Best Week Ever?

Narrator's voice: It was!

My daughter’s spring break came early this year and after the debacle of our end-of-January visit to New York City, we decided we deserved a do-over. Initially, I thought I would take her to Mexico City, but we have access to a place to stay in New York City¹ and I had a companion pass on Amtrak and my kid adores New York — so off we went, determined to spend the money we “saved”² by not traveling by air and staying in a hotel for a week.

My daughter, who believes herself a New Yorker, would be offended by this image.

March 15: Train from Baltimore to NYC. Tone for the week was set when a) pre-scheduled Lyft didn’t show up on time and b) I brought the wrong keys to our New York lodgings. We somehow transcended these missteps and had a lovely delivery dinner of soup dumplings and scallion pancakes.

March 16: My kid had said: “I’d like to see dancing.” I couldn’t find any ballet that fit our schedule, but there was a Twyla Tharp recital at New York City Center and OH MY GOD!. We then bopped around Bergdorf’s like it was a museum in which you’re allowed to touch the art objects. Daughter tried on a pair of Gucci ballet flats — only $1,100! — and professed her love for “Tabis,” extremely chic shoes although I personally do not to aspire to a cloven-hoof. Fancy-but-light sushi dinner.

Because of my affection for the Every Outfit podcast, I understand these are fashionable, but — I just don’t get it.

March 17: Although somewhat stymied by the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and a calamity involving my daughter’s toe colliding with one of my weights, we made our way to a ladies-who-lunch type restaurant on the Upper East Side, where we split potato chips with caviar³ and some duck. Then went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where the Philip Guston exhibition was an absolute salve. Dinner at an Upper West Side tapas place we love.

March 18: “A “lazy day” with no set plans. Daughter requested dinner at a UWS omakase joint that my friend Geraldine DeRuitter turned me onto, followed by Crumbl Cookie, which my daughter loves because you can order without speaking to an actual human.

March 19: Midtown dinner (Martini cost more than the price of a bottle at Beefeater’s at the Wine Source in Baltimore.) Gypsy with Audra McDonald, a performance I’m grateful to have seen, especially as I have missed all the other great Mama Roses.⁴

I love a sidecar, but I still cannot get over the sticker shock of this martini

March 20: Last year, I attempted to make a patty melt from a New York Times recipe inspired by The Commerce Inn in Greenwich Village. It was a surprising amount of work and I found my results meh. The real thing is sublime — and costs less than a Midtown martini. We window-shopped our way through SoHo, but the only place we bought anything was McNally-Jackson, now my daughter’s favorite bookstore. I told her she could buy one book, but allowed her two: Joan Didion’s Play it As it Lays and the A24 companion to Lady Bird. I selected Marcy Demansky’s Hot Air.

March 21: Lunch at an Italian place in Murray Hill, then onto the Museum of the Moving Image. A visit to Bloomingdale’s home goods department as we are on the hunt for sushi plates, but it’s more about the quest. And then I actually cooked dinner, something of an adventure in a narrow, not exactly well-equipped NYC kitchen. (Roasted salmon, salad, leftover lasagna from lunch.)

March 22: Flea market in Dumbo — my daughter knew about it from TikTok, wanted to check out the digital cameras and rings made from old watches. Bizarrely, or maybe not so bizarrely, Google Maps, given the absolutely correct address, kept trying to send us to the wrong location, but we persevered. Pizza slices at Scarr’s on the Lower East Side, followed by browsing in a gorgeous homewares store on Canal Street. Drinks and snacks with good friends, then The Sound of Music sing-along at Symphony Space. So much fun to sing and yell at Nazis, but perhaps my favorite part was the man who yelled at the Baroness: “You can do better, girl!” Later, I texted my daughter this classic McSweeney’s piece.

The canisters were $20! Cheaper than a Midtown martini.

March 23: Took the train home. One more mishap — daughter left the digital camera that she bought at the flea market on the train. But Amtrak found it the next day, all we had to do was retrieve it from Union Station in Washington D.C. All’s well that ends well and sometimes ending well just means having a good attitude about the things that go wrong.

I’ve thought a lot about what made our week work. For one thing, it was truly collaborative. My daughter chose the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the flea market. She asked for dance, but I decided what we saw. I finally got my Gypsy⁵, but I generally avoided late nights, making lunch reservations in various parts of the city so would have different jumping-off points. We planned ahead when necessary — theater, certain restaurants — but kept things relatively loosey-goosey.

I recognize this kind of vacation represents a tremendous amount of privilege: Dining out and theater are expensive. New York is expensive. But there are discounts to be found and browsing — our preferred form of shopping — is free. The Italian place I chose had a prix fixe lunch for $38 — antipasti, hearty pasta, and dessert, and the leftover lasagna became our dinnertime side. My daughter and I also often split a meal, so that patty melt at the Commerce Inn came out to $9 per person. The Sound of Music was $18 for my daughter, but $17 for me because I always check for the senior discount. That’s not much more than I would have paid to see Wicked in a movie theater, and if I had tried to sing, they would have dragged me out. (As it was, the woman in front of us moved about 15 minutes in. My daughter has the voice of an angel, so I blame myself.)

Read/Reading: Where Did You Sleep Last Night? Danzy Sessa; The Fourth Girl, Wendy Corsi Staub (out today, happy book birthday, Wendy!); Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams (audio); Sucker Punch, Scaachi Koul (audio); Back After This, Linda Holmes (audio).

Rereading: Once is Not Enough, Jacqueline Susann.

Me, Me, Me: Another starred review for Murder Takes a Vacation, this one from Publishers Weekly: “Lippman (Prom Mom) triumphs with this charming mystery featuring Muriel Blossom, a Baltimore widow—and former assistant to PI Tess Monaghan, star of another Lippman series—who finds an $8 million lottery ticket abandoned in a parking lot . . .”

Here is the obligatory pre-order link, followed by an obligatory selfie. And be forgiving of errors, typos, as I’m filing this from a train and cannot read it aloud, as is my usual practice.

I showed my daughter my doppelgänger over pizza slices and now she can’t unsee it.

1. OK, I own a small one-bedroom in New York. But please remember, my real estate is a by-product of divorce. These are complicated parting gifts.

2. Long-time readers of Calvin Trillin’s will recognize this as Alice’s Rule of Economics.

3. My daughter would like the world to know that we were well ahead of the curve on caviar and potato chips. Also Tabis.

4. And yet I’ve seen Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun. A REVIVAL, when I was 7 years old.

5. Inching ever closer to being a Sondheim completist.