The Week From Hell (and it wasn't just me, you know. Several non-Princeton people I talked to over the course of the past seven days have said things were not going well for them) was, chiefly, hellish because of the volume of homework. The Week From Hell did not maintain a constant pitch of hellishness. The Week From Hell was, at times, quite nice.
Wednesday night, at the end of the fiery portion of the week, I met in a "Draft Conference" (for writing seminar; mandatory) with two guys from my class. We were "randomly" assigned groups and when I arrived at the meeting place it was to find one boy there and one boy absent. It was ten o'clock on Wednesday night and I was eager to finish my revisions so that I could leave for New York the following day, so I decided to check my e-mail to see if there was any word from our missing compatriot. There was. He was, apparently in Connecticut all of a sudden (I had seen him in class eight hours previously), but would be back by ten thirty for the meeting.
Afraid that something had happened to one of his friends or family members, RemainingBoy and I attempted to do as much as we could without him. When he arrived (at ten forty-five) we didn't bring up his absence until he did.
MIABoy: Hi guys.
RemainingBoy: Hi.
N de P: How are you?
MIABoy: Late. Sorry. If your GPS ever tells you there's twenty-five minute traffic delays ahead--
N de P: Believe it?
MIABoy: No. Because it will reroute you into hour-long Lincoln Tunnel delays.
RemainingBoy: Oh.
MIABoy: I had to go home for my tux. And to get a check from my parents.
Yes, dear readers, its true. I go to an Ivy League, and now I know what it's like to pay the price.
When I eventually did get to New York, after turning in my paper, I managed to spend time with Mom and see The Homecoming (which I loved, but I couldn't quite move on from the random transition from wife-and-mother to prostitute as the husband watched). I also saw the Naked Cowboy of Times Square during my pre-show daytime wanderings on Friday while Mom worked. That was special.
Mom is currently reading The Book of Salt, my favorite book from last semester. So we talked about Vietnamese-French cuisine for a while until we got so hungry that we decided to order room service before attending the play. This was a good decision, as it turns out, because the food was amazingly good. I had a Lamburger (a pun which will never get old; I had one in the Palais Royale this summer with Mom and The Street and I'm still chuckling about it).
Today was just as good, if not better. After breakfast in "The Reading Room" of the hotel where Mom's cronies put her up, we went to meet Aunt L and The Street at their incredibly well-placed hotel.
They were the means of our introduction to Canal Street and knockoff [fill in the blank]s. It was, simply put, amazing. Of course, I was lugging all my overnight stuff around (leaving, as I was, right after the show that afternoon) and those tiny shops were not really the best place to be wielding an extra foot of stuff on my left side, but we navigated it somehow and came out on the other end with three bags (Mom, Aunt L, and The Street; not me, despite my sudden and unexpected fondness for the shiny red ones), truly hip black-on-purple glasses frames (The Street), two necklaces (The Street and I), and two scarves (Aunt L and Mom).
This revelry was followed by lunch at the Playwright Tavern. The name speaks volumes and it was perhaps, for this reason, unsurprising that there was a distinctly Irish feel to it. (The Street ate a Shepard's Pie. Our waitress was Irish. It reminded Mom and me of a Dublin pub we liked. There was a little Samuel Beckett in the air as we waited for our food.)
Then came Spring Awakening. We bid goodbye to Mom (who, I presume but will confirm later, went right off to the Swatch store) and found our seats (second row of the mezzanine, a perfect view of the great set) after wading through a long line at the ladies' room that had The Street and I comparing the odors of Paris versus the odors of New York. The show was incredible. Words fail to describe. I almost hate to say this, since it is making light of what was a great show that handled heavy topics with deftness and song, but what I found myself thinking of more than once during the second act was, "Now, if this is not a rally cry for comprehensive sex education, I don't know what is."
The music was wonderful. The comedy rang true. The tragedy was all-too believable. I was so into it, as I spluttered to Aunt L and The Street after curtain call, too wrapped up in the last dying notes to say anything else.
Immediately following elbowing our way out of the theater we went across the street to light candles in the church there, the one dedicated specifically to actors, which I thought was pretty cool. I felt like I was thinking the wrong thoughts to be in there, though, having just come from across the street. We lit our candles and made our wishes and left.
After they nicely walked me a few blocks towards the train station, I hugged The Street and Aunt L and departed, suddenly remembering, despite my more immediate feelings of fondness for hormonal German teenagers, how much reading I have to do this weekend.
But instead of doing any of that (despite the ten pages I read on the train before zoning out so thoroughly that I had to stop and watch Weeds on my iPod instead) I went and saw Roommate J, the Fencing Twins, and HSClassmate in a Bach Concert.
It was...Bach. But they all did very well.