BROOKLYN – Mission accomplished.
In nine weeks I saw eight Broadway musicals, one non-Broadway play and one ballet. I’ve seen everything that I wanted to, and I still have two weeks to go.
I also saw some free performances – two New York Philharmonic concerts and one Celebrate Brooklyn! concert with the Cold War Kids and two local bands – along with two free Broadway in the Park concerts with a variety of musicals, one free movie, two free trips to the Museum of Modern Art, and free entrances to the Museum of the City of New York, Playing the Building (an organ connected to pipes and beams) and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.
Add to that countless hours sitting in parks and walking around, in addition to going to museums that did charge: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters, the Neue Galerie, Coney Island’s Side Show and the New York Botanical Gardens.
But I want to concentrate on the time I spent at activities for a reduced rate. And really, everything except the Side Show and ‘Macbeth’ fits into the category because I received a student rate or paid what I wanted to in order to attend everything else on this list.
The seats I received at the musicals I saw probably cost around $115 each, except for ‘Wicked,’ whose second row seats cost around $300. I paid between $20 and $27 for all of those seats.
I had to stand for ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and ‘Spamalot,’ so excluding those, I saved approximately $720.
I know that theater will never be the same for me after this summer. The anticipation, the excitement of winning the lottery, the views from the front row, being close enough to touch the actors, oh, it all was incredible.
But in other news, I went on a couple of adventures this weekend. The Red Hook journey was much better than my stop at Yankees Stadium and tour of the botanical gardens in the Bronx.
I journeyed south of Brooklyn Heights to Red Hook, two neighborhoods south of me, on Saturday evening.
The walk was only unnerving for a few moments as I walked through a group of stray cats and then looked up to see a rooster pecking away at the ground behind a chain-link fence. A rooster was one of the last things I expected to see in Red Hook.
I was actually on a mission to find a glass studio that was in the area, and I didn’t find it before it got dark because I got distracted at Ikea.
So there is this new, gigantic Ikea that opened practically in the old ship yards about a month ago. I didn’t get inside the store, but I did peruse the grounds.
Yes, there are grounds to peruse at Ikea.
One of the old docks was repaired and turned into a very nice walkway, with manicured lawns and nicely landscaped plants. There are some very appealing lounge chairs that look extremely European and six elevated wood walkways that are only a couple feet off the ground, but are excessively hilly. I’d never seen anything like them before.
Ikea also incorporated some of the shipping history into the pier by adding informative signs about some of the shipping parts on display or describing what work was done in certain areas of the water.
The view was quite nice, too.
But the view from a pier a few blocks to the west was even more fantastic.
It was directly across from the Statue of Liberty’s front side, with nothing blocking the view. This pier was alongside a pre-Civil War building, which used to be a coffee warehouse, that houses the Fairway specialty food store. The pier continues in front of another similar building, too.
I should have gone inside Fairway, too, and visited its legendary ‘Cold Room,’ which is set at 40 degrees Fahrenheit all year round and houses meats, seafood, flowers, potted plants, milk, butter, eggs, fruit juices, pastas, sauces and soups.
If I get a chance to go back for the views from these places, I’ll definitely try to step inside Ikea and Fairway, along with finding the glass studio I was originally seeking.
And with the Ikea shuttle that transports people from Borough Hall, which is roughly one block away from my apartment, to the store, the 45-minute, minutely scary walk becomes a 15-minute bus ride.