Sight, Sound, and Smell Theatre

Christian Broadway.

That’s what they call it. It’s not a term that I made up, though it’s amusing enough to make me wish I had.

I’m referring, of course, to the Sight and Sound Theatre, one of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania’s top tourist attractions. It beats out Dutch Wonderland, the Julius Sturgis Pretzel Bakery, and the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society in terms of head shaking-ness. In fact, more than twice as many people visit the Sight and Sound Theater in Lancaster and its namesake in Branson, Missouri as visit Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson each year. Then again, as many times as I’ve been to Monticello—and it’s measured in the lots—I’ve never had to worry about being downwind from a farting camel.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Yes, there was a line in "Take Me Out" about dropping the soap.

I’ve only seen a handful of non-Christian Broadway shows. 1776, Dame Edna: The Royal Tour, The Producers, and so on; all pretty mainstream stuff.  About as edgy as I get was Take Me Out, the 2003 Tony Award winner for Best Play, set in a baseball team’s locker room, complete with wet and naked baseball players showering on stage. (Yes, there was a ”splash zone”.)

I’ve driven by billboards by the Pennsylvania Turnpike for the Sight and Sound Theater about a million times. They promote Sight and Sound’s Old Testament extravaganzas in a graphic idiom that’s more Disney than Deuteronomy.

Sight and Sound is partial to naming its shows after Old Testament A-Listers with short names. Moses, Ruth, and Jonah have made the grade. If history is any guide, Nebuchadnezzar and Melchizedek need to tell their agents not to sit by the phone waiting for a call.

I don’t know what made me decide to see one of the shows in person. Perhaps it was driving by the billboards again and again? Perhaps it’s the fact that I like a lavish Broadway musical as much as the next over thirty, single, and neat guy? Perhaps I thought "How could a million people a year be wrong?"

Whatever the reason, I asked the usual suspects if they wanted to go and they said sure. We all thought it would be a hoot.

We bought our tix online, $67 each, perhaps in subconscious homage to one of the best punchlines ever, “I can’t take 67 more of those!”

In a couple of weeks I got an email reminder about the show. It came with this notice, in red.

In 2015, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation will be performing construction work on Hartman Bridge Road (PA-896), approximately one-half mile north of our theatre.…this road construction may cause significant travel delays. We strongly recommend planning extra travel time on the day of your show.

Not wanting to miss the curtain as I sat in traffic while construction workers took a shoofly pie break, I telephoned the theater with some questions. I spoke to Alicia, a customer service representative. She was remarkably uninformed. I asked her if she could recommend a detour. She couldn’t. I asked if she knew that PennDOT was planning to work on a Saturday, the day of our show. She didn’t. She had nothing to say other than “you should leave early”.

And for such a Christian place, well, she wasn’t all that friendly. In fact, without too much training she could qualify for a job at the Post Office. Perhaps her caller ID told her that I was a middle-aged hipster doofus wannabe, and a slightly cynical one at that. Perhaps she was just having a bad day.

Since I wasn’t getting anywhere with being a nobody, I tried my luck as a somebody.

I’m a travel blogger, and I was wondering if you had a press kit that I could download. You know, the kind with facts about the theater and its history.

A pause. Yup, she had caller ID.

(Sounding even less impressed)  What do you want to know?

Well, how many seats does the theater have?

2,069. (Silence.)

This wasn’t going anywhere.

Well, what about its story?

It’s on the website. (More silence.)

Golly, she could not only qualify for a job at the Post Office, she could probably even work at the window. She’d be a natural at dealing with customers who don’t have the proper forms and are trying to mail large, poorly wrapped boxes to countries that don’t have any vowels in their names.

Jonathan Groff looking as if he's never had a a potpie noodle in his life.

Instead of asking if they’d ever consider Jonathan Groff, a bona fide Broadway star who happens to be from Lancaster, for a lead role, I gave up.

I mentioned my experience on the phone to my friend Tracy.

I bet they would have been nicer to you if you’d said that you were the pastor of a non-denominational church, she said

Or one that uses snakes in worship, I replied.

We chuckled.

Since Alicia was presumably not in the running to be the theater’s employee of the month, I decided to look at PennDOT’s website to see what was going on. Lo and behold (that sort of biblical lingo comes naturally when you are in the Sight and Sound mode), PennDOT wasn’t even starting the work near the theater until two days after our show.

Apparently Alicia and crew know all about Moses bringing stone tablets down from Mt. Sinai but they don’t know anything about PennDOT issuing press releases from Harrisburg.

The tickets advised us to be 45 minutes early for our 11:00 am show.  Yes, 11:00 am show. Oh right, it’s Christian Broadway!

But seriously, 45 minutes early?  Were there going to be security lines? How much time did they think we needed in the gift shop? They also urged us not to bring packages. Who takes a package to the theater? My friend K. called the theater as we drove there to see if a purse counted as a package. After being on hold for way too long, she finally hung up.

Construction hadn’t started on Route 896, just as PennDOT had promised, so our trip was a breeze. At the sign for the theater, we turned into a bucolic landscape worthy of Capability Brown. When we reached the enormous parking lot we found that attendants in neon yellow were doing an excellent job bringing order to something that wasn’t even close to chaos. One attendant told me to stay on the sidewalk and not walk diagonally across the parking area. Presumably the theater would get all kinds of bad press if I were run over by a church bus.

The place is enormous, you could even say Vegas-like in its scale and aura of kitsch. We went on a hot, sunny day, so the Vegas connection was even more apt. When we arrived lots of people were milling around in the plaza in front of the theater having their photos taken with Lion and Lamb Fountain.

After you do your best to absorb the enormity of the place, you notice the diversity of the crowd. It’s not like State College Presbyterian Church.  It’s like the model UN, that is if there’s a model UN that requires you to be an evangelical Christian. There are white people, black people, brown people, folks with accents that you don’t know where they came from, handicapped people. There were even Amish people. Frankly, I was astonished.

Once you enter the theatre lobby you get to navigate through second horde, though this time there’s cloying smell of hot spiced nuts in the air. Except for the lack of animal smells, it smelled like the county fair. I’ve never been to a theater that smelled like this. Then again, I’ve never been to the theater at 11:00 am.

The lobby’s top photo op spot was under a large statue of Samson. He’s the coming attraction. Sorry Nebuchadnezzar, maybe next time!  As sculpture goes, I’m not sure that it rises to the level of “so bad it’s good” but it does look as if it’s a refugee from an animated Disney feature with a generous dash of The Flintstones thrown in for good measure.  The crowd loved it. I’m sure tickets to the show are going like hotcakes.

I halfway expected the lobby reminiscent of Lourdes, festooned with crutches left by patrons who had a miraculous cure after the show. I mean, if there were ever a candidate for the evangelical, non-papist, Pennsylvania Dutch Lourdes, the Sight and Sound Theatre would be it. Who needs Obamacare when you have a non-Equity Moses telling you to throw away your crutches and walk?

While we were waiting to go to our seats—we were there PLENTY early, we perused the gift shoppes—matching shoppes, one on each side of the cavernous lobby. Interestingly enough, the gift selections were nothing special. Sure there were hideous giant purses, refrigerator magnets, and DVDs of the show. But there were no Daniel action figures, no license plate holders that said “follow me to Sight and Sound Theatre” no generic Lancaster county crap.  They are missing a tremendous opportunity to move merch.

Finally we were allowed to go into the house to our seats. The house was enormous. Not only are there 2,069 seats, but there are 2,069 generously sized seats, in scale with the butts of people who have never met a pot pie noodle that wasn’t worth a second helping. If there was any aura of mystery in the theater it was caused by the fog machines that were going overtime.

While we waited for the curtain to rise, we were treated to advertisements for coming attractions. The show started 15 minutes late, practically an unpardonable sin in my book. It looked as if they were waiting for one last busload of pilgrims, and when that section of folks finally settled in, we were treated to the admonition about turning off cell phones, and not interfering with the actors and animals in the show. In other words, this was no Tom Jones concert, so there was to be no throwing panties or motel room keys at anyone or anything.

They also announced that parts of the show were MADE UP for dramatic purposes.

They felt the need to point this out?

Before I get into the actual meat of the production, please note that I didn’t get the theater gene.  I can talk a pretty good game when it comes to window treatments, dogs as children, or even collecting Fiestaware, but theatre is generally lost on me.

In other words, Terry Teachout and Frank Rich would hate the show even more than I did.

Amateur though I am, he’s my review:

Joseph, as in the title character, lives in the Biblical era. He is, as my father would have said, a little light for heavy work, and a little heavy for light work. This is much to the dismay of his 10 half-brothers named, as in the Dr. Seuss story Too Many Daves, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, and Dave. Joseph’s younger brother is named Oliver Boliver Butt.

Joseph in the costume shop.

In addition to having their cloaks in a wad about Daniel’s spotty work ethic, the Daves are also not too keen on Joseph’s rather fashion-forward brightly colored coat, from the Maude Findlay Collection at JC Penney. Joseph, of course, thinks he look fabulous. Like his brothers, Joseph has terrible hair. As in, it looks like hell. And his shoes, well, they’re also abysmal. Even so, by my way of thinking, Joseph is obviously gay.

The Daves go to their father and nark on Joseph for his lollygagging. The father, Jacob, lives in a tent that looks like it was designed for Diana Vreeland—think the Arabian Knights and then some, no, and then a lot. The brothers seem to think Biblical glamping is normal. Jacob isn’t very sympathetic to The Daves but still tells Joseph, the son he likes most, to keep the stories about his dreams on the down low.

The Joseph has another dream and tells everyone. The Daves, especially, are NOT HAPPY.  And I was not happy either, because, when Joseph says that he’s had a dream, I am on the edge of my seat waiting for him to belt out these familiar lyrics:

I had a dream, a dream about you, baby.
It's gonna come true, baby.
They think that we're through, but baby,
You'll be swell! 
You'll be great!
Gonna have the whole world on a plate!
Starting here, starting now,
honey, everything's coming up roses!

That’s right, the famous showstopper from Gypsy! 

If there is ever a moment that calls for the playwright and the actor to channel the old inner Ethel Merman, this was it.

But no.

Instead we’re treated to some insipid faux John Williams crap.

Pardon me while I digress from the story synopsis, but one of the worst things (and there are several) about the Sight and Sound Theater was the Sound. There are no show tunes, or even hummable gospel numbers, instead the actors sing/lip-synch to a fake symphonic crap. It takes some doing to ignore the wonderful traditions of gospel music, American musical theater, and even opera to produce a show with a grand total of zero tunes you could hum. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Not a one. If that weren’t enough, there are no live musicians so really, the show is a two and a half hour long karaoke session.

I’m not really sure how they could have made the music any worse had they tried.
 
So back to the story, The Daves, are not happy with their dreamy brother and climb a big hill of Styrofoam rocks and throw him into a pit. Conveniently enough, the pit has a glass wall, so it looks as if he’s in a giant Ant Farm.  At this point a caravan of traders comes by. They have two actual camels, one of which farts next to Bruce as it waits to go on stage. Yes, this actually happened. They should call it The Sight, Sound, and Smell Theatre.

The Daves decide to monetize Joseph by selling him into slavery. Had I been producing the show, I would have had Joseph time-and-genre-travel to Gone With the Wind. If Joseph had learned some “negro spirituals” from Mammy, Prissy, Big Sam, and all the field hands at Tara, the music would have been much better in the second act.

Instead the slave trader retails Joseph to a bald soldier in Egypt named Potiphar. Think Yul Brynner lite. This is the occasion for some Egyptian dance numbers which seem to have been choreographed by Steve Martin in his “King Tut” period. On a good day this part of the show would rise to the level of a middle school musical. Unfortunately we were there on a just so-so day.

At this point Joseph starts taking Adderall by the bucketful, since soon enough he’s redecorated the palace, developed a new breed of horses, and brought a reliable 4G cell network to Ancient Egypt thousands of years before he’s even eligible for an free upgrade from Verizon.

Brad Patton

Interestingly enough, when he’s in Egypt, he gets rid of the bad hair and goes with a hairstyle that makes him look like retired porn star Brad Patton. It’s unsaid, but it’s obvious that Joseph is mindful of the old chestnut that it’s easy to be out when you’re out of town.
 

Mrs. Potiphar apparently "has needs" and tries to seduce Joseph. Although there is nothing about it in the program, my guess is that Mrs. Potiphar won the Norma Desmond Award at the Dean Smith School of Acting, since she practically shouts, “I am big, it’s The Pyramids that got small” at Joseph. Her charms are totally lost on him.

She’s not his type, since she’s married to his boss, and if I had to guess based on what passed for acting, because she was technically well, a girl. Stung by rejection, she’s says he tried to have his way with her and he’s thrown into the klink.

Then comes the best part of the show: the fifteen minute intermission.

I got a cup of gas station quality coffee at the snack bar, sampled the sugared spiced almonds, and stepped outside to enjoy authentic Pennsylvania Dutch Country sunshine. 

At the beginning of the second act, Joseph is released from prison as an honors graduate of the license plate making course. He then has a bromance with the Pharaoh which is when Joseph grows as a person (and presumably in other places as well) though that was just hinted at.

Joseph, now called by his Egyptian drag name, Zaphnath-Paaneah, is skilled at interpreting dreams. He misses an opportunity to reprise Everything’s Coming Up Roses, but does a number on one of the Pharaoh’s dreams and lets him know that there will be seven years of plenty followed by seven lean years.

Joseph (aka Zaphnath-Paaneah) and crew then store more grain during the seven years of plenty than you can shake a stick at. At this point, he’s apparently broken up with the Pharaoh or perhaps that's just on the back burner (so to speak) since he now has a wife named Asenath and two children, who, interestingly enough were played by children of different races. If we didn’t live in a colorblind society I would have told Joseph to answer the clue phone and wake up to the fact that Asenath not only has a checkered past, but apparently a checkered present as well.

During the seven years of lean, his brothers come to Egypt looking for food, and there’s lots of back and forth, including failed attempts at projecting actual emotions from the stage. Ultimately Joseph forgives his brothers for selling him into slavery and treats his brothers to a genuine Pennsylvania Dutch smorgasbord of seven sweets and seven sours.

At the end of the show, forgiveness rules the day, and Joseph flies off stage, more like a C-130 than Peter Pan, as I say, under my voice for once, WTF. There’s a short video of Jesus talking to us about forgiveness, and an announcer says that prayer partners will be around and about after the show. I demurred since the show was enough of a religious experience for one day.

So, as they do at the end of real theater reviews, some notes about the staging.

I already mentioned how horrible the music was, so I won’t kick the top off that old turd.

As for the costumes, well…did I mention that Joseph’s coat was from the Maude Findlay Collection at JC Penney? I thought so. Joseph is not the famous Las Vegas revue, Jubilee with its topless version of the story of Samson and Delilah. For the most part, people are covered head to toe, except for the Keen sandals all the actors (men and women) wear. Apparently they’re the Old Testament’s version of sensible shoes.

As for the wigs, think Jane Austen’s Regency England meets Medusa with a touch of Elsa Lanchester as Bride of Frankenstein thrown in for good measure. Trust me, even if all of Caitlyn Jenner’s hair fell out tomorrow, she wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those things.

There are lots of live animals in the show. A water buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, horses, a rat, a parrot, and perhaps even a llama. At least they didn’t sing and as far as I know, only one of the camels was dealing with flatulence.

The Egyptian sets, I have to admit were pretty amazing. They were a version of what Rameses II could have done had he the good sense to hire Cecil B. DeMille as his architect, landscape architect, and interior designer. They were gargantuan and stretched forever, from one wing of the stage to the other. Great stuff; the second best part of the show. They had a long way to go to beat the Intermission.

Interestingly enough, the program doesn’t list any credits. You have no idea who the actors are, who wrote the play, or the music, who designed the sets, did the choreography, the director, the costume designer and so on.

That was fine, I didn’t really want to know any of that.

However, I would have liked to know the name of the farting camel.

Sight and Sound Theatre

300 Hartman Bridge Rd

Strasburg, PA 17579

(800) 377-1277

New York City on More Than $5 Per Day

Not long after I returned from my Mexican adventure, it was time for my annual trip to New York City to see my old friend CB.  We’ve settled into a routine where I arrive on a Friday and for a day and a half, we hit some museums, perhaps go to a show, and sometimes do a little shopping. By Sunday, I’ve had enough of the city and my bank account has a large dent in it. New York is great fun, though each and every year I shudder at how money much I spend there. 

Since I’m not a fan of driving in general, and parking in NYC is a nightmare, I follow the lead of college students and the car-less and travel there on the Megabus. It’s a quite a bit different than the bus in Mexico.

In Mexico, I bought a paper ticket at the bus station. The bus pulled up right on time, I handed the paper ticket to the driver and the next thing I knew, I was in a spacious coach where the seat reclined just a bit too much. A couple of quick stops and I was at a large modern terminal in the city of Puerto Vallarta.
 

The Megabus has patrons buy tickets online. Instead of the bus station there’s the Walmart parking lot. When the bus arrived, more less than more on time, there was about 20 minutes worth of examining tickets and loading the bus. Americans seem to have WAY more luggage than Mexicans. While the driver loads steamer trunks filled with God knows what into the bowels of the bus riders try to find a seat in bright blue two-decker sardine can on wheels. I can’t imagine what Megabus seats feel like if you’re a big boy, but for me, they’re too small to be comfortable. 

Unlike the Mexican bus, Megabus has a safety video. I’d like to tell you about it, but once I realized that my seat cushion wasn’t going to become a floatation device and that in the unlikely event of a sudden cabin depressurization oxygen masks were not going to drop from the ceiling, I stopped paying attention. So, if there are any instructions on what to do in the event that the 15’ tall bus tries to go under at 14’ tall overpass, I missed them.

Once the trip starts you settle in for the five hour ride to New York City. Just as you feel that you’re making serious progress, the bus stops at a small truck stop (as opposed to a big honkin’ truck stop) in the Poconos. 

As soon as the bus parks 85% of the passengers make a mad dash for the john and then get in line to order epicurean delights at the truck stop’s Subway. This is what passes for truck stop cuisine in 2015, Subway. Whatever happened to hot roast beef or turkey sandwiches, smothered in gravy, green beans that have been cooking since the start of the cook’s shift, a Jell-O salad, and honest-to-goodness homemade pie? Perhaps they’re at real truck stops. Or perhaps heart disease killed all the folks who ate those meals. That could have happened. Whatever the reason, at Truck Stop Lite the choice is Subway and every variety of salty snack known to man.

I actually purchased beef jerky once. It was a long time ago, and for a performer at the Arts Festival. The performer loved it, but the public didn’t like the performer, and today he’s probably working in a beef jerky factory.  But back then, I think there were only manly flavors of jerky—plain, spicy, and hickory smoked. Today, I’m sure it comes in certified metrosexual flavors: free-range salted caramel, heirloom non G.M.O. kale, and mango with a hint of passionfruit.

The people who work at Truck Stop Lite are nice, but it’s a dismal place to spend 30 minutes with a bunch of people whose idea of getting dressed up is “nice sweats”. When the bus pulled out of the truck stop I noticed that there was a Mexican food trailer parked across the street.

I made a mental note for the next trip to skip the displays of Elvis branded tchotchkes and many different varieties of beef jerky to stop at the Mexican food trailer.

But eventually you get to NYC, though the last few blocks, from the end of the Lincoln Tunnel to the drop off point by Fashion Institute of Technology at 28th Street seem to take as long as the rest of the trip. The final stop couldn’t be more convenient for me since it’s just a few feet from the subway—as in the transit system. After a few minutes on the southbound Number 1 Train I’m where I need to go.

I had some time to kill on Friday afternoon so enjoyed one of my favorite urban pleasures: a shoe shine. My father was quite insistent on shined shoes—he even kept a shoe shine kit in his office—and I suppose some of that filtered attitude down to me. This shoeshine stand was in an actual shoe repair shop near Wall Street—the nice folks at Brooks Brothers directed me there. The now ubiquitous TV was tuned to baseball. I thought I might have to make conversation about the stinkin’ Yankees or stinkin’ Mets, but he wasn't chatty and English wasn't the shoeshine guy’s first language. I was relieved that I didn’t have to act as if I actually knew anything about baseball.

 

I also took the time to check out the Trinity Church cemetery, final resting spot of Alexander Hamilton, among others.

 

If you've gotta go, going in the midst of your usefulness seems as good a plan as any.

Friday night’s dinner couldn’t have been more touristy--Sardi’s, the theatre district landmark.  I won’t be the first person to say that people go there for the atmosphere not the food, though the food was perfectly serviceable. The atmosphere, that was fine too. The guys at the next table ordered steak tartare. My friend CB reminded repeatedly me that blob of raw beef the two guys were getting would have cost $3 at Weis Market. Even if it had been a $4 blob of ground beef I would have passed.

After dinner we took in a Broadway show, The Audience, starring Dame Helen Mirren, DBE as Queen Elizabeth II. The show imagines what happens when H.M. the Queen meets with her prime minister in their weekly audiences. The show covers the Queen’s entire reign, from her first P.M., Winston Churchill, through today's David Cameron. If you’re reasonably up on The Queen and British politics, it’s a great time. If you are looking for insights into what Princess Diana was really like or hoping for a cameo appearance by Austin Powers saying “Do I make you horny baby?” you probably should stay at home. I should probably be embarrassed about how much I know about the Royal family, so, yeah, I loved the show.

I was quite unprepared for the crush of people on the streets in and around Times Square before and after the show. I can remember when Times Square was filed with seedy sex shops and theaters. My favorite XXX theater was The New Bryant Sextacular, presumably named after a distant bough of the family tree. The New Bryant was the site of the 1986 Rick Bryant and Friends “Perversion Excursion” to see if a “live sex show”, as advertised in Screw magazine, really included “LIVE SEX”.

Yes, it did.

But for $4.99, the actual price of the show, I'm assuming that it wasn't top drawer live sex.

Interestingly enough, entrepreneurial working women in the theater offered patrons certain "value added packages" for as little as $5.00.

But I digress. 

Daniel Chester French did the sculpture groups outside the former U.S. Customs House.

Saturday morning I was up and at ‘em early to take a brisk walk around the Financial District (deserted) before taking the subway uptown to go to the Museum of the City of New York to see a couple of exhibitions.

The museum is just the right size for someone with the attention span of a gnat. In other words, me.

A piece from "Everything is Design: The Work of Paul Rand".

An image from Activist New York, an exhibition about New York's long history as a center for social justice movements.

The shows cover not just art and history, but other humanities as well.  Due to its out of the way location (5th Ave. at 103rd St.) and esoteric exhibition menu, you’re not caught in a tsunami of fashionably dressed people from The Better Suburbs trying to check the month's "must do" exhibition of their to-do lists as you are at MoMA or the Met.  By all means, make time to go.

After doing the Museum it was back downtown via the subway to meet CB at The Morgan Library.

If you’ve never been to The Morgan, go. If you have been, go back. It’s one of the best things about New York City.

J.P. Morgan as photographed by Edward Steichen

The library started out as the personal collection of banker J.P. Morgan. The three things you need to know about J.P. Morgan are:

1. He had the biggest nose of any of the Robber Barons.

2. He said if you had to ask how much it cost to have a yacht, you couldn’t afford one.

3. He isn’t related to the former Gong Show panelist and singer of the novelty song, The Tennessee Birdwalk, Jaye P. Morgan.

Understatement is the name of the game at The Morgan Library.

Morgan was a voracious collector—of stuff like medieval manuscripts, Gutenberg bibles, Sumerian Pez dispensers, and whatnot, so there’s quite a lot to see.

A portion of a plaster model of the library as designed by McKim.

Since he collected well before well before self-storage units and the hoarder diagnosis, Morgan engaged architect Charles F. McKim to build a library to house his collections. Even though money was no object, the place is still somewhat restrained, and doesn’t have the volume up to 11 as in quite the same way that a Newport “cottage” of the same vintage would.

The Morgan's buildings have been updated and expanded by Renzo Piano.

The exhibit Lincoln Speaks was the impetus for our visit. It’s a small exhibition of letters and speeches in Lincoln’s own hand. Lincoln didn’t have a Ted Sorensen, Peggy Noonan, or Christopher Buckley on speed dial to pen a few trenchant lines covering the topic du jour. So, he wrote his own material. The show isn’t large—but the letters are offered without printed translation, so it takes a while to read the 19th century handwriting  There are  a couple of artifacts too, such as a life mask and his pen and inkwell. The show’s great. By all means take the general tour of the library too. We tagged onto it for thirty minutes and it was fantastic.

"Is that a Sumerian PEZ dispenser in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"

The Morgan doesn’t have huge crowds. It looks as if most patrons there had good SATs, went to more competitive colleges, and are physically fit. If they were to start a bar, it would be a good place to meet guys named Hollingsworth. Indeed, I cruised the young members’ reception photos online, and frankly, it looked as if a bar at The Morgan could give Grindr a run for its money.

After some lunch (Thai), we went back downtown for a 3:30 pm tour of the Woolworth Building.

The Woolworth Building was the tallest building in the world from 1913 to 1930 and remains one of New York City’s Iconic Skyscrapers.  Since 9-11 the building has been closed to the public so you can’t wander through pretending that you’re on your way to meet your white shoe law firm or the person handling the trust established for your health and well-being by your great aunt Marge.

Woolworth stores were the Walmart—or would that be Amazon?-of the day, and Frank W. Woolworth put up the tallest building in the world both as advertisement and investment. The construction of the building was accompanied by an unprecedented PR campaign. When it was time to open the building, President Woodrow Wilson flicked a switch in Washington DC and turned all the Woolworth Building's lights on. As my friend Martha is wont to say, "You can’t buy that kind of publicity."  Interestingly enough, the Woolworth Company only used a floor or two of the building, and the rest of it was rental space.
 
Enterprising architectural historians have received permission from the building’s management to offer tours of the building’s lobby. Since only the lobby is open, you don’t go upstairs to see the early 20th century version of a cube farm, F.W. Woolworth’s private office, or the view of Lower Manhattan from 700 feet up.
 

Cass Gilbert, Architect of the Woolworth Building

The tour is pricey, but it’s worth the dough, especially if you’re interested in architecture. Our guide was Barbara Christen, a real live Cass Gilbert expert, not something you run into every day.

The lobby is covered in marble, glass mosaics, and enough gothic detailing to make the Hunchback of Notre Dame feel at home. The opulence of the lobby more than makes up for not seeing a vintage cube farm upstairs.

Architect Cass Gilbert holds a model of the Woolworth Building.

Owner Frank W. Woolworth counts coins.

One of the highlights of the tour are carved corbels of different men involved in the building’s construction—Cass Gilbert, Woolworth, the rental agent, and so on. I can’t see Donald Trump doing anything like this; then again, what stone carver could do justice to The Donald’s hair?

There were thirty of us on the tour none of them looked like likely candidates for their own reality show unless perhaps it was about wearing corduroy and trying to keep an old Volvo on the road.  Barbara did a great job dealing with the loud party music coming out of the rental spaces—she acted as if it happens every day and just ignored it. New Yorkers seem to have sang froid to spare.

The building is a construction site—it’s going condo—and the spaces we toured looked as if they could use a good cleaning, or at least to have the burned out light bulbs replaced. Presumably that will happen—it’s hard to sell an expensive condo when the remainder of the building is starting to look like the architectural equivalent of Miss Havisham.

The Ear Inn, one of New York's classic dive bars.

After the tour, it was time for a power nap and dinner at the Ear Inn—as modest as Woolworth is grand, and as crowded as Woolworth was empty. There were lots of other things to see in New York, but they’d have to wait until the next trip.

A Few Days in Mexico

I had the good fortune to be invited to spend a few days in mid-March in Mexico. My cousin Paul and his lovely wife Robyn invited me to spend quality time with them at their home near Puerto Vallarta. It was especially gracious of them to invite me since our friendship only goes back to our family reunion in 2009.

Willis, Sr. in a passport photo taken shortly after he traded combat with Pancho Villa for the more challenging opponent, my grandmother.

While Paul and Robyn have been semi-expats in Mexico for some time, when I think of Bryants in Mexico, I think of my grandfather, known in the family as Willis Senior (as opposed to Willis Seňor) and his time below the Rio Grande. No, he wasn’t in Juarez watching one of those shows with a donkey (I wouldn’t rule it out, but there's no documentation), but instead served under General John J. Pershing in 1916-1917 as part of what was then diplomatically called The Punitive Expedition, now known as the Pancho Villa Expedition.

Pancho Villa

If you were sick or perhaps paying more attention to your spontaneous erection at the thought of taking in-car driver training with the Rogers twins the day this was discussed in your high school A.P. History class, the U.S. of A. looked askance at Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa’s raid on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. One hundred years later, historians are still debating whether Villa was seeking to spend some leftover dollars or just wanted to be able to tell strangers in a bar, “Yeah, I’ve been to the Gadsden Purchase. Hasn’t everyone?” 

Woodrow Wilson

Venustiano Carranza

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson attempted to con Mexico’s president—a guy with the fabulous name of Venustiano Carranza— by claiming that the sending the US Army into Mexico was done with “scrupulous regard for the sovereignty of Mexico".  President Carranza, as one would expect, got his serape into a knot about the—as Henry Kissinger would say-- “incursion” into his country. Although Pershing was under orders to bring back Pancho Villa dead or alive, the United States gave up on the effort after eleven months. In those pre-Yelp days it took that long to learn that the Mexican food was better in Texas than it was in Mexico. Looking back from a vantage point of almost 100 years, no one considers this period to be a high point in the U.S. - Mexican relationship.

I am not a strong believer in omens but I knew that I was going to have an interesting trip when I looked at the fellow next to me in the departure lounge in the State College airport shortly before 6 AM to see that he was wearing bedroom slippers designed to look like some sort of little fuzzy animal. I think they might have been hamsters wearing Persian lamb coats. Apparently they are the perfect thing to go with sweats and a flat brim.

Manspreading in the departure lounge

When I checked in for my flight from Chicago to Puerto Vallarta I found that I could purchase an upgrade from steerage to business class, which is practically Net Jets compared to my usual spot in the middle seat between two folks who suffer from terminal flatulence while eating bottomless bags of bar-b-que potato chips. I weighed my grandmother’s dictum that “the back of the plane gets there at the same time as the front” with my father’s motto, “you don’t go on vacation to save money”. I came down firmly on the side of my father. I was all over that offer like a cheap suit. After entering my credit card credit card number and agreeing to terms and conditions that I never, ever, bother to read, I was practically a member of the leisure class. 

This meant that when it was time to board in Chicago, I was on the plane early, with my easy-to-spot compadres. They were mostly well dressed, except for guy in the row right in front of me, who thought that gym shorts and an Ohio State golf shirt made him GQ ready. His younger, but hardly trophy, wife sported an equally not-quite-dressy-enough for Walmart outfit. Fellow upgraders, I presumed.

Since Puerto Vallarta is supposed to be Mexico’s answer to Provincetown, Key West, and Rehoboth Beach rolled into one, I used the opportunity of boarding early and lounging in my seat scaled to actual human beings to check out (i.e. cruise) the sans-culottes as they passed by, struggling with their carry-on steamer trunks, anvils, live chickens, and whatever else people try to carry on a plane these days. Among the families and women dressed trampy-by-Las Vegas-standards, there were just two promisingly cute-ish guys. Otherwise, it was slim pickings. The line of passengers looked more like the communion line at State College Presbyterian Church than it looked like people headed south of the border for debauchery on the Mexican Riviera.

After a smooth flight, we landed in P.V., where the plane parked away from the terminal, and the ground crew rolled a stairs up to the side of the plane, just like in the old days. I was reminded of the postcard I bought in Dallas of JFK and Jackie—in her pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat—descending the stairs from Air Force One at Love Field, right before the famous motorcade.  I wondered, “Should I have packed by pillbox hat?”

When they opened the door of the plane, the sudden realization that—Wow! The heat and humidity are doing nothing for my natty outfit of navy blazer, white oxford, and khakis—brought me back to reality pretty quickly.  Oh well, I thought, if the British could subjugate an entire subcontinent in weather like this, surely I was up to the task of a few days of R and R. 

After a short trip through customs and immigration and I was met in the arrival lounge by my cousin Paul’s wife, Robyn.

Our first stop, on the two hour trek north to their house, was Walmart, where we loaded up on some staples and we (OK, I) marveled at the fact that Walmart in Mexico is pretty darned similar to Walmart in the U.S. I had no idea what anything cost since, as the ugly American, I had no idea how pesos translated into "real money". 

 The limes, however, were much limey-er than they are in America.

Speaking of limes, while R. and I were in the store shopping my cousin P. made sure that we stayed hydrated and enjoyed a prophylactic treatment against scurvy with a gin and tonic for the ride to the house.

The trip north from P.V. was quite beautiful, once you got away from bits of unattractive strip mall development, presumably put up to make Gringos like me feel at home.

We passed by more roadside stands than there are in Cape May County, NJ which is saying something. It was coconut season--they were stacked up at every fruit and veg stand like pumpkins before Halloween back home.  Paul pointed out one spot where a strip club was adjacent to a cemetery, the perfect spot for guys who never know if they’re coming or going.

From the coconut district we entered the watermelon district where there were piles after piles of watermelons for sale by the highway. We stopped to buy some. I don’t know how many pesos they were but it translated into not much in American dollars.

Not long after the watermelon district we came we arrived at their home, Casa Largarto just off the now no longer very busy coastal road.

It’s not so much a house as a grouping of three small buildings that take advantage of the steep, lushly landscaped hillside site.

The main entrance and garage were at the street level. The master suite is above the garage, and above that there’s a sky deck, or as P. and R. are learning to say in the local tongue, the mirador.

To me, Mirador is the name of a famous estate near Charlottesville, Virginia that was the girlhood home of Nancy Langhorne Astor, the first woman to serve in the British Parliament. It’s as stunning as P and R’s mirador, but in a different of way.

A few steps from the entrance building there’s a round two story masonry guest house with a thatched roof. Because of the sloping site, the main entrance to the property puts you on the second floor of the guest house. There was another guest room it at ground level.
 

The third building, a few steps further below the guest house, contained the kitchen, dining, and living spaces. Open on three sides, it was as much a thatch-covered patio as it was enclosed structure. It commanded a spectacular (and I do mean spectacular—on my first evening there we saw whales swim by) view of the little cove and the Pacific Ocean. The kitchen—an extravaganza of colorful tile and modern conveniences was located in the end of the building away from the ocean. P and R had the place decorated tastefully with a refreshing lack of tchotchkes.

A stairway leads from patio outside the living pavilion to the Pacific Ocean, about sixty feet below.

Soup to nuts, the place is beautiful. And you can go there too, since P and R have it on VRBO.

R. took me on a tour to get the lay of the land and to see see the other rock star houses in the 'hood.

Just add Mick, Keith, etc. and you're good to go!

The best part of the trip was the rare treat of hanging out with my cousins—two more arrived the day after me. They're bright, amusing, and fun to be around. We yammered about our family—who drank lighter fluid, who was crazy/a crossdresser/in a cult, who was on the Titanic/Hindenburg/Challenger, what did you really think of our grandmother, and so on.

Somehow I doubt that these are officially licensed NFL products.

During my four days there, we did some touristy stuff like going to a Mexican market.

I got quite a charge out of the Mexican approach to logos:

Nothing says tasty like a cow smacking his lips at his hindquarters being turned into a steak.

Don't all happy hypodermic needles wear lab coats?

But we mostly chatted, caught up on our reading, ate delicious food, and quaffed adult beverages. Not always in that order. It was a relaxing time with great company in a beautiful setting.

My temporary office. View was great; internet, not so much.

And in between all this, I had the DTs (digital tremens) since my phone didn’t work and the wireless available at a nearby restaurant was spotty at best. 

One day, the cousins and I went to the beach—just a short four wheeler drive from the house. There wasn’t a soul there and we got a bucket of beers, and sat in a mostly deserted café at the edge of the sand.  The water was warm and refreshing but before long, it felt as if I had barbed wire wrapped along my leg. Then one of the cousins said, “Did you just feel something?” Yes, we’d all felt it. Lo and behold we’d all been stung by jellyfish. It hurt but wasn’t disabling, like a mild case of shingles. We discussed peeing on our stings and decided against it. I was glad I’d packed ibuprofen.

My final night there, we had a bonfire on the beach. Even in Mexico, in the age old battle between beach bonfires built below the high tide line and the rising tide, the rising tide wins. 

L to R: Kristin, Rick, Paul, and Bill Bryant

The night after our bonfire, it was time to go back to Puerto Vallarta to start my trip home. The cousins and I said our goodbyes, and we posed a family photo to mark the event.

R. and P. put me on a bus and told me that when the bus arrived at an actual terminal and the driver got out, I’d be in Puerto Vallarta.  The bus was modern, clean, and speedy. In fact, the roomy seat reclined so much that it was like taking a 90 minute test drive of a La-Z-Boy Recliner Rocker.  The trip felt much safer and surely was more comfortable than the legendary Chinese buses that used to tote folks around the Mid-Atlantic states. Generations from now, my collateral descendants will not be wondering which ancestor was in a bus plunge in Mexico.

I’d looked into booking a room for my final night in Mexico in a quaint and charming hotel in the olde quarter of Puerto Vallarta. However, after reading Trip Advisor at length, I decided that I couldn’t tell the difference between one commenter’s colorful publican and another’s bitchy old queen. So, I decided to play it safe and stay at the large outpost of the U.S. of A. In other words, the CasaMagna Marriott Resort.

Nothing says quality like a double portrait of J. Willard Marriott and his son Bill that's in every Marriott lobby. I have lots of Marriott points and was able to cash some of them in for a room with an ocean view.

The building is an enormous John Portman-esque thing that would look a thousand times better if they’d just freshen up the exterior paint color. The color wasn’t baby shit brown but it made me think of baby shit brown. And that’s just as bad.

The hotel really was top notch even though check-in took 16 minutes once I got to the head of the line and my “Sucks To Be You” coupon for a discount on a massage wasn’t worth a whole lot since there weren’t any appointments available. But the thought was nice.

The swim-up bar is on the backside of Gilligan's Island.

A stroll around the grounds showed that there weren’t legions of buff, attractive, and amusing gay men who’d had excellent SAT scores lounging and loitering by the large pool with swim-up bar, or even on the adjoining not fantastic even-by-New Jersey-standards strip of beach. Puerto Vallarta may be Mexico’s answer to Provincetown, Key West, and Rehoboth Beach rolled into one, however, at CasaMagna, the Book of Mormon in the nightstand is the one revealed by the Angel Moroni to Joseph Smith so that he could found the church responsible for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Osmonds, and the dearth of Starbucks in Utah.

These guys do not exist in real life. At least in my real life, including my Mexican vacation.

Were the Book of Mormon in the nightstand at CasaMagna a DVD of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical with book, lyrics, and music by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone, well, there would be a whole ‘nother crowd making burnt offerings of themselves down by the pool.

Once I'd settled in, I showered, shaved, and Aqua Velva-d and upped the snazzy quotient with some fresh madras for a cab to the Olde City, Puerto Vallarta's gayborhood. Perhaps it was a communication problem caused by his lack of English and my lack of Spanish, or he didn’t like Aqua Velva and madras, but the cabby was, well, creepy. It was the only time in Mexico I encountered someone who was creepy.

The cab dropped me off at the Cathedral and I gave it a quick Reformed Protestant jiffy tour, taking in of all the bells and smells that I could stand in five minutes.

I walked around the Olde Puerto Vallarta which is like Wildwood, NJ except in Mexico, and it has fewer people who look as if they’re related by blood, marriage, or time spent in the buffet line to Governor Chris Christie. While people were out having fun, if there was Bacchanalian revelry going on, I certainly missed it. (It wouldn't be the first time.)

I had a fantastic meal in an upscale Thai restaurant, of all places. It even had Wi-Fi.

When I’d had given up on the idea of debauchery and had enough of the colonial charms of Olde Puerto Vallarta, I decided to take the bus back to the resort rather than to take another creepy cab ride. I called up the directions on my phone and found what looked to be a bus stop. Trip Advisor told me to wait for the blue and white bus that was going to the Marina, so I waited and waited and waited some more while lots of other buses came and went. After what seemed like an eternity but was probably really six minutes, my bus came by.

As soon as I boarded, I decided that the bus had been a washing machine in a former life. And not a Maytag either, but an East German 2-cycle washing machine that ran on whatever toxic waste there’s a surplus of in Dresden. After the bearings were shot, it was repurposed in Romania into a bus. I have no doubt that it shuttled Olympic athletes of indeterminate gender identity to and from their dorm to the Peoples Gymnasium #7 where they practiced the 250 meter rhythmic dodge biathlon, a sport that combines the floor exercise from rhythmic gymnastics (as in the wacky event where women cavort with the ribbon tied to a stick that calls to mind fly casting) with target shooting and dodge ball. It was considered perfect training for Communist bloc agents who were sent to the United States under deep cover as female gym teachers. But I digress.  

I’m not sure if the bus had an actual suspension, but as we sped down the cobblestone streets, it felt, well, as if we we’re on the love child of the square-wheeled train from the Island of the Misfit Toys and an industrial strength Magic Fingers. I sat there, glad that my nephew was a dentist. If my fillings vibrated out, I’d at least get the family discount on some new ones. On the other hand, the fare was less than 10 pesos, and no one on the bus was remotely creepy. What wasn't to like?

The next day, after a breakfast almost as good as that of The Buffet at Wynn Las Vegas, and enjoying an hour or two of the best weather of my trip, I flew back to the U.S.

When I was waiting in O’Hare Airport for my flight to State College my phone came back to life, easing my DTs (digital tremens). I could now get back to the important stuff in my life, like following Lee Radziwill on Twitter.  I’d had a great time in Mexico, reconnecting with relatives, seeing a new part of the world, and being thankful that I‘d waited as long as I did to get stung by a jellyfish.