Tuesday, June 28, 2011

We slept until 9:00 when Mark woke us up and pointed out if we hurried we could still make it to the hotel breakfast, which we did. Every day was offered pretty much the same thing, scrambled eggs, some kind of potatoes, sausage, waffles, oatmeal plus the usual continental breakfast stuff like bagels and cereal. The coffee was truly awful though. We stayed at a Residence Inn in Sacramento and the coffee was fine so I don’t know what was up with that. After breakfast we walked around Times Square and saw the ball that drops on New Years, all the big screens, the M & M store, etc. After a while we were getting hungry so we headed to the Stardust Diner for lunch. The girls really liked it here because the wait staff (all aspiring singers and actors) would sing covers and original songs every ten minutes or so. Our waitress was really good! I had to remind Charlotte that it wasn’t a TV show and the woman could see her when she sang so it was okay to smile, and the lady came up to us later and said it really made her day to see Charlotte’s smile in braces. After lunch it was time for our NBC Studio tour at the Rockefeller Center. The girls had read about this tour in the New York Kids guide we’d gotten them and wanted to see it. As I expected, it was a little bit hype and a little boring as not much is filmed there anymore. Charlotte was also very disappointed that she didn’t get to be filmed doing the weather report – she thought everyone got to do it but really they pick a couple of people from each group. So if we had to do it again we would skip this tour. We then picked up some snacks (macarons for me and Genevieve and a cupcake for Charlotte) and walked to St. Patrick’s cathedral, and then back to our hotel. Genevieve and I stayed out for a bit to look at the astounding number of bead stores across the way – I think there were five of them all lined up!We had tickets to see the Addams Family Musical so we went to try to eat at Carmine’s in the theater district but the wait was two hours so we passed and went to a little place nearby called  Osteria al Doge where we had a very nice meal. Then on to the Lunt-Fontane theater where we were very surprised and delighted to see that we had excellent seats, about 10 rows back and dead center. We were also lucky in that it was Brooke Shields’ debut performance as Morticia so the energy in the theater was high. The musical was good, too, light and funny and very entertaining. Mark didn’t even come close to drifting off and the kids didn’t get the wiggles either. There was some excitement as Kirstie Alley was in the theater as well a few rows from us, once she was spotted there was a huge line for autographs. And then when the musical was over we walked back to our hotel, very happy.

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