Winning at Easter

Last Easter Sunday I woke up early and was out of the door by 8.15am. I got on an underground train for 12 stops, got on a boat for 20 minutes, climbed up 377 steps, and there I was.

Completely on my own, the only person in the entire world at that exact moment looking out from the crown of the Statue of Liberty in N Y actual C.

Feeling very small and insignificant within the global scheme of things, but also a bit amazing and special for being there toute seule, just me and Lady Liberty, sharing the view and taking it all in. I felt a magical glow I wanted to protect, to remember in minute detail, along with an intense pressure to relax and enjoy my moment. It turns out that doing things you’ve always dreamed of doing is fraught with the panic of not quite doing it right.

And sure, the magical glow may have been largely due to a huge sense of RELIEF that I hadn’t passed out on the way up. Heights don’t bother me, but climbing up a double-helix spiral staircase where the steps are only 19 inches wide and everything’s made of metal and it’s 27 degrees outside so it’s much hotter than that in here, and the railing is just getting hotter and shinier and sweatier with every step I take – well, that bothers me.

So I make it. And by some fated planetary alignment, I’m undisturbed by other tourists and free to take as much time as I want for gazing and photographing, and regaining my composure and a normal resting respiratory rate. The sporty-looking couple who were ahead of me have been and gone, and the fanny-packed group behind me are evidently taking advantage of the rest-stops on the way up. 

Right now, in this moment, I am Winning at Easter.

Just below me in the statue’s headspace were two National Park Service employees keeping an eye on things, a man in some kind of nook (the Statue’s ear?) and a woman casually swinging her legs while sitting on a metal beam (as you do). They were lovely and helpful, and keen to chat. The man reassured me that my new obsession with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is really quite normal, and it turned out that the woman had recently spent her honeymoon in Paris, and we swapped stories about hunting down the many and varied Statue of Liberty replicas that are dotted about the French capital. (My own ‘gotta catch ‘em all’ challenge of visiting each one is in the works. I’ll get to it when I get to it, OKAY?).

I shared my anecdote about how the statue on the Île aux Cygnes, not far from the Eiffel Tower, was swivelled in 1937 so that she is now directly facing her big sister on the other side of the Atlantic. The woman lit up at this gem, and I like to think she’s woven it into the Liberty stories she tells tourists.

Visiting the Statue of Liberty is the only thing I’d booked before arriving in New York, mainly because people kept telling me it sells out 6 months in advance and you simply must organise yourself beforehand. It’s easily the most reasonably-priced ticket I bought on my trip, just $21 for visiting Liberty Island, climbing up to the Crown, visiting Ellis Island and its incredible Immigration Museum, and hopping freely on and off 3 different ferries around New York Harbour along the way. (Please bear in mind that in New York money, I had a plate of waffles and a coffee that cost more than this; they were really nice waffles, but still).

As regular readers of this blog already know, I am nuts for GOING UP STUFF, so this was an ideal morning for me. However, if you’re not sure about the steps or the height for climbing up to the crown, take a look online for what to expect. There are go-pro videos and suchlike. And I would thoroughly recommend an early-morning time-slot, as queuing was minimal.

I saw plenty of people not even bothering to get off the ferry at Liberty Island. They were straight round the harbour to the next stop at Ellis Island, ready to get going with the hours of fascinating stories and memories from 62 years of US Immigration. Self-guided audio as well as human tour-guides, so you can take as long as you like.

That was the best thing about the whole day; there’s something for everyone, and you can tailor it to suit the time and energy you have.

This Easter, I (sadly) didn’t go up any stuff. Instead, I went to the cinema and took in some art, and then I went to 3 different supermarkets in search of cocoa powder. I eventually found some (a different kind of Winning at Easter), which is sort of hilarious, given that I now live in the UK again, and I thought my days of being a confused moron in the supermarket were behind me.

Apparently not.

Confused Moron, Party of One, signing off, and planning to be Going Up Stuff every Easter from now on.

The Grapes of Passive-Aggression

Last Friday, I went to see a play. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment, I-wonder-if-there-are-still-tickets-available situations, and there were, so I bought one and went.

Plus, it allowed me to start a project I’ve been meaning to get off the ground for some time now, the ‘When they say ‘restricted view’, just how restricted do they mean? project’ (I’m still working on the name). Will a few square feet in the corner of the stage be hidden from view, or are we talking seats behind pillars, where you’d have to be next to someone you know really well to do the sort of leaning necessary to get a decent sight-line?

Now I’m not launching this project in the name of science, you understand; it’s purely self-serving. My quest is to find, at each of my local venues, the exact location in the theatrical Venn Diagram where lowest price and most acceptable view overlap, so that I can sit in it. Don’t worry; it’s not that I’m short on hobbies and one step away from taking up raffia-weaving. It’s that I usually buy tickets when there are only 8 seats left on the only night I can go, and I want to be speedy and efficient and feel that I’m snapping up a bargain, rather than taking what I can get.

*NB. This all comes after the Hamilton-booking shit-show, where my friend and I spent an impressive amount of time considering the relative restrictedness of a £30 ticket in a £50 zone vs a £50 ticket in a £70 zone vs a £100 ticket in a £howmuch? zone, before getting so overwhelmed at the potential for expensive disappointment that we opted for unrestricted seats to save our collective sanity.

At HOME in Manchester, it turns out that Circle Row B Seat 8 for £10 is in fact a pretty good seat (view only properly restricted in one scene for approximately 38 seconds, where I just pretended the actors were having a conversation off-stage-right).

The reason I know it is a pretty good seat is that my view was such that I recognised the actress playing the drama teacher as Steph Barnes from Coronation Street, who the rest of you would probably recognise from Happy Valley Season 2 (I still haven’t watched it yet, alright), but who I haven’t seen since she was married to Des circa 1994. Recognising facial features 24 years later? That’s a pretty good seat.

The play was Circle Mirror Transformation, and it was great. Set in Vermont, over a six-week drama class in a community centre, Steph Barnes (actual name Amelia Bullmore, if you prefer) and her 4 students gradually get to know themselves and each other through the magical world of drama – they didn’t quite play Slap the Butcher, but there were some nice moments where I was reminded of Mr G.

My real treat, though, was witnessing the solo meta-drama coming from the guy next to me. It was a play within a play, Silent Angry Man, from the moment he traipsed in behind his (probable) wife, to his visible upset when he realised there wasn’t going to be an interval and kept looking murderously at those audience-members brave enough to nip out to the toilet / bar.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such quiet yet determined anger. He wouldn’t take his coat off, which was weird, but turned out to be useful as each new seethe caused him to rustle slightly, meaning I was alerted to his full litany of rage, which went as follows:

      Phase 1. Huffing and sighing.

      Phase 2. Fidgeting.

      Phase 3. Refusing to look at the stage for a full 20 minutes.

      Phase 4. Practically crying every time the cast played the game where they 

                   try – and fail – to count to ten.

      Phase 5. Frenetically tapping a leaflet on his knee.

      Phase 6. Falling asleep.

The only time he perked up was when one of the characters was talking about how he used to have a stuffed animal toy of a snake in his childhood bedroom. And the only time he acknowledged his (probable) wife was when the characters had to each write down a secret that no-one else would know, at which point he and his companion looked significantly at one another. Both of which speak to much darker things, if you ask me.

So thank you, Angry Man. I hope you figure out your unresolved issues about improv exercises and / or community centres. Or maybe I should just make a note that Circle Row B Seat 7 isn’t quite as nice as Seat 8.

An Excessively Random Act of Kindness

Funny thing happened to me today. I needed to generate a £1 coin from a £10 note so that I could use a locker at the swimming pool. Not exactly a Sherlock Holmes-level of intellectual conundrum, but nevertheless; life cannot always reflect art, now can it.

So there I am, pondering just what I can buy, that will cost between one and two pounds, or between three and four pounds, thus ensuring my handful of change definitely contains a £1 coin. I’ve upped the level of my personal maths-problem game, you see, and I don’t want to risk spending, say, 95p on a loaf of bread, and then being landed with a fiver, some shrapnel and two £2 coins. That would be a failure, leading to an awkward conversation with the shopkeeper, in which I ask if I can change one of my £2 coins for two £1 coins, and the shopkeeper looks down his or her nose at me and refuses.

I’ve worked in retail; I know that £1 coins are like gold-dust, and must not be given away willy-nilly or, indeed, if someone asks politely. They are always the first coin to run out in the till, and it is a pain in the arse when that happens. You’ve probably got to ask Jane to go and get more pound coins from the safe upstairs, which will take an age, and the angry customers waiting for their £1s in change will have started to look remarkably like villagers with pitchforks.

Also, in a land where the customer is always right (haha), you really value opportunities where you can say, ‘No, I’m sorry, I really can’t spare any change,’ when what you actually mean is, ‘I would rather beat myself over the head with this barcode scanner than open the till again to give away my tiny stock-pile of gold. Also, why aren’t you paying by card like any normal person, thus minimising the physical and verbal contact we have to have with one another.’

I digress.

So, I’m planning my £1.50 purchase of bananas or post-its from the supermarket, when I catch sight of an ON-THE-STREET BOOK STALL right outside the swimming pool building. This is PERFECT, I think to myself. Not only can I indulge my weakness for second-hand books (inherited from my dad; totally not my fault), but I’ll get my change into the bargain.

Now here is where I experienced the oddest act of kindness I think has ever happened to me. I found a great book for the princely sum of £2, presented it to the book-purveyor-gentleman with my shiny new £10 note, only to find out that he has no change either. Which is when I find myself leaving the book-stall with the book, my £10 note plus a £1 coin given to me by the book-seller, who said I could just pop back later and give him £3.

Now I’ve just moved back from France, and I’m not saying that such a thing would never happen at a French second-hand book-stall, but I am saying that I think it’s pretty unlikely. And I know that I probably looked very trustworthy and honest in my sensible middle-class trench-coat buying my sensible middle-class book about castles, but still. This bookseller really put some faith in the human race with this gesture. This was a win for people being nice and helping one another out. And while we’re at it, aren’t Northerners just the loveliest?

So there we are. I experienced altruism. I got to go swimming. And more to the point, I got hold of my £1 coin without recourse to maths or shopping; instead, I essentially stole a book and was given a pound by a man in the street.

The fact that it got stuck in the locker because the swimming-pool hasn’t updated since the new-style coins came out, and apparently I should really have kept one of the old-style ones if I ever wanted to go swimming, is neither here nor there.