Let's pause the doomscrolling for some joy, shall we?

My forever Broadway buddy and I went to see the matinee show of &Juliet yesterday followed by dinner downtown. You may recall I saw this show last December when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson fulfilled a lifelong dream to appear on Broadway. She brought down the house with a walk on role written just for her. As I watched the show that night, I knew my daughter would love it as much as I did, and so, for her birthday, I got us tickets to go. And the production was every bit as fabulous the second time around.

The show reimainges the ending of Romeo and Juliet, in which Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway, swipes his quill and rewrites the story to have Juliet not kill herself when she wakes from her sleep potion and finds Romeo dead. Instead she goes on with her life, embarking on a empowering, self-actualizing journey of discovery with her best friends May, who is trans, and April, who is played by Anne, who takes the liberty of writing herself into the tale. The sparring between mansplaining, casually sexist Will Shakespeare and his wife Anne is a witty take on an often overlooked slice of literary history, in a musical that manages to be full of lines provoking belly laughs yet also poignant and socially optimistic. Juliet (below) is played by Maya Boyd. This girl has some pipes!

The production is a jukebox musical, meaning the songs are all Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 singles since 1998, which makes them the pop ballads that provided the soundtrack for my daughter's middle school, high school, and college years ("Eye of the Tiger" or "I Kissed A Girl" anyone?). Seeing it with my daughter opened up whole new dimensions of the show to me. She gave me the backstory on some of the songs, the eye wink of now middle aged Tony Fatone of the former boy band NSYNC playing the French king, the buzz created by the huuuuuge TikTok influencer Charli D'Amelio being a member of the dance ensemble ("the one in green, Mom, wearing the tiaria"), and other such details I completely missed the first time around. And just to see the enjoyment on her face as she watched, the way her eyes danced, how she happily clapped her hands without even realizing she was doing it, it was one of those perfect moments in life, where nothing exists outside of just being present for what is currently happening.

We took our obligatory "look at us on Broadway" theater selfie, then Ubered to an after matinee dinner at a restaurant called Ruby's in Murray Hill, where the sweet potato fries sprinkled with chili oil were a revelation.

There, over spicy margaritas, we planned the paint and sip birthday party my daughter is throwing for me next weekend on her back patio! It will be just the NYC fam, our kids and their spouses and the nieces, eight of us in all, and we'll have pre-drawn canvases on which we can follow the outlines or ignore them completely, as we wish. I'm so excited for this I could burst. I don't think I've had a birthday party thrown for me that I just had to show up to since moving to New York, which I was startled to realize this morning will be fifty years ago come August. 

Anyway, that was my Saturday. In the midst of the tsunami we are living through, it was a perfectly joyful day.