happy new year

Photos

We went to the Westchester Dinner Theatre to see Miracle on 34th Street (musical) and celebrate the new year. The first thing we noticed when entering the lobby was the pre-dinner mountains of lobster claws and shrimp. Damn the dinner, full speed a-lobster! Hiroko and I plowed through several plates of crustacean before the first act, as did Masa and Yuko.
The show started and it was surprisingly good -- much better than I expected and at least as good as what I've seen on Broadway.
After the show dinner arrived, my steak was inhaled, Masa consumed dessert for three, and the band fired up. In contrast to the musical, the band was:
1) loud
2) bad
They started somewhere in the roaring twenties and worked their way up through the sixties with a non-stop musical medley that could only be described as Please Stop Now. The lead male singer was mediocre, but at least he wasn't so loud. The female lead singer was both mediocre and deafening. Taking a small break they left the mic to the keyboardist for his rendition of Elvis Plays The Dinner Theatre, Badly. At one point my dad commented "I can't actually hear the melody", which is generally the impression a band wants to avoid giving, but in this case it was ok because the songs were so not good. But the crowd of dancers took to the stage with abandon. We looked on with amusement and horror as my parents were joined on the dance stage by Large Man in Blue T-Shirt, Too Old For That Small A Red Dress, Victorian Lace With Neck Tattoo, Bring Me My Heart Medication, Glad We Took All Those rumba Lessons, Gold Pinky Ring And Hair Grease, Where's My Rhythm and The Large Sisters.
At midnight we donned our silly hats, made noise with our noise-makers, drank a wee bit of champagne from plastic champagne glasses, and got the hell outta there just as the band made it into the 1970's and started their BeeGees tribute.