Travel Braving the Big Apple

STANDING OUTSIDE ROCKEFELLER CENTER AT 8 A.M., waiting for stand-by tickets lor the afternoon taping of Conan O’Brien’s late-night TV show, was not exactly how I imagined spending an hour ol’ our trip to New York City. But my 15-year-old son. Eric, and his buddy Will Hodges, also 15. were determined to see O’Brien, the sly comic whose primary audience is male adolescents. I never imagined getting into Conan would be as challenging as scoring tickets to The Lion King.
When my friend Carol Hodges and 1 decided to take our teenagers to New York for spring break, we had more traditional tourist activities in mind-the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the new Hayden Planetarium. Chinatown, and Broadway. But we wanted the boys” input as well. They were fine with all that-as long as they got to see Conan.
Stand-by tickets for the Conan O’Brien Show are handed out each weekday at 9 a.m. at the 49th Street entrance of Rockefeller Center. We grabbed our blue passes-allowing us to stand in line again later that day-then headed out for sightseeing.
Creating the perfect itinerary for a mother-and-son bonding trip proved harder than I thought. First Carol and I crossed off all the girlie stuff: art galleries, shopping on Filth Avenue, the Bliss spa, and Kiss Me Kale on Broadway. 1 scoured the Internet, magazines, and newspapers for stuff that both mothers and teenage sons would like. We tossed out Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden because our boys aren’t into sports. With so many restaurants, meals should be easy, right? Nope. Teenagers are picky. Mine won’t touch hot dogs {the quintessential New York food!), and anything too fancy or too authentically ethnic-except Italian–is suspect. Oh well, we figured we could always grab pretzels and bagels on the street.
Accommodations in New York are expensive, but during certain limes of the year, you can get good deals. We found a great little boutique hotel on Korean row on East 32nd Street called The Avalon. two blocks from the Empire State Building. Once a factory, then an office building, it has been renovated into a hotel with 80 suites and 20 rooms. Our deluxe suite had a huge marble bathroom and every amenity (including a “body pillow,” which this mother immediately claimed).
To attract families, The Avalon has a kid package thai includes free continental breakfast and “City Passes,” booklets with tickets to six top tourist sites, including The Met, the Natural History Museum, the Empire Slate Building, and the Statue of Liberty. (It not only saves money but also waiting in lines.) The Avalon’s service was great and though a bit off the beaten path. the price made up for it.
We spent Saturday getting oriented, going to the top of the Empire State Building and then cruising Times Square. Though cleared of the hookers and peep shows, there’s still plenty to ogle: the fabulous electronic signs, break dancers, a silver robot man, street preachers, the snake guy. To our relief, the boys weren’t interested in the hottest restaurant in Times Square: WWF New York, the new wrestling-themed eatery. So for dinner, we went to John’s on West 44th Street-a favorite of The Sopranos cast-for thin-crust pizza. It was authentic, cheesy, and cheap.
The next day. we took one of those double-deck tour buses. We inadvertently chose an off-brand bus, operated by two guys, entrepreneurs in the great New York tradition of immigrants on the make. English was not our guide’s first or second language. He provided an unintentionally hilarious trip south, past the “Fla-Tiron” building through SoHo. the neighborhood transformed into a hip area in the 1970s by “artists, writers, hippies, gays, lesbians, and liberals.” We laughed all the way down through the historic tip of the island back up to Chinatown. where we bailed in favor of walking.
We gaped our way through Chinatown, taking in the strange smells and language, The boys, however, preferred the more familiar surroundings in Little Italy and SoHo, with its flea markets and funky shops like Yellow Rat Bastard, with skateboard gear for teenagers, and vintage stores like Andie’s Cheepies and Alice’s Underground, where the boys searched for bowling shirts. We spent too much time at Pearl River Trading Co. on Canal Street, a warren of Asian shops where the boys shopped for cheap sunglasses. A few doors down, we were tempted by counterfeit Fendi and Kate Spade bags.
Musicals are the essence of Broadway. so Sunday night we tried to pick one the boys would tike: Footloose, the Broadway-show based on the movie starring Kevin Bacon. At the Richard Rodgers Theater, the production was bright, energetic, and well staged-but a little too cute. (Clue: The audience was packed with 13-year-old girls who knew all the words.)
After the show, we walked a few blocks to Carmine’s Italian restaurant, 200 West 44th Street, where food is served family style. From a front window, we people-watched and feasted on Caesar salad, stuffed artichokes, shrimp scampi, and a huge sampler platter of pasta, accompanied by crusty slabs of bread and followed by a mound of tiramisu-way too much food, but all great.
Monday, we took the subway south to Wall Street. (If you plan to stay in New York for a week, buy a Metrocard at any token booth-for $17. you get unlimited use of the subway for seven days.) We toured the New York Stock Exchange (pick up free tickets to this popular tour at the 20 Broad Street entrance) and went to the top of the World Trade Center.
Tuesday, we headed north to the American Museum of Natural History on West 81st Street. We dashed through the renowned dinosaur skeletons to the new Rose Center for Earth and Space, the phenomenal new wing that takes you from the Big Bang to last week, with colossal scale models of the planets floating in the enormous glass box that houses the spherical Hayden Planetarium.
But the “Passport to the Universe” space show was the highlight. Inside the lower level of the 87-foot sphere, we stood in a circle and watched a short three-dimensional light and sound show. In the upper-level theater, we reclined in cushy chairs, looked up, and were swept on a throbbing trip back in time to the birth of the universe. After a dazzling ride past Mars. Jupiter, and Saturn, we were launched into interstellar space, past galaxies far beyond the Milky Way, then sucked into a black hole and disgorged back at Earth.
Back on our feet, we raced back to Rockefeller Center to wait another hour in line and not make the cut. But thanks to Carol’s nephew, who works for NBC Sports, the boys still got an inside look at big-time TV. We went behind the scenes at several NBC studios, including the Rosie O’Donnell and the Saturday Night Live sets. (Want to get in to see SNL? Send in a postcard in August to enter the ticket lottery, but be aware that most of those who get in know somebody.) As we left Rockefeller Center, the boys vowed to get up at 5 a.m. on Thursday to have another go at stand-by tickets to see their hero.
Wednesday we moved our base camp to the heart of Times Square. Once the last place you’d stay with kids, Times Square has cleaned up its act, and the rooms at the DoubleTree Guest Suites are family-friendly-each suite has a microwave, small refrigerator, wet bar, and a Nintendo.
At 5 p.m.. we hopped a cab to the studio on West 54th Street where they tape The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Comedy Central’s popular TV news parody. Unlike the Conan show, we just had to call a few days ahead to get the free tickets. The comic who came out first was hysterical, if a bit raunchy for the moms’ taste, and the boys did their part as members of the studio audience by whistling, shouting, and applauding wildly on cue. Stewart was warm and friendly and very funny.
We rushed from (he taping to the East Village for the 8 p.m. show of Tubes, by The Blue Man Group: three bald men covered in cobalt blue makeup. They pound drums and a weird instrument made of plastic tubes, doing increasingly strange and disturbing things with Twinkies and Jell-o?, all the time maintaining perfectly blank expressions. It’s wordless satire, performance art, and music rolled into a funny, mesmerizing, and unsettling (but PG-rated) show. As we left, the boys looked shocked that their mothers had brought them to something so…hip.
Thursday, the boys woke up at 5:30 a.m. to get in line for Conan stand-by tickets, This time they were No. 1 and No. 2 in line-if anyone got in, they would. After a day of sight-seeing, we returned to the Conan studio. But the gatekeeper announced the studio was so full, they were not admitting any standbys. The boys were disappointed but philosophical. Next trip, they’ll know the ropes.
That evening, we headed downtown to see De La Guarda, a show that’s so Off-Off-Broadway it should be called “Beyond” Broadway. It’s also one of the hottest tickets in town.
Performed in a gutted bank building by an 18-member troupe of young, buff Argentineans, De La Guarda is part rave, part performance art, and part three-ring circus, Warned we’d be standing throughout the hour-long show and that we’d probably get wet, we heeded advice to check our coats and bags. We joined others in the audience to stand in a dimly lit room with a black floor, black walls, and a white ceiling made of paper. As we waited in anticipation, I could see Eric looking at me like. “Now what have you gotten us into?”
It started slowly, as mysterious creatures swooped overhead, creating playful shadows on the paper. The pitter-patter of raindrops, then the material ripped. A man dressed in a business suit, harnessed to a long rope, plunged through the paper only to be pulled back up. As drums pounded and a singer chanted in something vaguely like Spanish, he swooped down again, joined by a diving woman. A wind whipped a dry fog and the ceiling disintegrated as writhing, wet bodies formed a single seething mass. The barely clothed performers leaped, crawled, and twirled above, then suddenly descended into the audience, kissing and grabbing willing audience members and lifting them high above the crowd.
De La Guarda is a sweaty, sexy, energetic explosion. As we left, damp and disheveled, Eric said thoughtfully: “That was soooo weird. But in a good way.”
Friday dawned cool and clear; from Battery Park, we caught the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Seeing the green-skinned Miss Liberty from the ferry was strangely thrilling, like glimpsing a favorite celebrity at the grocery store.
The surrounding buildings, now restored as a museum, resonate with the large story of America and the smaller story of my German-Irish ancestors. Eric and I found family names etched on the American Immigrants Wall. Though relatively low-tech, the exhibits are beautifully done. The boys were ready to go after a couple of hours; I could have stayed all day.
Our week ended in classic New York style. Central Park, then the Egyptian galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. and the big finale: Disney’s The Lion King. which everyone told me was a must-see– and completely sold-out for months, But the concierge at The Avalon had located four orchestra tickets for Saturday night. only S250 each. Carol and I gulped, then decided to go for it.
The four of us sat on the front row, completely dazzled by the leaping gazelles, the menacing Skar, the silly Zazu. It’s a big. beautifully realized production that is far better than the film. At one point. I sneaked a peek at our teenage offspring. They’d been suspicious at first. (“That’s for kids.’”) But they were caught up in the show, mesmerized by the magic of Broadway.