Almost home

In Lake Havasu with a great view of London Bridge from our hotel room.  Next stop Sacramento

Made it to Big Spring, TX

We are about three hours from Carlsbad Caverns where we expect to send a couple nights before moving onto Arizona and back to California.

Chickasaw Cultural Center

Just left the center which is in Sulfur, Oklahoma about half way between Oklahoma City and Dallas.  Really beautiful and full of Native American pride.  We highly recommend.  Now on US 70 heading west.  Still in Oklahoma but should cross into Texas in an hour or two.

HEADING. WEST THRU MISSOURI

Left Susan's high school friend Ellen this morning and heading west with our next destination Carlsbad Caverns.  Meeting Rose's friends for lunch in Columbia, Missouri.  The St. Louis gateway arch is fantastic.  A beautiful city.

New pictures from NYC

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=glevpalmer&target=ALBUM&id=5607317216636040081&authkey=Gv1sRgCOaq5PL5seCugAE&feat=email

St Louis

Lots of lightning and tornadoes possible.  An exciting evening for us California types.  Got one of those radio alerts with the emergency system and thought it was a test but was the real thing

Definitely not on New York anymore

Grits, eggs,pancakes, biscuits, fried apples, and gravey.  Three people and $19 with tip.     And oh so good

Rose graduated

Two days of excitement.  Tuesday was Columbia college graduation and Wednesday was the university wide graduation. 
We had a family dinner Tuesday and a dinner with tje four girls that stayed together all four years with families Wednesday.

In Pennsylvania

We left nyc at noon.  New Jersey is only 70 miles wide so it did not take lomg to get to Pennsylvania.  We will get to Ohio today and to St Louis tomorrow to visit Susans high school friend Ellen.
We are back on Interstate 80 and will turn south at Youngstown Ohio towards Columbia and then to indianapolis on way to St Louis

People in the picture

This is a great musical about Poland and Jews during world war II.  If on New York, we highly recommend.

Blogger now on our Droid

This makes it easier to post.  Things are so green and beautiful.  The whether has been perfect.

HEADING TO THE CATSKILLS

We're taking cousin Natalie to her summer home in the CATSKILLS.  Natalie has a winter home in Florida and shipped her car in advance of flying up last Friday.  We'll spend the night and return to our apartment tomorrow night. There's a beautiful lake and there should be lots of birds to see.

Happy mother's day

We went to brunch at this environmentally friendly cafe with great food.  Then returned to the cloisters and a tour by a Columbia phd student.  Then took cousins to dinner followed by dessert in this 1904 Italian bakery

Another show we saw

Suzanne Vega’s ‘Carson McCullers Talks About Love’ via NYTimes.com

“Carson McCullers Talks About Love” opens on Thursday at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, where it’s scheduled to run through June 4. The 90-minute play features Ms. Vega alternating between monologue and songs, backed by two musicians, recounting McCullers’s complex life. McCullers, who died in 1967 at 50, broke ground with her depictions of solitude, unrequited love, physical disability and repressed homosexuality. She also faced frequent illness and the suicide of her husband.

Nice singing but a fractured story line.  Still waiting to read the reviews

Freud's Last Session

This play imagines a meeting between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis.  The two men debate the nature of God and life.

Again, the acting was great; lots of humor and thought provoking.

This show is "Off Broadway" at a theater on the Upper Westside a couple blocks from Lincoln Center.  We would recommend this one as well.

PS - the seats in this theater were most comfortable.

The Normal Heart

The Broadway show we saw a week ago Monday....

This is a Broadway premiere of an old groundbreaking play that focusses on the early years of the AIDS outbreak in New York and the silence of America's political and media powers in addessing the issue.  Whe it first showed at the New York Public Theater, the Play was a critical sensation and a seminal moment in theater history.  Joel Gray directs the show as he was in the original production twenty years ago.

The leads were nominated for best actor in a play in the Tony Award nominations annouced yesterday.  It was very moving and the cast was great.  It was very powerful in its message, even today.

The author, Larry Kramer was out in front of the theater after the show passing out letters about the pharmacy industry and the lack of affordable medications for AIDS treatment.  He is still an activist.  He did not look like a famous author but rather some old hippie that came to the show to protest.

It was another exciting NYC experience. 

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Bengal Tigar was our first Broadway play during our month.  We saw it our first day in NYC about two-and-a-half weeks ago.  Our brother-in-law Bob went with us while Carol and Maddy decided to go  to La Cage Aux Folles instead.  (Susan and I saw La Cage previously) 

The play follows a tiger as he haunts the streets of Baghdad seeking the meaning of life.  As he witnesses the puzzling absurdities of war, the tigar encounters Americans and Iraqis who are searching for friendship and redemption.  By the end of the show, all are ghosts.

The show was funny and heavy at the same time.  Robin Williams is wonderful in the show though he was NOT nominated for a Tony Award (Oscar's for live theater); the nominations came out yesterday. 

PS   we caught pictures of Robin Williams him after he left the theater.  They are already posted.

After the show we went to a Deli for some giant desserts.  

PSS - Carol, Bob, and Maddy live in Woodland Hills (LA) and were in NYC the first week.  They arrived the same day as we pulled into town.  Maddy came to spend some time with Rose at Columbia.  She starts SF State this coming Fall.  Happy Birthday Maddy - you're 18 today

The Metropolitian Opera: Il Trovatore

We both saw opera for the first time last week.  After consultanting with people "in the know", we selected Il Trovatorefor our first experience.  The opera was sold out so we selected standing room.  We had to show up the morning of the performance to buy the standing room tickets.  It is "assigned" standing.  Every has a specific place to stand and has a little table (sort of a narrow version of a bar ) in from of them to lien against and to read the subtitles that appear on a little screen attached to the lip of the "table".  The location is at the back of the orchestra section - given the Met is six stories high, they are good "seats".

The opera was fastastic.  The four leads all had powerful voices and are well known among opera goers.   The opera house is beautiful though from our location we missed seeing the lights going into the ceiling before the show.

We both agreed it was a wonderful experience and we would go to the opera again but would try and get some seats the next time - standing for over two hours is difficult.

Two full days at the Met

One day was not enough for us, we had to spend two.  And even with two days we did not see all of the art.  The impressionists are fantastic.  For art lovers - its like Disneyland.  We ate lunch in the members lounge.  The Egyptian section was SUPER.

NYC

We have just finished two weeks in NYC and three since we left home.  We went to our first opera, have seen two Broadway plays and two off Broadway musicals//plays.  We went to two performances at Columbia; one was the Gospel choir that Rose sings in.  We've gone to two museums - MOMA and the Guttenheim and two  great art galleries.  We went to the Jewish Museum, Ellis Island via the Statute of Liberty, and Ground Zero.  We3 went to an oration present by former Governor Mario Commo (Father of the current Governor).  We've walked miles and climbed thousands of steps.

New York City Pictures set #3

Its been a while - here is a link to the third set of NYC pictures.  These have no headers or captions - sorry.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=glevpalmer&target=ALBUM&id=5601375127288416753&authkey=Gv1sRgCMWVw-nHuPapgwE&feat=email