Valentine’s Day weekend in NYC with mom

I spend Valentine’s Day weekend in NYC with mom and her Sassy Classics (a dance club) friends from Raleigh, NC. They flew up to take some lessons from a former Radio City Rocket. So I took the train down to hang out with them and a few of their husbands that were dragged along for the ride.

On Friday, we all went to see “Never Gonna Dance,” a musical based on the motion picture “Swing Time”. Though the musical is clearly miss-named, for there is nothing but dancing, it was quite good.

After the show, we spotted Neil Patrick Harris coming out of the theater. You know, Doogie Howser. We also spotted several actors from the show at the restaurant we ate at across the street. It was a fun evening.

On Saturday, mom and I went to the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a fantastic museum and planetarium. We saw two planetarium shows and one Imax. I thing our favorite part, however, was The Scales of the Universe, a 400-foot-long walkway that hugs the glass curtain wall along the second level of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. It illustrates the vast range of size in the universe — from the enormous expanse of our observable universe to the smallest subatomic particles — by using the 87-foot Hayden Sphere as a basis for comparison.

Saturday night, we saw “The Boy From Oz,” which tells the story of Peter Allen, who won the Academy Award for the theme song from the film Arthur, as well as having been discovered by Judy Garland, marrying her daughter, Liza Minnelli, and his record-breaking runs at Radio City Music Hall. The lead was played by Hugh Jackman. Seeing Hugh play the role of Peter Allen really changed my image of him as Wolverine from X-Men. Yet, it does show his capabilities as an actor. Neither mom nor I enjoyed the show, despite the great performance of the cast and crew.

On Sunday, mom and I visited the International Center of Photography, New York’s predominant exhibiting and educational institution in the photographic arts. This, too, was a little disappointing. We then did a little shopping before I had to catch a train back to Norwalk and she had to catch a flight back to Raleigh. It was a fun weekend, mom. I enjoyed it.