Stereophonic

Started: 2024-11-02 16:23:01

Submitted: 2024-11-03 21:06:58

Visibility: World-readable

A quick weekend trip to New York City starting with a Tony Award-winning Broadway play

The kids had two days off school in the middle of October. I took the opportunity to visit my sister Bethany in New York City, while Kiesa took the kids to visit her family in Washington.

We both flew out of San Francisco on Thursday, morning, the 17th of October; but my flight returned late on Sunday so it made more sense to drive separately. I left a bit later and ended up stopped behind a line of vehicles blocked by a highway patrol cruiser on highway 17, on the north side of Summit Road near Redwood Estates. The wait felt interminable as I tried not to watch the clock and estimate my updated arrival. (My most important constraint was whether I was going to be able to call into my 09:00 meeting.) After probably ten minutes the patrol cruises removed itself from the middle of the two lanes and let the waiting cars pass. Around the corner I saw a second cruiser parked on the shoulder next to a tow truck, which I took to be the response left after a collision. Despite waiting for the collision, and rush-hour traffic in Santa Clara County, I got to San Bruno BART station in time to call into my meeting, then took the train one stop to the airport.

I cashed in some of my Delta miles to fly to JFK. I collected the miles when I was living in Seattle; now that I no longer live in a Delta hub city they're somewhat less useful to me, except when I want to fly somewhere that is a Delta hub city. This meant I got to fly through the newly-renovated Terminal 1, which looked new and shiny, in the slightly-sterile glossy-white way that new airport terminals built in the last few years tend to look.

I worked from the plane, mostly working on a bit of code that I could write asynchronously without a dedicated Internet connection; but it turned out the in-flight wifi was good enough that I could debug a colleague's assembly code, via Slack, from an airplane at cruise altitude somewhere over the middle of the country.

Before leaving San Francisco I bought some food to take with me on the plane, including a sandwich that was labeled as something vegetarian. When I opened it, on the plane after takeoff, it turned out to be a stale peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. I ate the sandwich, because it was what I had brought to eat (and it's compatible with my dietary restrictions), but I had to hope that no one near me had a peanut allergy.

We landed early at JFK, then waited for our gate to be ready so we could disembark. It was 20:30 Eastern time, past time for supper in my new time zone, so I ate at the airport before catching the AirTrain to Jamaica Station and transferring to an E train towards Manhattan. I got to use my contactless credit card to pay at the fare gates, which was an exciting innovation that more transit agencies should adopt. The E train whisked me through Queens, a significant improvement over the last time I took the train between Midtown and JFK. (Just like San Francisco, the New York subway also had a scruffy person gesticulating and pontificating at volume; but I was already practiced at ignoring them.)

Midtown Manhattan

I spent the day on Friday working from my sister's apartment in Midtown, since I only really need a laptop and an Internet connection. (This is a power that I feel like I should use more often, though I also have responsibilities at home that are harder to perform remotely.) In the evening we walked towards Times Square for supper, past a series of "finger buildings", new tall residential towers in Midtown (when developers realized that the zoning codes restricted the floor space but not the total height, so they could build thinner buildings and get more height). One building on 58th Street caught my eye with its pattern of strong vertical lines on the sides. For a block or two walking past the tower it looked like I was seeing a wide facade from a shallow angle; but when I got closer I realized this was an optical illusion.

Central Tower above Midtown

We ate supper in Times Square, then walked around the corner to the John Golden Theatre to see Stereophonic. Walking down 45th Street to the theater, past multiple theaters with people crowding the sidewalks to reach their theater in time for the curtain, I got the impression of a cinema multiplex showing multiple movies at once — except each theater was a live stage play.

Stereophonic at the Golden

Bethany and I both listened to the Freakonomics Radio episode The Magic Behind a Hit Broadway Play about the play; and when I decided I ought to visit New York this year we decided we ought to see the play. It follows a rock band in 1976 trying to record their second album. The stage was set up inside the recording studio; we looked over the shoulders of the recording engineers at their giant mixer board into the glass-walled recording booth. We watched the band practice and perform, with the actors on stage playing the instruments as the members of the band. The setup of the recording studio let the play direct us to focus on different things at different times: we could listen into the band in the recording booth, or turn down the volume so we could focus on the action in the control room. The band was portrayed at the cusp of greatness, but just about to fall apart. Some of the awkward conversations between romantically-involved band members reminded me of conversations I've had, and it went as badly for them as it did for me. The music was good, and we got to watch a version of the process of producing the songs as the band members tried different things, mixing and remixing the songs to (or past) the point of perfection.

The play was excellent and I'm excited that I got a chance to see it in its original Broadway run.