Times Square

Wed I decided to check out these 1/2 price Broadway tickets I kept hearing about all week. I decided on the Philanthropist at 2p and purchased my ticket in Times Square. The play was phenomenal! Matthew Broderick (Ferris Buehler's Day off) plays an English professor in this hilarious critique of the world of academia (particularly the English dept :)--highly recommend this to all my English major friends!! Whom will particularly enjoy the following quote from the play "masturbation is the intellectual man [sic] and woman's television"
So, not only did I go to see the perfect play for what my interests are, but I sat in the middle of the front row. 103 AA at the American Airlines Theatre--I could touch the stage from where I was sitting. Being a Wed afternoon showing it turned out to just be me and everyone's Bubbe.

It was during the intermission that I somehow found myself in the middle of a conversation with a group of older Jewish women. We were discussing the important matter of how to get out the grease stain from the slacks that one of them had just gotten "baaack from the cleaanas." When suddenly the topic switched to one of the older women being tired from being at a school all day. I asked what she did at the school (since, given the time she probably wasn't a teacher) and she replied that she shared her story of survival during the Holocaust with school children. Wow. I was completely blown away by the story this woman told about her escape as a child from Poland. Her entire family, father, mother and 6 siblings were all murdered. Her father hid her in a closet (or small trap in the house...the details were a little blurred and I couldn't think of a polite way to ask so I just let her tell me whatever it was she had to say) and she said that before he shut the door he told her to "remember to be a good person and to forgive" and that was the last thing she remembers her father saying to her. She then was hiding in a silo somewhere with a younger sibling and she left it to go and get food and when she returned the baby had been killed. All of this happened to her when she was 6 years old. I can't even comprehend what that must have been like. How it was not that long ago that the Sho'ah happened and what I have learnt from the survivors is truly a gift that I am eternally grateful for experiencing. Before long we were back in our seats and the comedy continued forth--still a spectacular play with a star studded cast, but I cannot help but think the only "starstruck" experience I had at that performance was meeting that nameless survivor for those few precious minutes.