re: Today Show/GMA: Nope. Our professor hates early mornings as much as I do, so . . .

ALSO. the thing we saw tonight was not the thing our professor told us it was (apparently the company switched shows on us?) and it was probably the worst theatrical experience and longest 90 minutes of my life. It had less coherency than a sketch comedy show and the music was ear-bleedingly loud and none of the actors had any. energy. at all. 

FORTUNATELY, tomorrow is a drag show called the Vaudevillians that sounds like it's going to be hilarious, so. 

OK, I won't get up early to watch for you. With theater every night, I understand why you don't get up early. Thanks for the photo, but you know we can't post it. If you get to Lincoln Center, look for the fountain that hid the time tears (in a story somewhere on Chatterbox). Enjoy the rest of your trip.

Admin

New York Trip of DOOM pt 1

Because I've had the time to get my thoughts in order and stuff. 

Nov 5 — we flew in and landed at La Guardia at around noon-ish, and then that evening we went to 54 Below (!) and saw Joanna Gleason (!!). It was basically amazing (I am a teensy bit disappointed that we weren't there one day earlier, because there was a Wildhorn concert there and Karen Mason and it would have been fantastic. But on the other hand Joanna Gleason...)

Nov 6 — Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in Waiting For Godot in the afternoon and then No Man's Land in the evening. This was surprisingly disappointing (maybe it shouldn't have been surprising, because I... don't actually like Patrick Stewart very much) and Godot in particular was a bit spoiled because of Cornell's AMAZING production of it. But anyway there was low energy and mumbling and it just... wasn't great.

Nov 7 — we saw the new Kander musical The Landing. It was beautiful.

Nov 8 — THEN SHE FELL ajldjalkjfhiga;kls'alsfj[aohjwbivnskl;

It's an experimental, immersive theatre experienced based partially on Alice in Wonderland and partially on the relationship between Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. We bought a private performance because alcohol is served at public ones and only like four of us were 21, so we got a dry show. They split us up into little groups and shepherded us through the environment, which was this three-story building that they'd converted into an abandoned psychiatric ward (Kingsland!).

spoilers!—>

For me it started off a little unsettling with the Red Queen/Queen of Hearts/Lorina Liddell freaking out in a chamber? Then she came out and shooed us (there was another girl with me) into the hallway, where the White Queen/Duchess picked us up and took us to the Tea Party. She did a short dance piece that involved stacking the chairs and table against the wall to make stairs leading to a throne, and then a doctor came down, sent her away, and put the table and chairs back down before enlisting us to make a tea blend with him (they had a period-appropriate strainer!:D), after which he left and the White Rabbit came in with two more of our group. He got as far as sitting us down (against the walls, not at the table) before the HATTER burst in and they had a vaguely-flirtatious-vaguely-antagonistic dance on, around, underneath and with the table (they slammed it from one side of the room to the other at one point and did things like him attempting to knock her off of it by lifting up one end. it was really amazing). Then they set the table and the Queens came in, and the eight of us sat and did the "clean cup change seats" routine... three times, I think, and then we had the tea from before (it was hibiscus/rose-hips/cinnamon on an oolong base, I'm almost positive. Really good, at any rate.) 

The White Rabbit ran off with his two again, and the White Queen escorted myself and the other one out. She took us to a bedroom, turned off the lights, and told us a bedroom story (about a little girl who grew up and lost the ability to remember anything but the future, i.e. herself), and left us there. THEN THE HATTER CAME IN. because it was her room—I know because her cabinet was full of clocks that had stopped at six o'clock. She climbed around on the cabinets for a while and made herself a drink and exhibited signs of mercury poisoning (:D) and was generally fantastic, and then she got in her cabinets and sang the White Rabbit's Evidence over the loudspeaker.

Then she told us to follow her, but in the hallway I got grabbed by a nurse and sent to this room where they were playing a recording of the Walrus and the Carpenter. She made me a drink (it was minty?) and gave me this photo album with the pages cut out inside to make a "secret" compartment, which was filled with letters from Carroll/Dodgson to Alice Liddell, which was the point at which everything started to get super creepy because they pulled no punches with (theoretical) historical accuracy. 

The White Rabbit pulled me out of that room and into an interrogation chamber with filing cabinets, from which he produced paint and white roses. We painted those for a minute before he ran off to investigate a noise [we kept hearing these enormous banging noises, some of them from the tea party because they were throwing the table around everywhere and others just from people hitting on walls or running past. it was really atmospheric and terrifying] and left me with the roses. Which I just dipped in the paint because honestly how else are you supposed to coat them evenly.

The nurse from before picked me up again after I finished the second one, and swapped the drippy roses out for dried ones, which we took to this little room FULL of dried out, painted roses, and then she dropped me off in a study-type room. Which is where I met Lewis Carroll. WHO WAS THE CREEPIEST. I took dictation for him while he wrote another letter to Alice (this after the split between him and the Liddells, so it was a letter of the "I miss you lots" variety), and when I finished I followed him around a corner and the floorboards started breaking away to reveal water (the Pool of Tears, I think?). He threw the letter in a bottle and put that in the water and then just sat being sad and miserable, and the nurse appeared again to take me down to the basement, where she directed me into a confession box that had a one-way mirror into the Red Queen's sitting room. She was in there primping, and then one of the Alices (there were two, real Alice and mirror Alice, and which one was real and which one was the mirror switched depending on the scene) came in, and the Red Queen did her hair and then left, and then Alice had an altercation with her mirror self, who was standing in another room, looking in through a mirrored window.

Then I got taken upstairs again and left in an alcove to fill out a patient history, and then HATTER was the one to come get me, and she made fun of me because of the patient history and then, as she led me into her workshop, because I can't sew (well, I said "occasionally" and she said "do you do anything more than occasionally?" and when I said no she was just like "well at least you're consistent"), and then I took dictation for her and it was the MOST INCOHERENT letter—it was addressed to Carroll and she kept having me cross stuff out and rephrase, and finally it ended with "Tea? Why is a raven like a writing desk?", after which she crumpled it up and threw it beneath the desk.

She then gave myself and another person hats and brought us into a room with a "vanity" that was actually an empty frame that we sat on opposite sides of, and then the Alices came out and started mirroring in front of us. One of them led me into her closet and we had a conversation and then I got taken downstairs again to watch the other Alice and Carroll dance.

Then in pretty quick succession, we went into the Duchess's kitchen, where the White Queen and the Alice who'd been in the closet with me ate a pear together (it... was more intriguing than it sounds when I say it like that), and then that Alice had the altercation with her reflection that I'd seen the other side of earlier (this room was next to the Red Queen's), and then after they left, the Red Queen and the White Rabbit had a vaguely-flirtatious-vaguely-antagonistic in her room, and then she left him and he pulled us from the kitchen to the sitting room. We saw Carroll in the chapel where the confession boxes were, and the Alice he'd been dancing with before showed up again. 

And then we heard a noise behind us and turned around, and the White Rabbit was in the kitchen with the White Queen, and it was surprisingly sweet considering what all the other even remotely shippy dance pieces had been like thus far. He fell asleep and she wandered away, and then he woke up and led us up through the house again. The others got picked off by nurses or other characters one by one until it was just me and one other. We went back to the interrogation chamber and he presented the White Rabbit's Evidence to us (in sync with the Hatter's voice, as she was singing over the loudspeakers again). Then he took me to the tea party room, gave me a cup of PERFECT Earl Grey, and left me alone. Which was the end of it.

It was so amazing. I just want to go back forever because there's so much stuff that I didn't get to see or didn't have time to fully examine—every time you got taken to a new room, you'd be alone for a few minutes to just explore, and there were letters and books and photographs and just things stuffed into every corner (Carroll's study had a few white knight chess pieces hidden in his desk, for example), it was really really lovely.

/spoilers

Also, the Hatter was played by the (fabulous!) Elizabeth Carena, who is also the managing director of the company who put this together, and who is also following me on twitter (!!!) because I tweeted her the picture I drew of her and I guess she liked it? Seriously, though, she's fantastic.

Nov 9 — This was a free day, so my friend and I got tickets to see Matilda in the afternoon ('twas every bit as magnificent as I expected and THEN SOME. I literally almost fell off my chair like... three times because the Trunchbull was so terrifying and I turned into a blubbering wreck whenever the escapologist showed up. soooooooo good, you guys) and Little Miss Sunshine the musical in the evening (yes it exists. yes it was FANTASTIC). This exchange happened at the stage door of that:

Stephanie J. Block: [as I handed her a marker to sign my poster] You're not sick, are you?

Me: Actually I'm going to die in... a week. Of a very fatal and... very contagious disease.

Her: Ah, but at least you don't have a cold.

[SHE KNEW I WAS JOKING. SHE THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY AND LAUGHED. she is also, as it turns out, a complete dork. Someone else drew a picture of her and her response was "LOOK AT MAH FACE!! :D" It was adorable.]

Also my friend got photobombed by Wesley Taylor.

Nov 10 — the humanest. It was sold as an audience participation-heavy performance art piece about what it means to be human. Really it was sketch comedy + interpretive dance with some audience voting at the end.

Nov 11 — We went to the Vaudevillians, which was a drag show about two vaudevillians who went on a tour of Antarctica, got frozen, thawed out recently thanks to global warming, and discovered that their repertoire had been stolen by popular artists like Lady Gaga and her ilk. It was the most hilarious (in part because she pushed one of our group members' head into his hamburger).

And I'll break here because this is getting long.