An acoustic afternoon
I stepped out of my comfort zone again yesterday by taking my wife to a concert in Central Park. (Read my post about the last time I left my comfort zone.) The concert, dubbed "An Acoustic Afternoon" by its promoters, featured Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin, Patty Grffin, and Dar Williams. I'm not familiar with any of them (I didn't recognize a single song they played), but an opportunity arose last week for me to get free tickets to the concert, and my wife is a fan of Shawn Colvin. So I got the tickets, and we caught a train into Manhattan right after church on Sunday.
I'm
glad we went. The concert was in the format I like best, with the performer(s)
talking to the audience and playing their music without making a huge
production of
it. In this case, the four musicians sat onstage together and just took turns
singing. All four sang backup for each other, and their banter between songs
felt lively and unrehearsed (at least I can't imagine Shawn Colvin planning
ahead to tell a story about how she peed herself in front of 'N Sync at Disney
World). For me, the concert highlights included Mary Chapin Carpenter's impression
of Julie Andrews auditioning for Oklahoma! and not getting the part,
and a collaborative reinterpretation of the Backstreet Boys' I Want It That
Way in
an acoustic/folk style.
Afterward, we went to our favorite restaurant in Manhattan. Actually, we tried to go to our favorite restaurant in Manhattan. We both know generally where it is—somewhere within a three-block radius of Radio City Music Hall—but neither one of us can ever remember exactly where it is. That, combined with my abysmal sense of direction and insistence on being the leader, makes for a lot of frustrated wandering. Last night we never found our restaurant, which gave us a good opportunity to practice our conflict resolution and forgiveness skills. We ended up eating at a pretty decent pizza place near Rockefeller Center.
Good music, good fall weather, decent food, and excellent company made for a fun evening all around.
If you're ever in Manhattan and looking for a good and inexpensive place to eat, try our favorite restaurant. It's called La Bonne Soup, and it's located on 55th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues (about five blocks away from Radio City Music Hall).
This
is the kind of No Parking sign you find in New York.
