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...or something like that. Yeah. I'm back. It was quite fun. There were actually only four to a room, and two of the girls in my room got kicked out because they were lighting things on fire and throwing them out the window. Hey, I'm a pyro too, but this was a hotel. I mean really. Idjits. So I got a bed all to myself, after voluntarily sleeping on the floor under the table for two nights (I like den-type enclosed places). As much as I did sleep, which was not much. I think I accumulated more sleep debt on that trip than I've ever had before. And all because of the first two nights, when the idjits would leave the TV on all night and watch Baywatch to make fun of it. And then we had to get up and go look at stuff (which I liked) and shop (which I didn't). I bought one thing, besides food, th entire time we were there. A hat. It was cold. And it was a special hat. This'll take some explaining.
The concertmaster and his group of cronies sat in the back of Bus 2 (which I was on). They were the ones who basically got into all the mild trouble. They started calling themselves the RachmaniMafia, after the composer Rachmaninov whose 2nd symphony we were performing. They all bought T-shirts that said NY Mafia on them, with bulletholes and everything. It was cute. So then, while my group and I were sitting in Wo Hop, a Chinese restaurant that our chaperone's cousin (a native New Yorker) had brought us to, an idea just popped into my head. I was embarassed at first, but they made me tell them: our group was all girls except for one (a half-Japanese foreign exchange student from Germany) and we were all known for speaking our minds. We (the orchestra) had played a piece by the composer Shostakovich on our last concert. Our group could call ourselves the ShostakoBitches. Thus, I became a Shostakobitch, and we all bought hats that said NY Bitch on them. I turned mine inside out to wear it so the word wouldn't show in the nice restaurants we went to, but it was nice and warm for walking around in. So I have a hat now, and I'm a Shostakobitch.
The concerts went well, and the concerts we went to went well (I especially liked te Philharmonic's performance of some Ravel, Debussy and Berlioz stuff with a countertenor singing a female voice part). Les Miz was a little disappointing (I'd never seen it before) but the acting, the set, and the lighting were all spectacular. The title role soprano in Tosca was awful. She was a half-step sharp the whole time and her vibrato was a third wide. Luckily, we got there 15 mintes late and had to sit in the TV lounge and watch it on an overhead projector for the whole first act. The tenor was very good, though.
More than Lady Liberty or Times Square or 5th Avenue or the subway, the most memorable thing on that trip was the restaurant at which we had our farewell dinner, Mars 2112. It was great. Oh, it was so great. I loved it. The lobby was all shiny chrome and white walls and fake digital gate signs to look like a spaceport. You stood in line to get through one of the gates (unless you had a condition or just didn't want to, then you went through the Zip Speed Passage which I'll explain later). Once the gates opened, you went into the spaceship there, and sat down in one of the four rows in front of a 4x6 screen which had the logo on it. Once the gates closed behind you, the ride started. It didn't really go anywhere, but it shook around and the screen looked like you were going somewhere and the captain as very friendly. It was great fun. Unless you were nauseated, in which case you went through the Zip Speed Passage.
The Zip, which also went to the bathrooms, was a little hall about ten feet long, with Van de Graf generators lining the walls in columns of writhing electricity. There were lasers about four inches off the floor which, if you interrupted them, would play a note, so it made a song when you walked down the hall. It was completely dark except for the orange logw at the end of the tunnel, the reflection of lasers off your shoes, and the flickering lightning from the columns. It was fantastic. You emerged from there or from the spaceship into the same place, a little alcove with a steel platform to walk on above what looked like glowing lava. The walls were reddish orange abd rough and bumpy like a cave wall, and there were rotating orange lights on the walls and above the gridded ceiling, so everyting was bathed in orange light. Except for the corner of the alcove, which has blue and white streaks painted on it in a trickly water pattern and a light with a pilter over it to make the patterns that water makes when the sun shines on it. This waterfall had a blacklight directly above it, so it was glowing. Seriously cool. From there you walked through a tunnel with fiberoptic glowing cacti hanging from the ceiling, past the Mars Bar and the Cyber arcade (closed for renovations), past a bunch of false doors which looked like airlocks and warned of rediation on the other side (the fire exit was one of these), over a series of bridges above bubbling lava (the bridges glowed orange too), down the stairs into the dining room, which had a ceiling of maybe 50 feet in one section, thoguh we sat in the section with a cozy, low, cavey ceiling. There were orange lights everywhere and little black strings hanging from the ceiling that gave regular light out the ends. Fake windows with a Mars atmosphere view adorned the walls, and in the more cornery sections (there were no straight lines) there hung flat TVs with the Martian News on. It was this computer-animated blue lady with head ridges and no hair, making strange handsigns, with Martian and then English subtitles in a Star Trek-type font. Every once in awhile they would zoom out for the end to go to something else and you would see that she was suspended in a beam of light and had no lower half. But I didn't pay much attention to that. There were candles on the tables.
I spent the whole time brooding (Amandami had accidentally reminded me of someone I was trying to forget so I could enjoy myself) and playing in the fire. My fingers got pretty black. The waiter brought my salmon after asking me if I was conducting a seance (oh yeah, I told him). After a fuzzy Martian came by and played with my hair and tried to get me to take a picture with my tablemates who had been trying all night (I gave him The Look and he went away), the waiter came back again and asked me curiously why I was so interested in the candles. I told him to guess, and we had a quite pleasant conversation about pyromania and its various reasons, but soon he had to leave. I'm grateful to him for his intercession... I may have been miserable the whole night if not for him. And he brought me my salmon.
Anyway. Great trip, but I'm glad to be home. Who's up for playing? I came home to a bunch of new clothes on my bed, and almost all of them are Renaissancy!
The concertmaster and his group of cronies sat in the back of Bus 2 (which I was on). They were the ones who basically got into all the mild trouble. They started calling themselves the RachmaniMafia, after the composer Rachmaninov whose 2nd symphony we were performing. They all bought T-shirts that said NY Mafia on them, with bulletholes and everything. It was cute. So then, while my group and I were sitting in Wo Hop, a Chinese restaurant that our chaperone's cousin (a native New Yorker) had brought us to, an idea just popped into my head. I was embarassed at first, but they made me tell them: our group was all girls except for one (a half-Japanese foreign exchange student from Germany) and we were all known for speaking our minds. We (the orchestra) had played a piece by the composer Shostakovich on our last concert. Our group could call ourselves the ShostakoBitches. Thus, I became a Shostakobitch, and we all bought hats that said NY Bitch on them. I turned mine inside out to wear it so the word wouldn't show in the nice restaurants we went to, but it was nice and warm for walking around in. So I have a hat now, and I'm a Shostakobitch.
The concerts went well, and the concerts we went to went well (I especially liked te Philharmonic's performance of some Ravel, Debussy and Berlioz stuff with a countertenor singing a female voice part). Les Miz was a little disappointing (I'd never seen it before) but the acting, the set, and the lighting were all spectacular. The title role soprano in Tosca was awful. She was a half-step sharp the whole time and her vibrato was a third wide. Luckily, we got there 15 mintes late and had to sit in the TV lounge and watch it on an overhead projector for the whole first act. The tenor was very good, though.
More than Lady Liberty or Times Square or 5th Avenue or the subway, the most memorable thing on that trip was the restaurant at which we had our farewell dinner, Mars 2112. It was great. Oh, it was so great. I loved it. The lobby was all shiny chrome and white walls and fake digital gate signs to look like a spaceport. You stood in line to get through one of the gates (unless you had a condition or just didn't want to, then you went through the Zip Speed Passage which I'll explain later). Once the gates opened, you went into the spaceship there, and sat down in one of the four rows in front of a 4x6 screen which had the logo on it. Once the gates closed behind you, the ride started. It didn't really go anywhere, but it shook around and the screen looked like you were going somewhere and the captain as very friendly. It was great fun. Unless you were nauseated, in which case you went through the Zip Speed Passage.
The Zip, which also went to the bathrooms, was a little hall about ten feet long, with Van de Graf generators lining the walls in columns of writhing electricity. There were lasers about four inches off the floor which, if you interrupted them, would play a note, so it made a song when you walked down the hall. It was completely dark except for the orange logw at the end of the tunnel, the reflection of lasers off your shoes, and the flickering lightning from the columns. It was fantastic. You emerged from there or from the spaceship into the same place, a little alcove with a steel platform to walk on above what looked like glowing lava. The walls were reddish orange abd rough and bumpy like a cave wall, and there were rotating orange lights on the walls and above the gridded ceiling, so everyting was bathed in orange light. Except for the corner of the alcove, which has blue and white streaks painted on it in a trickly water pattern and a light with a pilter over it to make the patterns that water makes when the sun shines on it. This waterfall had a blacklight directly above it, so it was glowing. Seriously cool. From there you walked through a tunnel with fiberoptic glowing cacti hanging from the ceiling, past the Mars Bar and the Cyber arcade (closed for renovations), past a bunch of false doors which looked like airlocks and warned of rediation on the other side (the fire exit was one of these), over a series of bridges above bubbling lava (the bridges glowed orange too), down the stairs into the dining room, which had a ceiling of maybe 50 feet in one section, thoguh we sat in the section with a cozy, low, cavey ceiling. There were orange lights everywhere and little black strings hanging from the ceiling that gave regular light out the ends. Fake windows with a Mars atmosphere view adorned the walls, and in the more cornery sections (there were no straight lines) there hung flat TVs with the Martian News on. It was this computer-animated blue lady with head ridges and no hair, making strange handsigns, with Martian and then English subtitles in a Star Trek-type font. Every once in awhile they would zoom out for the end to go to something else and you would see that she was suspended in a beam of light and had no lower half. But I didn't pay much attention to that. There were candles on the tables.
I spent the whole time brooding (Amandami had accidentally reminded me of someone I was trying to forget so I could enjoy myself) and playing in the fire. My fingers got pretty black. The waiter brought my salmon after asking me if I was conducting a seance (oh yeah, I told him). After a fuzzy Martian came by and played with my hair and tried to get me to take a picture with my tablemates who had been trying all night (I gave him The Look and he went away), the waiter came back again and asked me curiously why I was so interested in the candles. I told him to guess, and we had a quite pleasant conversation about pyromania and its various reasons, but soon he had to leave. I'm grateful to him for his intercession... I may have been miserable the whole night if not for him. And he brought me my salmon.
Anyway. Great trip, but I'm glad to be home. Who's up for playing? I came home to a bunch of new clothes on my bed, and almost all of them are Renaissancy!
From: (Anonymous)
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