G&A: trip there, Day One

FRI AUG 8

We slept in a bit. Scott, the darling, took me to breakfast at my favorite place in the neighborhood, IHOP.

Somehow we got on the subject of Lucia Popp, a Slovak coloratura soprano from the 60s thru the 90s. Here she is being super fierce as the Queen of the Night:

Don’t mess with that broad! She’s got a chandelier on her head!

Scott did a little laundry, I finished packing, we had a little lunch, and we got on the subway, Long Island Railroad, and JFK Air Train. I hadn’t done this before and was thrilled that it look about 40 minutes from Penn Station and cost under $20. Major score.

There was a super friendly and smiley guy at the airline counter when we checked in, his name was John. He tried to talk us into upgrading to business class. We’d have much more leg room, early boarding, a free checked bag, and (I quote) “a more delicious dinner.” All of this for only $799 per passenger. Go figure, we said no thank you. We saw John again when we boarded our flight. He spotted Scott, lit right up, and said, “Hello, my friend!” I was glad that there were no hard feelings.

Lunch at the airport: I had a caprese sandwich (mozz, parm, tomato, and allegedly fresh basil), Scott had turkey, turkey bacon, and cheddar cheese. We were both pleased.

Scott and I both wanted aisle seats so his seat was two rows ahead of mine. We knew we’d get plenty of together time on this trip so we didn’t need to sit together on the plane.

I was amazed at how many movie choices they had, including a few surprises:

About Schmidt

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

All the President’s Men

Arsenic and Old Lace

The Bad and the Beautiful (that tempted me)

Contagion (also tempting since I heard it was a road map for Covid)

Her

The Informant!

Inherent Vice

Kit Kitteridge

The Magnificent Seven

Moana

Mystic River

The Room Next Door

Shaft (shut your mouth)

Trap (love that movie, but I’d seen it too recently)

Victor/Victoria

Wag the Dog

Zodiac (maybe on the trip home)

I chose *The Magnificent Seven,* which I don’t think I had ever seen. I was surprised that the big broad theme didn’t come in immediately. Thank you, Elmer Bernstein, for the delayed gratification!

By the way Elmer Bernstein is no relation to the posthumously canceled Leonard - - I have a soft spot for Elmer because he got his Oscar for the score of *Thoroughly Modern Millie,* my favorite movie of all time for the majority of my life, I’ve honestly seen it about 45 times.

Uh oh, Eli Wallach as a Mexican. Problematic. Also problematic that all these Mexicans are speaking to each other in English with pseudo Mexican accents. I was confused by the first scene because the Wallach gang is clearly a bunch of soulless bad guys but their music is so appealing, has so much duende!

Yul Brynner. So much sexier than Steve McQueen. Their clothes all seem a little too clean and tailored to be authentic. Also in this movie: a taciturn James Coburn, a young and hunky Charles Bronson, and Robert Vaughn, who I know only vaguely from his many appearances on television. This movie is littered with sexy guys. But though it starts off with great promise it pretty quickly becomes boring. I fell asleep during the big massacre scene and didn’t really care.

Dinner was, as my brother Howard’s ex-girlfriend would say, completely adequate. We had a choice between chicken cordon bleu or squash ravioli. I chose the chicken and it was reminiscent of Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine.

They turned the lights off and I slept for maybe two hours. It was only a six-hour flight so not really much time. They gave us a little breakfast when we landed: a cold croissant filled with cream cheese, a strawberry yogurt (tasty and firm), a little fruit cup, a small blueberry muffin.

We landed in Frankfurt, went through some kind of Immigration scenario, and found our gate. We looked at the screen showing the gate number for various flights and I had such brain fog that I couldn’t remember what our destination city was. I kept thinking it started with an L but that was Lufthansa, our airline. Turns out we were going to Nuremberg.

We took a bus to our plane and boarded it from a stairway on the runway. I always enjoy that. Our plane was small but not teeny weenie - - there were only 20 people on the flight, so plenty of room to sprawl out. This was maybe the shortest flight of my life, only 35 minutes.

We landed in Nuremberg, went through another Immigration scenario, and walked outside. The next couple of hours were sort of unpleasant. Our plan had been to take an Uber to the hotel but neither of us could get a signal so were unable to order a Uber. And there didn’t appear to be any cabs driving by that we could hail. Thankfully I had enough of a signal to use the map on my phone so we walked to the hotel, about a half hour. Not that far but bear in mind we had all our stuff.

Finally we got to the hotel. It was 10:30am - - check in time was 3pm so we thought we’d ditch our bags at the desk and wander around until we could check in. We took the elevator up to the reception floor and discovered there was no reception desk. We were in the restaurant in the hotel and interrupted a beleaguered woman who was vacuuming. She didn’t speak English so she got someone on the phone. I asked him (in German) if he spoke English and he said, “Nein.” I told him in my broken German that we had a room and he said, curtly, to come back at 3pm. I didn’t ask him about leaving our bags, I couldn’t begin to say that in German, or understand his answer, and there didn’t see to be any point in asking the beleaguered vacuumer.

We found a bench in a nearby public square and tried to figure out what to do. I suggested going to a movie a couple blocks away, at least that would be a cool place to sit with all our crap. Scott wisely saw that going to a movie would turn into a two-hour nap and we intended to stay awake until it was time to sleep.

He thought our first task should be getting the internet on our phones. He had set up his phone with a SIM card which was supposed to automatically kick in when he landed but that didn’t happen. We found a T Mobile store and an exceptionally helpful woman there (who spoke English) set us both up with continuous mobile internet access for a week for only 10 euros each.

We used our new internet abilities to Google a locker nearby where we could stash our bags, at the bus station, about a five-minute walk. It felt so good to be rid of those for a while. We went back to that public square area and got some kind of cheese-encrusted bread, a bottle of water for Scott, and a Coke Zero for me. We sat in the shade. We were both very happy.

What to do with the three hours we had before we could check in? We decided to go up to the Bayreuth Festival grounds. We found a bus that mentioned the Festspielhaus on the automated sign. We got on the bus, I saw something on the fare collection thingie that appeared to read a chip from a credit card so I “blipped” my card. But no blip. It was hard to tell because the bus driver was wearing sunglasses but clearly he gave me a major eyeroll and waved us through. There might also have been a heavy sigh.

We sat down and got off at the Festspielhaus stop. It was about 2pm, the show that day was at 4pm, so we weren’t expecting to see many theatregoers. Still we were a little flummoxed to see the people getting off the bus were so young and casually dressed. We followed them up a sidewalk and through a sort of wooded area which led to an anonymous driveway. I spotted a couple of brightly-colored molded plastic pieces of scenery, probably from their new production of *Meistersinger* or The Ring (does it matter). I said to Scott, “I think we’re in the wrong place. I think this is the entrance for The Help.” It was a lost episode of *I Love Lucy* season five: “Lucy and Ethel Go To Bayreuth.”

So the question became, Now that we’re at the employee entrance, how do we get to where we need to go? We followed the driveway to its end and could either go into the concrete building straight ahead (which appeared to be offices) or up a concrete stairway and through a door on the right. We chose the stairway and the door magically led us beside the opera house itself. We breathed a sigh of relief.

A little too soon, it turned out. We were approached by two hunky security guards who asked to see our IDs. I explained that we were idiots, we had taken the bus to the wrong entrance and were aware that we shouldn’t have been where we were. They groaned and left us alone.

Scott was eager to try and get tickets to the 4pm performance of *Lohengrin.* I would have loved that too, it’s my favorite Wagner opera. There was a sign outside the box office saying that unfortunately there were no tickets for that day but we waited in line for a while anyway, hoping we’d get a different answer. We stood in line for about 15 minutes with very little movement in the line and we gave up. Hopefully I’ll see Lohengrin and his swan boat another time.

We walked around a bit more and took this picture of us in front of the opera house:

It was approaching 3pm so we walked to the bus station, picked up our bags, and walked back to the hotel. We noticed these Wagner-centric street signs:

The check in process was handled by a machine in the hallway outside the restaurant where we had been before. I plugged in my reservation number and it brought up my name and the dates of my reservation. Then I was asked to confirm my home address and had to correct it from an address in Dallas, Texas. Who knows where they came up with that.

Our room was, to use a familiar phrase, completely adequate. This was the one hotel where we were sharing a room. We unpacked our things, talked for a while, and of course we both fell asleep. But thankfully only one at a time and not for very long.

We saw a promising Italian restaurant nearby, L’Osteria. The wait staff were all young and attractive. Our primary server was a lovely woman named Salma. She spoke flawless English. We were intrigued by the rhubarb beverages on the menu - - Scott got a rhubarb juice mocktail and I got a rhubarb spritzer, really and truly one of the most delicious beverages of my life. Flavorful, just a little sweet, immensely refreshing. I’ll be on the hunt for a rhubarb syrup when I get back to New York.

We split a Caesar salad, delish, not too lightly dressed. I got spaghetti carbonara and Scott got a pizza with ham, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and kalamata olives. The carbonara was fantastic, the pasta was done to perfection, truly al dente. Scott’s pizza was ENORMOUS!

The guy who delivered it said they made the biggest pizzas in Germany and I believed him. I helped Scott out by having one or two slices and we still left some on the table.

We asked Salma to take a picture of us. She took my phone, took a few steps back, and said, “Hey Tommy, get out of the way, I’m trying to take a picture.” We turned to look at Tommy, who was dealing with something at the counter outside the window. Scott said, “We don’t mind Tommy being in the picture!” Tommy was very handsome and well built. This got a big bashful smile out of Tommy, we all had a good laugh.

We walked around for another hour or so, exploring that part of Bayreuth. Somehow it was spared the bombings of WWII, there were many untouched buildings from the 18th century and earlier. It’s a charming town with more activity than we had anticipated.

I felt myself hitting the wall at about 8pm and suggested we go back to the hotel. I did the math and determined that we had been more or less awake for around 42 hours. Scott said the next morning that he probably fell asleep before his head hit the pillow.

Next day...