In With The New

You get 3 wishes

Aladdin was Disney magic on Broadway. To say we all enjoyed it would be an understatement. I won’t bore you with my theatre geek review, except to say the genie was spectacular & they made a good decision by not trying to copy Robin Williams. As we left the theater the barricades were just starting to go up for the ball dropping festivities. While we were heading toward Penn Station to make our exit we definitely felt like salmon swimming upstream. The throngs of revelers were arriving en masse.

The train ride back to L.I.

Darren & Dawn had another feast ready to go which featured a beef tenderloin (the size of which I have never seen roasted in a conventional home oven). Shrimp were also served and were prepared in the style of Ina Garten, who’s latest personally autographed cookbook lies in Dawn’s kitchen. Now would be the time to mention my sister’s obsession with The Barefoot Contessa.

Only ‘good’ vanilla.

While Dawn & Darren were staying in a B&B out in The Hamptons someone casually mentioned that Ina’s home was located nearby and gave them the street address. My sister forced my poor brother in law into stalking Ina’s property and photographing her gardens and the guest house where The Barefoot Contessa is filmed. How they didn’t get arrested I don’t know.

Holy Cow!

We gorged ourselves to the brink of a food-induced coma and then retreated to the TV to usher in 2015. It was fun to show Damian on live TV the places that he had been standing in only a few hours before.

Noisemakers

We toasted the New Year at midnight basking in the glow of the enormous high definition TV that dominates my sister’s media room. Not long afterward we bedded down for our first respite of the New Year. New Year’s Day dawned brightly and since it was the last day we would spend at my sister and Darren’s house before heading to Connecticut and upstate NY we decided to take it easy. To burn off some of the extra calories we had been consuming we took a brisk walk through the neighborhood. Damian was complaining mightily about the walk and then we discovered the bruises on his legs from his ice skating adventure. We decided to cut the walk short and returned home to watch my all time favorite Christmas movie which Darren had so thoughtfully recorded for me. We capped the night off by ordering Chinese take-out. A whole lot of it.

Take one from column A and one from column B

In the morning we said our good-byes and closed another chapter in an ever expanding book of memories. Thanks Dawn and Darren.

And to all a good night!

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