coincidence, nonetheless.

Long before I came to New York I sadly resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be able to see Nellie McKay in a live concert. She would never come out to Utah and If I happened to visit the east coast, she probably wouldn't play at that time. Besides, I figured she retired from performing since she's now a broadway actress instead of a jazz singer. So in passing, Sally told me she noticed that Nellie McKay would actually be performing in a pub downtown for 20 bucks. I immediately phoned Maria and she immediately told Laura and within minutes I was on the phone with the good people at Joe's Pub buying Nellie McKay concert tickets. I then told Kristi and Sally that I would be leaving them for an evening. The Nellie concert actually fell on the same day that Laura and Maria wanted to meet me at that famous Serendipity restaurant. We did try to go before the show. They told us to come back and check in an hour and a half. When we came back, they told us to check back in an hour. We never got in.

Serendipity just wasn't meant to happen on this particular trip to New York.