Passover. Eight days for us to compensate for not being allowed to eat bread by eating remarkable amounts of just about anything else. Each year I promise myself that this will not be the year in which I eat my weight in chocolate covered cashews (I do not even like cashews) or marshmallows made from a slime only found at the bottom of a nuclear reactor (I wish I I could say that I don’t love marshmallows. They will be my downfall. I especially like them covered in shitty chocolate.) Each year I fail miserably. Only four days in (gasp! can this be true?), and I’ve woefully missed the healthy mark. (You can eat as much quinoa as you like and it doesn’t undo all the chocolate covered jelly squares.)
It’s also a remarkable amount of family togetherness, and that’s a mostly good thing. I generally assume that unless I get up with the rooster and run, the only time I will get to be free of a child appendage is … crap, I can’t even say in the shower because this morning someone just needed to sit and watch me, or on the toilet, because 30 minutes ago I just adjudicated a dispute over a pink paintbrush all while sitting on the loo.
But my mother in law snapped up the LAST three tickets to the opening of Act One last night at Lincoln Center. Even though the memoir on which it was based (by Moss Hart) has long been hailed as the theater nerd’s bible, I hadn’t read it until I moved to NYC in the fall. I loved it, and the play was just as moving, inspiring and beautifully reminiscent of the Broadway of 100 years ago as the book itself.
We got to celeb spot in the theater, which always adds to the fun: Victor Garber, Christine Baranski, and Nathan Lane.
In short, complete and total theater nerd heaven.
And the whole things almost didn’t happen.
I had been up since well before six. I had also been out all day with the kids, one of whom had to be physically touching me at all times. Someone threw up all over me, someone melted down all over me, and I had 15 minutes to figure out dinner and get them ready for bed before the sitter arrived. And then I remembered that the sitter wasn’t arriving — I had to get her. I was pooped and at several points I almost looked at my MIL and said: “Go without me. Give my ticket to a lucky, unsuspecting hobo.” (I get a tad overrdramatic when tired.) But the thought of overseeing bedtime coupled with the idea of missing this show I’d been dying to see… it was all I needed to pull myself together and get the hell out of dodge.
Sometimes I’m too much of a wimp, and I pass on evenings that I know I’d enjoy because the idea of organizing my escape is too much. It’s like I always seem to block out how fantastic it is to be out of the house.
And more than anything else, a night of theater is always worth the pact I have to make with the devil just to get out the door. For me, it’s a wonderful feeling that I’m still basking in today… and it’s not something that post-200-marshmallow-and-300-macaroon nausea can take away.

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Posted in Broadway, children, food, New York City, parenting, Passover on Apr 18, 2014