songbird's crazy world

So last night we went to see the revival of Sondheim’s Follies. You know how I love live theater! Our evening began, as it frequently does, in Ellen’s Stardust Diner. We love this place! You go for the atmosphere, not for the food.   This is not a place for quiet conversation.. Ellen’s, as I’ve probably mentioned before, is a salute to the pop culture of the 1950’s, the outside designed to look like an old subway car, and inside   you’ll find old fashioned diner tables, video screens showing scenes from I Love Lucy and real vinyl records and album covers (from artists like Johnny Mathis and Elvis Presley) on the walls.   It’s also the home of the singing wait staff, where the person who just took your order is the next person to grab the mike and sing. The wait staff used to be very 1950’s as well.   The guys would wear red bowling shirts and paper soda jerk hats.   The girls would be in poodle skirts, red t shirts and little scarves tied around their necks...

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I love Times Square!  I love the theater district! We saw La Cage Aux Folles Thursday night.  Douglas Hodge and Kelsey Grammer are incredible in this show, it's very different from the production I saw in the 1980's and the revival I saw in 2004 -- less lavish, bawdier but just as bittersweet as the original.  and both stars were very gracious about signing autographs at the stage door. Times Square on a thursday night -- not quite as crowded as New year's Eve, but very very full nevertheless.  And just as crowded at 11 PM (when the show was over) as it was at 6 PM when we went to dinner (Bubba Gump's we ordered shrimp, of course). I love the corwds, I love the excitement.  the street vendors selling "I Love NY" t shirts and "designer" pocketbooks....the hot dog and shish kebab carts ....the guys handing out coupons for comedy clubs, restuarants and double deecker tour buses...street musicians and other performers (I've seen the Naked Cowb...

a little bit about the NYC celebration -- I've never been crazy stupid brave enough to go. Countdown to euphoria BY LARRY McSHANE DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Monday, December 29th 2008, 10:45 PM Related News Articles Still time to have a ball on New Year's This is one celebration you can set your watch by. The annual New Year's Eve bash in Times Square peaks with a worldwide television audience of 1 billion counting down the seconds until 2009 arrives exactly at midnight. With no room for error, organizers spend the other 364 days of the year making sure everything runs like clockwork when New York rings out the old and rings in the new. "People think I only work one day a year," said Countdown Entertainment head Jeff Straus . "Actually, January is my second-busiest month." Revelers will enjoy a new twist with their "Auld Lang Syne" this year: A high-tech, supersize ball will drop down from One Times Square, replacing the previous incarnation....

There he is, in all his glory, parading around Times Square. In all the years I've lived/worked/played in NYC, I've never seen him. A group of my friends ran into him once, I was supposed to be with them but had to cancel out. So I've never seen him. I've seen lots of "living statues", you know, people dressed like the Statue of Liberty -- or something similar -- who perform on the street. One time I ran into "Spongebob Squarepants" outside the Toys R Us on 44th Street. And several years ago I saw a group of roller skaters dressed up as butterflies to promots MSN, But the Naked Cowboy...never.