When Tourists Attack

The Pater Familias took me to a Broadway show for Mother's Day. "Crybaby", the new musical based on the John Waters film of the same name, was a delightful spoof of 1950's teen melodramas. The book, by the folks who write for Comedy Central's news parody "The Daily Show", had lots of subtle jabs at the current US government.



A sample lyric (and I'm misquoting) "someday we'll export democracy to another country/ we'll be greeted with flowers and unicorns". Maybe you had to be there.

The show plays at the Nederlander theater in a busy Times Square chain hotel. We dodged folks lugging suitcases through the cavernous lobby and tiptoed through a long line of tourists waiting to take their mothers to brunch at the homogenous chain restaurant attached to the hotel.



Getting through the crowds in the lobby was nothing, however, compared to negotiating the scrum that Times Square has turned into.



"Did you ever imagine 42nd street would look like this?" my father asked in shock. He was referring to the Disney-fication of an area that was populated with porn and pickpockets throughout my childhood, and his.



Now Times Square is packed with tourists day and night, to the point where you can barely move among them.



It is the most popular tourist destination in the city, but why anyone would want to stay there for longer than it takes to watch "The Lion King" is beyond me.



Times Square is not the real New York. You won't find a home exchange there. I'll tell you why that's a good thing another time.





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