Thoughts on an afternoon and evening in Times Square.

First, the NY Times has moved over to luxe eminent-domain obtained digs on 8th Ave, so maybe it's time for a new corporate sponsor?

I saw a preview of Cry Baby, another B-way musical based on a John Waters movie, Wednesday, courtesy of the seat-filler membership. I wasn't optimistic, but like the show that preceded it in the Marquis Theater, The Drowsy Chaperone, it's a surprisingly good time, and better in my opinion, than Hairspray. The opening number, "The Anti-Polio Picnic" sets the bar kind of high, but it was very clever. Allison's grandmother is played by Harriet Harris, always a hoot as Frazier Crane's agent, Bebe Glazer.

Then I went to the box office of the Imperial to see if I could get a ticket to August: Osage County for the time I missed because of the bronchitis in January. Remembering how I got to see the show I was on my way to when I got run over by the bus, I talked to the house manager, and they do have a means of seeing the show, despite numerous "no refunds/exchanges" warnings all over the place, and I enjoyed it as much this time as I did last week. My favorite line is the mother's response to her daughter Ivy, who claims to have natural beauty not to need make-up. "All women need make-up. The only woman pretty enough not to need it was Elizabeth Taylor, and she wore a ton."

I don't get the appeal of the M&M and Hershey stores on [insert new corporate sponsor] Square. I've been to Hershey Park and they have a store with all kinds of stuff you don't see in stores, as well as unusual packaging and sizes, but not in these shops. Are there parts of the country where candy is hard to come by? I'm not kidding, you see all kinds of people with shopping bags from there, and I hear people talk about it all the time, "Where's the M&M store from here?" I mean, since you're right there, go to Dale & Thomas and get some pepper and white cheddar popcorn. They don't sell that in the vending machine at work.

Tonight I'm seeing another show here in Brooklyn, just down the road from last week's Kafka, Lysistrata. I've never seen it before, but I know the basic story from "Gilligan's Island". The girls quit doing housework and baking coconut cream pies until the men did what they wanted. Only it's not housework in the real one.

And can I tell you that between seeing the Harold Hecuba musical production of Hamlet on "G's I", I never saw any other version until Mel Gibson's movie came out in 1990? When you've seen the best, why mess with the rest?

I am 1/32nd Irish. I recently solved a little family mystery about my great-great-grandmother, Maggie Jordan. Firstly, she was born in Manchester, England, but her parents were both from County Cork. She met Hiram L. Curtis, Sr. in Philadelphia and married him there in 1861. For reasons unknown, they were in Alexandria, LA, when Hiram left for the Civil War, leaving Maggie to make her way up the Mississippi to her family in Wisconsin, 2 year-old Hiram, Jr. in tow. What I heard growing up was that Sr. disappeared in the war and she never knew what became of him. Maggie remarried and had a zillion more kids, so Hiram, Jr. left home early, married stalwart Emma Cleora Hyde, and had a zillion kids of his own, including Freddy, my grandfather.

What I learned recently was that a Hiram L. Curtis, Sr. died in 1874 in the Alexandria, MN area. The obituary described him as "an early settler of the Lake Osakis area", where my family has a cabin that Freddy and some of his strapping boys built in about the late 40's. Said Hiram was survived by his wife, Mary, whom he wed in 1854, and a zillion kids.

What does it mean? First, that Hiram, Sr. was not free to wed Maggie, and therefore, I am of a bastard branch of the Curtis family (which includes, btw, Hiram, Sr.'s father, the fabulously named Ebenezer Curtis!). Secondly, Grandpa Freddy must have known this because he owned property on Osakis and knew how he came by it. The idea that a man with the same name as his grandfather owned property on the same remote lake is too farfetched. Also, Maggie must have in fact known what happened to Hiram, Sr., because the bastard branch and the legitimate branch, as we've seen, came to be lakeside neighbors. So the only remaining mystery is why all the mystery? Maggie still did this incredible thing of making her way with her baby fifteen hundred miles during a war, doesn't it make it an even better story that Hiram, Sr. was a bit of a scoundrel?

Again, anything that happens both here and in Manhattan is better here. This afternoon at 12:58, the Brooklyn St. Patrick's Day Parade started at the end of my block. You can see the crowds whipped into an anticipatory frenzy.









Nineteen minutes later, the parade has literally passed me by.












The only dogs qualified to march.







What eggs are to omelets . . .














Cub Scouts still exist!














Irish dancers














Now here's something interesting. This is an old-tyme trolley from historic Green Wood Cemetary, serving Brooklyn's corpses since the van Buren administration. Why do they have a commemorative trolley, and who would want to ride in it?














Lucky shamrock horse. There were only two parts to the parade after the four horses passed, a giant sanitation truck with a guy who jumped out to shovel up the occasional horse dropping, and a street sweeper. So half an hour after the totally tidy parade, not only was there no trash, but our street was freshly washed.

Toast and eggs, crackers and tuna, yummmmmmmm!

This is a detail from my friend Lorna's favorite NYC building, the American Radiator building, now the Bryant Park Hotel. When I was a kid, the harbinger of spring was the return of the red-breasted robin. Today it got into the 50's, and a homeless guy in the park had his bare feet stretched out in the sun, airing out the dogs after a long winter. I guess that really tells you all you need to know about the difference between Minnesota and New York.

I saw a really cool show last night. First, it was at the Brooklyn Lyceum (and let's not get into the whole lyceum v. academy debate). The building used to be a public bath and still has two doors with Men and Women carved over them. And there's no theater. There's a big gym with a batting cage, and in a corner, an ersatz black box made out of four curtains and a black plastic sheet ceiling. Inside, there were four cafe tables and ten folding chairs, a projection screen and a podium. The show was of a Kafka story I've never heard of, "Report to the Academy", a guy in gorilla make-up and a tux, talking about how he was captured and decided the only way to escape his cage was to evolve into a human. That took about half an hour, then "Red Peter" told us some fun facts about Franz Kafka, a long-standing favorite of mine. There were only five of us in the audience, so it was uncomfortably close in a good way, I loved it.

Last week I was waiting for a light on the Upper West Side when I heard a kid scream, "I want to take a taxi, Mom, I'm CHILLY!" I looked down and this kid was no more than six years old, wearing about five shirts like he's at a J. Crew photo shoot. Maybe it's all the oxygen from Central Park, but I think things are weird on the Upper Sides.

I stand corrected. Last night, I saw August: Osage County, one of the shows I missed when I had bronchitis. It's gotten double-plus good reviews, but everything I read about it, sprawling family drama, incest, etc., really made me uninterested. In November of aught-four, I saw Bug, by the same playwright, Tracy Letts, and while I liked it, it didn't really presage a play I'd spend a hundred bucks for. But August was fantastic, a brawling, cruelly funny, complicated, not-too-incesty spectacle that didn't seem like it took the three and a half hours it did. I often think "this is really good acting", but I rarely feel like I'm watching real people, and I predict a Tony for Deanna Dunagan and at least a nom for Amy Morton. (The Tony Awards are on my birthday this year, which is also Father's Day--all the world will be celebrating something.) The principals are all from Steppenwolf in Chicago, which helps me not recognize them as actors. Anyway, great, rollicking, fun, well-written show. Know what, though? I'm all about the family bruhaha, and usually, and in this case, writers get the tension and resentments and anger right, but I can't think of an example offhand that depicts what I feel as family love. It's a kind of unchosen, tribal birthright thing that gives you the right of respect from people you might barely know. As for adult siblings, you often see depictions where they're trying to recapture some of the closeness they had as children, usually having banded together against some awful childhood. I'm not particularly close to my brother and sister, but we were so close growing up that it doesn't matter, what was there then is always there, and the same goes for the cousins I grew up close to. So yeah, it's great to be friends with your adult sibs, but that doesn't illuminate what sibling love itself is. (Again, examples of sibling rivalry and hatred are Baby Janeing all over the place.) As we learn from the syndicated Judge shows, the only force that can destroy sibling love is the lending of cell phones.

I'm telling you, the NY Post never disappoints. Headline today, regarding Governor Spitzer's admitting he's paid for sex: "Ho, No!"

The magic of live theater! This evening, I went to a staged reading of two P.G. Wodehouse short stories, An Evening at the Anglers' Rest. I was a little worried that the cast had varying proficiency with their British accents, then after only a couple of minutes, the main character said, "Oh, god," and slid to the floor in front of the bar. For a second you think it's part of the show, but the rest of the cast gathered around him, and in a minute, I heard his voice say, "M&Ms". Yep, hypoglycemic. They helped him off the stage and while they were setting up the second reading, the artistic director told us the story of their company. "Normally," he said, "we specialize in forgotten musicals. My friends said, 'you mean flops'. It started when I found this book in the library, The Musicals No-One Came to See." This wasn't a musical, but that sounds interesting and if I ever see ads for their musicals, I'll check it out.

So then they did the second story, and it was pretty cute. I may swing down to yon library tomorrow for a look-see.

I was standing under a bus stop sign yesterday when this gnarled gross guy sidled up to me holding a half-eaten Drake's lemon cake. "Hello, gorgeous girl, are you waiting for a bus?" he said.
"Yes."
"My name is Darrel. What's yours?"
"I don't talk to strange men on the street. If you had a daughter, wouldn't you tell her the same?"
"Oh, most definitely! Can I give you my number?"
"No, thanks."
"Okay, can I have your number, then?"
"No. Have a good day, though."
"Thank you, thank you. Can I give you my phone number?"
"No, thanks."
"Can I get your phone number?"
"No."
"Okay, then . . ." and Darrel wandered off.