Whether you say on line or in line, it's always fun

In the (luckily) distant past, blog silence meant something bad, but now it is likely to mean I'm running around, which is the case since I last wrote.

After I picked Katie up at Logan Airport last Saturday, we had a day at home and then went to "the old country" for her birthday celebration a month early because she is in between jobs. Monday was travel day, Tuesday Shakespeare in the Park, and Wednesday, dinner with (cousins) Jeanne and Amanda and "Waitress" the second time around because we had both seen it in Boston.

The least expensive and most decent looking Airbnb that I could find happened to be at 115th street and Fifth Avenue, just a little north of my old homestead. I've passed by the apartment where I grew up but lost touch with our friends in the building and found myself tearing up when we talked to the doorman at 1200 Fifth and looked at the cement in which our cousin had written LG (for Lynne Gordon) in the wet cement when the new building owners were wreaking havoc during the last days of her life in 2006.

Before I went down I had called our friend, now 99, and asked her how our other friend, the fascinating Martha Coigney, was doing, and was upset to hear that she had died a few months earlier . My mother had called her Martha-Who-Has-A-Tony because she had indeed won one for her work with the International Theater Institute. We had stayed with both of them in their fabulous apartments overlooking Central Park but had lost touch over the years. I felt horrible but it's just too hard to keep up with everyone.

I cheered up with a trip to Little Italy via subway for dinner, a stroll, a gelato and cannoli.

The next day, we got up at what my father used to like to call the crack of dawn to wait on the Shakespeare line, one of our favorite things to do. (I still hang on to my New Yorkism – on line – instead of the proper "in line" so I thought I would throw it in there.)

In the Shakespeare Line

We made friends with the people around us and talked the whole way through, hardly even opening our books. Then, it was good that we had taken the traditional photo of us holding our tickets, because at some point during the day, one of the tickets wandered off. The show, an all-female "Taming of the Shrew," was sold out, a not totally appropriate way of saying it because the tickets are free, but in any case, there were no more tickets to be had.

The person at the Delacorte Theatre box office said our only choice was to go early to the standby line unless we could zoom in on the tickets in the photo and show proof that we knew the number of the missing seat. My investment in my iPhone 6 with the good camera paid off because we could indeed see the number, and the night was saved.

It was interesting to see Cush Jumbo (Lucca Quinn in the last last season of "The Good Wife,") in the role of Kate. You can read the New York Times review of this problematic play here. We decided that they managed to pull it off through a tongue-in-cheek approach.

I thought I might go for a little run, but we did so much walking that it never happened. We were also going to go see the bench that we had dedicated to our parents near the flower garden that my mother loved. I don't know where the time went but we skipped it in favor of spending more time on the next visit.

Wednesday's performance of "Waitress" was early, at 7:30, so we had dinner early too, at a good Italian place on Restaurant Row.

Over at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, the smell of baking pies wafted through the air, a nice touch with "waitresses" selling the pies in little mason jars. For a sampling of reviews, click here.

The show was sweet, just like the pies, and we drove home listening to Sara Bareilles singing the songs. Back at home, I went up the hill to Breezy Acres and got a pie made with fresh local strawberries.

The mason jar and the whole pie each cost the same amount: $10. But we were paying for atmosphere at the theater, so it was worth it.

Great expectations, anxiety dreams

Last night I woke up every hour because I was so excited about seeing "Waitress the Musical" at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge tonight with twins Wendy and Lisa and my "twin" Margaret. I am lucky to have a prescient daughter who tells me when shows are going to be very hot. She clued me in, and I got the tickets when it was in previews, before the announcement of its Broadway run.

That is not exactly the point of this post. The point is that while having this great thing to look forward to, and coming from a fabulous dinner last night with my new friends from The Canoe Club, my dreams reveal the anxiety that lurks beneath the surface. For example, in real life, I have two scratches on my thigh, courtesy of an over exuberant dog. In my dream, Dr. Alyea, when giving me a checkup, noticed little dots in that area. He was worried that they were petechiae, those tiny dots that at one point in the thankfully distant past signaled low platelets. (As low as two. Hard to believe.) No they're not, I said, realizing that they were allergic reactions to a pill.

I guess it might be a sign of healing in your psyche when you dream of something potentially horrible and then realize it's not going to do you in.

In the rest of the dream, I had just returned from a great trip with friends, and when Dr. Alyea asked me where I had gone, I couldn't remember. I tried to call Emily, but couldn't remember her whole number and couldn't figure out how to access it in my contacts. When I finally reached her, she said we had gone to Paris and some Arabic countries, and I couldn't remember any of it.

I was grungy from the trip and had to take a bath, and when I got out and was wrapped only in a towel, Dr. Alyea said he might as well examine me then. He set up an exam table in a hotel room. Or maybe it was a school, because little kids were coming in there. I asked if they had to be in there, and he said yes, they had no place else to go.

Maybe this part of the dream was all about all those "little kids," i.e. the doctors so young they look children. And about the exposure.

But the sun is coming up, and a new day is drawing, with tennis at The Canoe Club, a dog to walk, and hopefully a nap before I make myself presentable, or as my mother used to say, get gussied up.