I did a few other things in my trip to NYC last weekend. Because of my concert ticket mix-up that led to me staying an extra day I had all of Friday during the day to do something. I have been wanting to go to the Tenement Museum for forever, but since it’s all timed guided tours I often feel like I don’t have time to fit it in between whatever else I have scheduled. I thought this trip might be a good opportunity, but from what I understand some of the tours are outside and they recommend you pairing an inside and outside tour. The weather was supposed to be not great so I nixed that idea.

In looking through the weekly New York Times article about what exhibits to see this weekend I stumbled on the fact that there was a David Bowie exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum that sounded pretty cool. I decided that was what I wanted to do. I told my friend who I was staying with and she decided she wanted to go too, so we both got tickets (it’s timed entry and you should definitely buy tickets online ahead of time).

Our entry wasn’t until 1:15 so we decided to head down to Brooklyn early and find somewhere to grab brunch/lunch beforehand. Based on Google maps it looked like there were a number of options up one of the major roads near the museum so we just decided to wander. We saw a place on Google maps as we were walking called Tom’s that said it was a Brooklyn institution since 1936. After popping our heads into a couple of other places that we decided weren’t what we were looking for we wound up at Tom’s. At first it looked like we might not be able to get a table, but there was a an open table for two hidden away in the back corner. We were sitting there talking and all of a sudden I glanced at the wall and saw this

So we apparently accidentally stumbled on eating at the Tom’s where Suzanne Vega wrote the song “Tom’s Diner” and only knew about it because we wound up sitting at that particular table. I love serendipity.

The David Bowie exhibit was really cool. I don’t have any photos of it really because there weren’t any photos allowed. I’m happy about that because it was crowded enough and difficult to see and read everything without having to deal with people trying to take photos of everything. The exhibit was really cool. When you go in you get handed a pair of headphones to use through the entire thing. There’s some mechanism set up so that what is playing changes as you move through the exhibit most often providing you the audio to whatever video is playing. There were of course lots of artifacts, lots of video and audio, and costumes. If you even remotely like David Bowie I would highly recommend this exhibit if you can make it to Brooklyn before it ends in July.

Before heading home on Saturday I saw a matinee of Children of a Lesser God. Although I had some knowledge of what it was about I had never seen a previous staged production of it or the movie. This revival stars Joshua Jackson as James Leeds a speech teacher at a school for the deaf and Lauren Ridloff as a Sarah Norman one of his students who doesn’t want to learn to speak or read lips and whom James falls in love with. She signs her entire performance and you basically get what she is saying by the way he responds to her. I wonder how it would change the experience if you knew sign language and were watching. It’s a very thought provoking play about communication and power.

I really enjoyed it and though Joshua Jackson and Lauren Ridloff were both great. Anthony Edwards is underutilized in the role of James’ boss, which is one of the few things I agree with in the New York Times’ less than favorable review of the production. The set also didn’t do much for me, but those are about the only disparaging things in that review that I agree with. The show like the original is still set in the 1970s. The gender dynamics were treated as such which is something the reviewer seemed to take issue with. He seemed to want the show to also address race and gender in ways the show wasn’t meant to. I thought it was a great show and I would definitely recommend it if you’re in New York and looking for a play to see.