Highlights:

Wicked– It had all the elements of a successful musical: clever catchy songs, eye-popping sets, and fun dance numbers, but Wicked is surprisingly complex and meaty for a musical. It not only offers a completely different view of the Wizard of Oz, but also delves into the complexity of female friendships, how the press decides who’s good and who’s evil, government propaganda, dealing with prejudice, and the difficulty of being a smart quirky girl.  We loved it. Now I’m reading the book.

Tom’s Restaurant – in Morningside Heights at 112^th Street looks just like the shots in Seinfeld on the outside. Inside, it looks most like the first season of Seinfeld, where the booths were brown and the wallpaper a tan color, rather than the bright, roomy white floored inside of the diner scenes in later Seinfeld episodes.  There is a signed picture of the cast over the cash register and a brief description in the menu of how the diner is well known from Suzanne Vega’s song and then Seinfeld, but the diner itself is low-key and untouristy with good inexpensive diner food. The Bank Street College bookstore, chocked full of teaching guides and children’s books, is across the street.  We spent a happy hour there too.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum– Probably my favorite museum.  This year we went on the Confino Family tour.  An intern took our group of 16 into the basement of the tenement house.  We were given the details of the Confino Family, a Sephardic Jewish family that were forced to leave Turkey in 1912 due to war and ethnic cleansing.  The intern had us pretend to be an immigrant family from 1912.  Since a large part of our group was a real 2007 British family, we decided to pretend to be British.  We were then led upstairs to the Confino family apartment.  An actress playing the Confino’s 14 year old daughter,Victoria, greeted us.  We squeezed into the tiny 3-room apartment that she shared with her 10-member family. (They were out working).  She advised us on how to start our new life on the Lower East Side and answered our questions about her life.

The actress stayed in character so well I really believed I’d been transported back to 1912.  The daughterling had a different reaction.  She spent the entire time wondering about this actress’s life.  Did she think about the character when she wasn’t working?  How did she acquire her accent?  Did she study Laredo (the Spanish-Hebrew dialect spoken by Jews in Turkey and Greece)?   

Ellen’s Stardust Diner – It’s designed to look like an old-fashioned red streetcar on the outside.  The inside is covered in fifties murals and memorabilia.  The wait staff, wearing poodle skirts or gas station outfits, all have names like “Pinky” and “Gus”.  In-between serving burgers, fries, and malts they sing karaoke and dance.  We had fries and pie while we watched the wait staff perform “Downtown”, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “A Whole New World.”

Chinatown – We wandered through Chinatown past fish markets and sidewalk fruit stands. The main streets of Chinatown were loaded with tourists checking out cheap t-shirts, but the tiny winding side roads, where key scenes of Kiki Strike had taken place, were almost empty.  It was cold outside so ducking into the tiny Vegetarian Dim Sum Restaurant was toasty warm. Turns out we’re really not adventurous enough vegetarians to appreciate Vegetarian Dim Sum.  We ended up having vegetable stir-fry instead.

Velselka’s – We subway-ed to the East Village to visit the Marble Cemeteries from Kiki Strike.  Along the way we stopped at Velselka’s, a Ukrainian Diner, which serves delicious raspberry blintzes and had me wishing I’d skipped the vegetable stir-fry so I’d have room for their varied vegetarian choices. Velselka’s is featured in a key scene in the book, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist—of course I had to check out the bathroom that plays a role in that scene.  The daughterling hadn’t read Nick and Norah, but Velselka’s fit in nicely to our Kiki Strike theme since Kiki’s guardian, Veruska, made the girls cherry blintzes after their Underground City Adventures.

The Scholastic Bookstore– in Soho is one dangerously tempting large room of every novel, picture book, toy, and teacher guide Scholastic has published. We spent an hour here just looking and reading.

Greenwich Village– We walked down Cornelia Street and found the seven hidden houses mentioned in Kiki Strike, then walked past the apartment block that’s always shown in Friends.  There was a huge walking tour group standing in front of it so it was easy to find.