A Night Out at “The Prom” and White Chocolate Lavender Ice Cream

In baseball news, I scored a cheap New York Yankees ticket this morning! It's for the Saturday night game of their series with the Boston Red Sox the first week of August.

The reason it was about half the price of the other three games in the series? The August 3 night game is a make-up of one that was postponed in May due to rain (and the only date in the four-game Sox-Yankees series I can make). My editing shift ends at 6 that Saturday, giving me just enough time to hop on a train to the Bronx for the 7:05 p.m. start. I’ll refrain from rocking a Red Sox jersey (mine didn’t make it into my carry-on), but I'll be rooting hard for the away team in enemy territory!

Today at work I heard from a pretty cool guest speaker (understatement) — Elisabeth Burmiller, the New York Times’s Washington Bureau Chief. I kid you not, she started her career at the Washington Post as a party reporter for the “Style” section, and now she’s of course covering a different kind of party — the political one! One interesting tidbit I hadn't previously considered: The New York Times can have a story about Trump up online for 24 hours, but he only reacts when it runs in print (a.k.a. he only reads the print paper). Guess print’s not dead in the Oval Office!

After work this evening, I headed to “The Prom” at the Longacre Theatre. The show is an Indiana-set comedic musical about a 17-year-old high schooler who’s told she can’t bring her girlfriend to the prom. Let’s just say, Indiana doesn’t come away from this looking too good — it’s presented as a backwater state teeming with homophobic high schoolers. There are tractor jokes and middle-of-nowhere dismissals. And, of course, the butchering of the Indianapolis Star as the Indiana Star (*cringes*). The musical is a smorgasbord of gay and Hoosier stereotypes, but that's the point —everything is played for laughs.

But behind the mostly flimsy characters; streeeetched, butter-spread-too-thinly-over-bread plot; and pervasive stereotypes are some great songs, “Unruly Heart” and “Dance With You” in particular. “Dance With You” is the tune I walked away from the musical at the end of the night humming.

"The Prom" is the opposite of most shows — I wanted a more extended resolution at the end (many productions overdo it on the wrap-up scenes, which can tend to drag). But this one starts out slower in the first act, then pummels you with great songs in the second.

It does stretch belief that one actor could convert an entire town of homophobic kids to LGBTQ acceptance in the span of one song. And I wanted much more backstory about Emma’s relationship (well, now non-relationship) with her intolerant parents, as well as her struggles with coming out herself — that aspect was pretty well glossed over in favor of focusing on her girlfriend's struggles to do so. Tonight's audience definitely skewed young and liberal, with loud cheers and applause for many particularly incisive bits of social commentary.

And finally, your daily food shout: I grabbed a scoop of White Chocolate Lavender ice cream from Stuffed in the East Village, which tasted … minty? Ice cream is my treat of choice at the moment, as NYC is in the middle of a stifling heat wave.