Having butchered many songs over my thankfully unplugged Karaoke career…I thought it time to try to live, and perhaps sing, my version of Billy Joel’s ‘New York State of Mind’.
Manhattan is generally where visitors to the Big Apple stay, but I decided to leave my hat elsewhere…so across the bridge I went to Brooklyn. After renting a funky apartment near Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens I headed to the local bar…it was playing the music of Bob Dylan who became a local to the area in the 1960s. Fast forward 50 years or so and remove the talent…I was the one to become a local within minutes. Hours passed while the barkeep and I watched baseball together with a journey through his favourite beers…it was quite simply the best jet lag cure I have found.
New York to me means catching up with friends and seeing the latest theatre. My ex-pat friend, Laurie-Anne (who is great company and one of the nicest people in New York) and I saw It’s Only A Play starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Stockard Channing, Rupert Grint and Megan Mullally. I should say it really stars Nathan Lane supported by Stockard Channing, as in this performance the others are not in their class and Matthew Broderick was barely audible…perhaps to him it really was only a play?!
This was followed by Once which is set in modern day Dublin, a beautiful story performed to heart-felt songs. It is about a singer who is giving up on his music and the girl who saves him. Simple, stunning, and a sell-out…it has won every award possible and made me want to hop on a plane to Dublin to find a girl who thinks I can sing…as she would be a saint…or deaf.
My very close and terrific friends from Sydney who have moved to New York and married – Allie and Rees – took me to the roof top bar of Wythe Ave Hotel to watch the sunset over the city…why does New York always look better from the outside?
To finish my Brooklyn experience I booked a pizza sunset bike tour of the area…it seemed the perfect balance between eating and burning off the indulgences. Through the many suburbs with my older very New York Jewish guide we went, who seemed content to show us Brooklyn’s history through his childhood rather than the actual areas, and kept saying “how times are a changing”…they may be, but the music didn’t seem to. It was a great six hours but, as you can imagine after sitting on a bike that long, memorable for more than one reason.
‘It was so easy living day by day’ wrote Billy Joel, and considering dinner starts with Martinis, breakfast doesn’t exist, brunch includes Bloody Mary’s, and in between are cocktails…anyone could be inspired to sing…even me…lucky for you all I am far from home.
