BROOKLYN – I won the lottery this weekend.

No, I didn’t win hundreds of thousands of dollars or even a mere $10.

The lottery I won was for a ticket to a musical.

Now, you might not think this is something special, but it is. Winning a lottery ticket isn’t something that happens every day. There’s usually a small percentage chance that you’ll win, but if you do, you’re in for a treat.

The treat is that the lottery tickets are for the first and second rows of the theater. And the price isn’t $100 or more, which would be the price you’d pay buying the ticket from the box office.

I paid $26.50 for my front row exact center seat to see one of this year’s new musicals, ‘In the Heights.’

The location of your seat is just by chance, and since I was the fourth name drawn and the three people before me each wanted two seats, that sat me in seat number seven in a row of 13.

I couldn’t believe it.

This is a feat that could be accomplished by anyone in New York City, but I think most people don’t know about the lottery or rush tickets.

Some of these tickets have a catch, like you must be a student. Most require cash and a valid ID for the purchase.

To find out which plays and musicals are offering specials like these, check out Playbill’s Web site. I understand that neither the lottery nor the rush tickets are guaranteed, but take the chance.

This lucky first full weekend is going to be hard to surpass.

I about cried when I saw where my seat was in the theater, and the musical was amazing.

I’m always slightly leery about seeing musicals I’m not familiar with, but I picked ‘In the Heights’ as my first choice because it is up for 13 Tony Awards, including best musical. I was pretty sure I couldn’t go wrong with this one.

It really was phenomenal. The only thing that could have made the experience better was if I could speak Spanish, because a good number of the jokes are in Spanish.

This musical is about a Bronx neighborhood with Puerto Rican and Dominican Republican roots. It was also entirely different from any other musical I’ve seen because the main character doesn’t always sing his lines. He sings/raps/chants his rhyming lyrics that frequently tell the story.

The cherry on top for this musical was that I knew of one of the backup dancers without realizing who he was.

I made a comment to the guy who played the graffiti artist because he was wearing a LeBron James jersey. When I mentioned my hometown, he mentioned a dance studio there, which I knew, and we ended up both knowing someone who I’ve been friends with since preschool.

The weekend also continued quite spectacularly because my aunt, her mother, a friend and her friend’s daughter were in NYC for a vacation, which meant I got to spend time with people from home.

This was quite nice.

We spent Saturday shopping at a wide variety of stores, including a department store, a soap store, a pizza joint, an accessories store and my favorite of favorites, H ‘amp; M. There are eight branches of the store in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn, which is a lot of H ‘amp; Ms.

This day was the longest day I’d ever spent shopping. We started at 10 a.m. and finally sat down to dinner around 8 p.m.

Sunday was slightly more relaxing because I spent the early part of the afternoon relaxing in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The weather was gorgeous and perfect for working on my tan.

Then, in the evening after having dinner on restaurant row, a.k.a. 46th Street west of Times Square in the area known as Hell’s Kitchen, I saw something that was a wonderful end to a wonderful weekend and something that can only been seen in New York: a man walking down the street with a leashed cat standing on his head.

– Respond to Alison at [email protected].