Rich Dad, Poor Dad

I'm about to begin the indoctrination program that will make Daughter the Second comfortable with navigating New York City. You have to get inside their tiny heads as soon as possible for it to stick and she's almost six, so it's time. It's a rite of passage. Daughter the First is already hopelessly attached to Gotham, so my work there is pretty much complete.

You start with something safe and simple and then move on to more complex things. And take it from me, you can't get safer than a matinee production of Disney's The Lion King. It's visually stunning but the music is boring and forgettable. It's the bait I used on Daughter the First and it worked like a charm.

I marched down to the Minskoff Theater box office on my lunch hour and whipped out my credit card. Things have changed a bit since the last time I was there. The seating plan has been reconfigured. They now deem over half the house as "Premium Seating." Typically, a premium seat would indicate a seat in the center orchestra and no further than, say, five or six rows from the stage. You can now pay $210 for ONE ticket in the 14th row off to the side. Or, if you'd like to sit in the last row on the floor in the back of the house, you can pay $154 for a seat. There's money to be made and tourists to be gouged and fathers with good intentions to be taken advantage of. What a bunch of greedy, blood sucking leeches.

2 tickets = $310. A considerable expense for someone in my income bracket. And those aren't premium seats. For all that money, we're sitting up in the balcony. The whole thing has left me feeling utterly inadequate. And it's not about having good sight lines at a tacky musical. It's broader than that. It feels like I didn't try hard enough in The Game of Life and can't provide for my daughters the way other, more successful, fathers can.

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Here's an interesting factoid: Eugene O'Neill, arguably one of America's greatest playwrights, was born in a hotel room on 44th Street and Broadway. Right in the heart of the theater district! Isn't that strange?! It's analogous to President Obama being born in the White House or me being born in an office cubicle.

At that time, the neighborhood was called Longacre Square. It was rechristened Times Square in 1904 when The New York Times opened its offices there. They've posted a brass commemorative plaque on the site where the hotel once stood.

Wanna know what's on the site now?

Mourning Becomes Cappuccino. Long Day's Journey into Caffeine. The Ice Coffee Cometh. A Moonpie for the Misbegotten. I've got a million of 'em.

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What's that dot on the horizon? Daisyfae approacheth from the west.