It's Up To You

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Things I learned from our recent vacation in New York:

  • Manhattans are better in Manhattan, or at least the Manhattans at Jacob's Pickles are awesome. (And getting to have their biscuits after 1:00 a.m. is heavenly).
  • Always try to make Chad wear sunscreen.
  • Apparently, it's very important for New Yorkers to be able to buy fruit late at night (thank the Heavens, because it allowed me to get strawberries at 1:00 a.m.)
  • Chad and I can run a 10K together (even if Chad has to run much of it backwards to slow him down).
  • Chad and I can still both sleep in a double bed (I thought we left those days behind us in college). 
  • We can walk over 9 miles in one day. It was a pretty great way to experience the city, once we made it out of the crowds of people in Times Square without having a meltdown. And I can talk straight for about 5 miles, especially with some wine in me.
    We didn't exactly walk this route
    but this is a map of our hotel to the
    teenaged-staff comedy club
  • Superman shirts from Target are very notable in New York, and several people will yell "Hey, Superman!" at Chad when he wears one. (Okay, Chad's shirt probably just made it easier for street vendors to single him out, but even Richard Belzer commented on it! He said it was so popular because Superman is part of "collective unconscious." Whoa.)
  • You never know when you might run into a celebrity like Richard Belzer late at night in a little convenience store and get tangled up in his dog's leash. 
  • If you go to a comedy club, don't trust the teenager working the door who tells you it's too early to let you in and you should just show up right before the show. If you DO listen to the teenager, don't get bitchy with the woman working the door who tells you there is no room for you, because she may just be Madison Malloy, one of the comics that night who could ridicule you for losing your shit if you do get in. (Luckily she didn't mock us, and we thanked her for that afterwards!)
  • Caroline Rhea has awesome hot pink jelly shoes. 
  • I'm too old to get many cultural references made by young comics, but it is still really fun to hear comedy at a New York comedy club. Thankfully, Jill and Steve had just talked about Tinder on the Current's Morning Show before we left so I got at least soem joked.
  • Neil Patrick Harris is REALLY worth it, and "Hedwig"moves me just as much as when I first saw it in Minneapolis years ago. 
  • People really can NOT spell "Snyder" and even Latino people will uber-Germanify it to "Schneider." If the hotel front desk clerk can't find your reservation, don't just assume it's because he can't handle the clusterf%#k of consonants in "Luedtke."
  • There really IS a Starbuck every two blocks, and Duane Reade pharmacies are almost as common.
    Toni Collette  in "The Realistic Joneses"
     
  • I knew "Hedwig" would be life-changing, but "The Realstic Joneses" also rocked our world.
  • I am so lucky to be able to take such an awesome and crazy vacation with Chad, and also very happy we live in Minneapolis!

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