The absolute best way to start a morning off is to talk a walk in Central Park and let the pungent aroma of horse droppings smack you awake. Sidestepping horse-drawn carriages, my local tour-guide Alex, whom I recruited off the streets of NYC (who says New Yorkers aren't nice?), took me on a hour-long guided tour around the most celebrated park in the world. Everything in the park is planned, he says, from every curve in the path to each unique tunnel, from every contour of the lakes to the positions of each stone. "No shit Sherlock," I reply. "You mean a park didn't naturally confine itself into a perfect rectangular smack in the middle of a city?" What a dumbass. Should have sprang for a real trained guide.
As I walked along the man-made forests of Central Park, I couldn't help but feel oppressed. Everything was beautiful, for sure, with all the gazebos and terraces, but everywhere you looked, buildings obstructed the fringes of the park. I suppose the beauty of this park was that you could escape the bustling city-life for a quick dip into nature, and you could just as easily get back into the city if need be. What I felt, however, was this sense of confinement and restriction, as if some higher government power had set regulations on how much nature we could have, which of course, was exactly what the early settlers of NY did. The buildings framed the park so perfectly that even though you were surrounded by nature-y things, you can't really bring yourself to feel like you've been immersed in it. Surprisingly, the only place where I felt a sense of claustrophobia wasn't in the city, but felt it instead in the park where one's supposed to be able to escape from it. It's amazing what you notice when you're looking at it again with adult eyes.
But of course, I'm letting my neurosis get in the way of a perfectly beautiful experience. I saw where Charlotte and Miranda went jogging, where Carrie fell into the lake after a heated argument with Big, where that guy proposed to his girlfriend on a bridge with a 4-piece band in that viral video, where Joseph Gordon Levitt did a big dance number in 500 Days of Summer. It was idyllic and restful, yet architecturally stunning and classy, the kind of place where young passionate romantics as well as old wrinkled lovebirds can both enjoy equally.
The main event for that night was Chicago, the Broadway show I've been dying to see. Now Chicago holds a very special place in my heart. From the first time I saw the movie, back when I was 10 and my sis was forced to bring me on her date, I was hooked The full story is that she lied to our mom about where she was really going, but my mom, being a mom, figured it out and used me to ruin sis' plans. Yup, I've been a pawn in my family's mind games since I was born, my manipulative personality is a product of their actions. Just a little note to the future judge who'd be trying my case.
So anyways, there I was, ten years ago, on a date with my sis and her schmuck of a boyfriend - and I was completely enthralled by the glamorous, murderous vaudevillians. Apart from The Sound of Music, this was one of the first musicals I've seen, and my perception of a musical was that it was supposed to be all cheerful and Switzerland-ish. People were supposed to sing about how their favorite things consisted of kittens and mittens, not how much their exes deserved ten stabs in the chest! My ten-year-old mind was completely blown by Chicago's dark satire of our society's tendency to glamorize crime, although of course back then I didn't have such pretentious thoughts. I was just simply enchanted.
My seat was 5th from the stage and an excellent view of all the gratuitous skin that was on display. I was a tad disappointed with the almost non-existent props - I had been so spoiled by the movie version's elaborate sets that I forgot that Broadway shows simply don't use such detailed devices. A lot of it is implied, a little like how in the Shakespearean plays the audience is invited to imagine their own sets. For two and a half hours, I was living and loving the sexy, gritty world of glamorous danger, set to witty lyrics and impeccable footwork. I'd be so happy up there, I thought. That was my world.
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