My husband thought he was going to go up to New York for work early in December, so I had been planning on taking advantage of a free hotel room for a night and going up with him and seeing some of the Broadway shows I wanted to see before they close early in the new year. That trip wound up getting nixed, so I was disappointed that I didn’t get to do all the things I had been planning. So after we wound up not going to Boston over Christmas I suggested to my husband that we go up for an overnight trip. We went up on a Wednesday so we could see two shows on Wednesday and then head back first thing the next morning. That helped avoid a lot of traffic and more importantly reduce the insane amount of money we had to pay to park. It’s way more expensive to drive in on a weekday apparently. If we stayed one minute over 24 hours it was going to double our cost. So our goal was to get in and out in under 24 hours.

Although I knew I wanted to see Take Me Out and A Strange Loop, I did not buy tickets ahead of time because there were lots of them available. My plan was to try and get them half price from the TKTS booth, and I figured if I didn’t succeed there would still be plenty of seats open that I could pay full price for. I never wait in the line in Times Square because when we’re staying downtown if we’re there for my husband’s work I used to be able to go to the location at the Seaport, which COVID killed, or up to Lincoln Center where there isn’t usually much of a line. As predicted when we walked by the Times Square location the line was crazy long and would have taken hours to get through. We were going to make our way to Lincoln Center, but I looked at the app and saw that it was closed for some reason. So that was a bummer. We decided it wasn’t worth it to wait in the ridiculously long line and just made our way to the box offices and bought tickets. I don’t know what the discount was for, but the woman at the Take Me Out box office gave us some discount. It was still way more expensive than all the people who did get discounted tickets sitting around us, but I guess time is money and we decided that is not how we wanted to spend our time.

Take Me Out is about a baseball team in which one of the players comes out as gay and stuff that happens after that. There is a lot of nudity in the play with most of it taking place inside the team’s locker room, so you had to put your phone in a locked bag that you kept with you so that you couldn’t take photos. Of course some dumb people didn’t listen and didn’t turn their phones off before putting them in the bag, so there were multiple phones ringing during the show which was annoying. I really liked the play a lot. It was way more humorous than I was expecting and lots of good drama too. It went into previews the week after my friend and I went up to New York back in March, so we missed it then and since it had a limited run like most plays I didn’t think I would get to see it. Then they brought it back for a second run, and I’m really glad I got a chance to see it before it closed again.

I don’t really know how to describe what A Strange Loop is about, so I’m not even going to try. You can look some other summary online if you don’t know and you’re curious. I didn’t like this show as much. I did really like the music, which is one of the reasons I wanted to see it. I had really liked all the songs I had heard from it before going, and that was true during the actual show as well. However, overall I that it was just okay. The story didn’t do a whole lot for me. I’m not sad that I spent the time and money to see it though because I did really want to see it, and I don’t think there is any chance that it is going to tour despite winning the Tony Award for Best Musical because it would for sure offend a lot of people who would just be there because it was part of their season ticket package.

My husband booked us a room at the Millennium Premiere in Times Square. I would not recommend this hotel. We had to move to three different rooms for various reasons and the last one had issues too, but we didn’t realize until late because we were out and I doubt they would have been able to move us again anyway. The first room may have been fine except when we used the key to unlock the door and walked in there were already other people in that room. I’m not entirely surprised, since I don’t understand what the back end of their booking system looks like, but the two people working seemed to be struggling to find people open rooms at check in time and were telling each other room numbers not to use because they were going to use them. So I’m not entirely surprised that they double booked a room. Aside from that error I really don’t have anything bad to say about the staff as they tried to rectify all the issues and immediately brought us to the front of the line every time they saw us show back up in the lobby. After the first room they didn’t have any open rooms with king beds, which is what we booked. So they removed the resort fee from our charges since we only got a queen bed. However, when we went to that room something was clearly very wrong with the AC system as the thermostat was set at 65 and the room was 91 degrees. That was not at all tenable, so we went right back down and they found a third room for us and gave us a box of chocolate as an apology. That one seemed fine, but before bed we were getting chilly and that room had the opposite problem in that when I went to turn the heat up it wouldn’t turn on and there was something on the thermostat that said service. It wasn’t so cold that it was intolerable, but colder than I would have wanted it. Since we were only there for the night and we had already had so much drama I just threw my hoodie on over my pjs and I was mostly fine. They did also have a free to-go breakfast that had a lot of food in it, though we went to get bagels so I didn’t eat it.

We headed out pretty early, but before we left we walked down to Penn Station so I could get a black and white cookie from Zaro’s. When we take the train up I would always get a cookie to eat on the train home. Since COVID happened I have been up once and my husband has been up once separately from each other and both of us drove, so we each grabbed me a black and white cookie from somewhere else. They were both terrible. So to avoid the disappointment of another terrible, no good, very bad, black and white cookie I went to the source where I knew I would get a good one. There’s also a bagel place near Penn Station that I know I can get good bagels at, so it was easy to accomplish my two food goals right near each other.

It was a fun, quick trip and I’m glad we were able to make it happen.