 | A WRITER'S WIT |  E. Wharton |
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting important personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fifteenth post of fifty.
New York (1952, 1957, 1974, 2006, 2008)
My father was born in Greenwich, Connecticut and grew up not far away in Port Chester, New York, graduating from PCHS in 1938. His was indeed a suburban upbringing, as my father preferred the woods to entering the wilds of the city. I first saw New York City as a four-year-old. When we returned to Wichita and were downtown one day, I commented on the tall buildings, and my mother nearly slapped me, reminding me of all the tall buildings we’d just seen.
In 1974, while at a teachers’ convention, I attended the Broadway show Pippin starring John Rubinstein and Grease, though John Travolta and Adrienne Barbaux had both departed from the cast. The music from those shows continues to resonate with me largely because I saw them in New York when I was twenty-six. Over forty years later, Pippin was still winning Tony Awards for its 2013 revival.
I visited New York again in 2006, when Ken and I took Amtrak from Fort Worth to Chicago, then Chicago to Penn Station. We enjoyed Threepenny Opera with Alan Cumming and Cindy Lauper. I’d forgotten how wonderful it is to see a live performance with professional proficiency, high energy, and certainly no glitches. A friend took us to Coney Island, where my father had worked as youth selling frozen custard at the famed establishmen Abbott’s on the Playland amusement park. ¶ New York is eleventh of the original colonies. It celebrated its bicenquinquagenary (225 years) in 2013.
Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals
If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas 13. New Jersey
2-Oklahoma 14. Delaware
3-Texas
4-Louisiana
5-Missouri
6-Illinois
7-Indiana
8-Ohio
9-Pennsylvania
10-West VA
11-Maryland
12. Virginia
NEXT TIME: My Book World
RSS Feed