Vacation Memories (The United Nations trip-part 2)

(For those of you just joining this story, you can read part one here.)

When our bus rolled into New York city I could feel the city pulsing with life. I took one look at the tall buildings, the crowds, the traffic, the busy people, the sun light glinting off the thousands of windows, the signs, and I felt like I was home. For a kid who had spent the first ten years of his life in Detroit and then was forced to live in the country, first in Michigan and then in Virginia, New York was heaven to me. I was in love with everything about the place, well everything that I could see, of course they weren't about to take busloads of kids from out of state to the slums or to the rough neighborhoods of NYC, so we saw only the best parts of the city.

When we got to the hotel I found out that we were joining up with teenagers from Maine, Louisiana, and Nebraska. It was a pretty wide ranging group of kids and I remember loving that there were so many young people like me across the country. Our hotel was near the Wintergarden Theatre and I remember that this theatrical abortion was playing at the Wintergarden at the time:

I remember thinking, "Who would be dumb enough to shell out all that money to go see a bunch of guys who are not the Beatles sing Beatles songs?" But sure enough there were people dumb enough to go do that, just like in a few years people would be dumb enough to put down their hard earned cash so they could go see Starlight Express.

The people who sponsored the trip wanted us all to meet and hang out with kids from different states when we were in NYC so I had to room with a guy from Louisiana. He wasn't really my idea of a great roommate, he was a shade thick and he constantly complained about how much he hated New York and being around all those "Yankees." I finally told him that I loved the place and that if I could I'd live there all the time and could he please shut up or keep his complaints to himself.

Since I had a provincial dullard for a roommate and I had a gal who let me kiss on her and hold her hand, I ditched him when ever I could so I could hang with Cynthia and my friends Jeff and Heidi. We were an inseparable foursome that week, if we could manage it we would all eat together, sit together on the buses, sight see together, and attend all the UN functions together.

The focus of the trip was spending time in and learning about the United Nations and we spent most every day of that week in New York doing just that. We took tours of various parts of the building, heard lectures on UN related things, and we got to sit in the big conference room where they had all the names of the countries on the many desks. I got to sit at the Outer Mongolia desk, I was stoked. One day at the end of a lecture on economic theory by a Japanese diplomat they decided to let us ask questions. Some dude raised his hand and he asked if the diplomat thought that Japan and the US would ever get into another war. I could see the color drain from all the chaperone's faces when that kid asked his question and as the diplomat was laughing off the question but still trying to answer it I saw one of the chaperones leading the kid who asked the question out of the room by his ear. I took me a minute to make out who it was they were leading out, it was, wait for it, wait for it, my roommate from Louisiana. I never said anything to him about it, I figured he had suffered enough and that everyone else was going to make fun of him and I also thought that if he heard me making fun of him he might smother me or something in my sleep.

It was not all lectures and UN tours that week, we got to go on many sightseeing trips and we even went to a Broadway show. We got to see and go up in the Statue of Liberty, in those days I had no fear of heights and I remember loving the view from her crown. We got to see the Empire State building, in those days it was still a big deal. We went on trips to Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Saks. The Broadway play they took some of us to was The Wiz, others went to see Doug Henning's magic act on Broadway, and we had the worst seats in the house but I didn't give a shit, I was seeing a Broadway musical! We also got to go to Radio City Musical Hall where we got to see the Rockettes and some shitty boxing kangaroo movie starring Elliot Gould, during which young Cynthia grabbed my hand while I was kissing her and put it inside her blouse. Needless to say I was in heaven in the dark of Radio City Music Hall for a few minutes.

All in all it was a great and glorious week. I can still remember the sounds, the sights, the weather, how the food tasted, in short most everything about that trip. I remember how cool, temperature wise that is, and dark the hotel lobby was. I remember thinking how cool it was that the hotel had a mezzanine and that the sodas in the drink machines were the outlandish price of 75 cents each, I was used to 25 cent sodas. I can remember how the elevator smelled and how funny it was to see all us kids sitcking our heads out of the windows so we could talk back and forth without the adults hearing us.

When Friday rolled around I was sad to be leaving New York and all the friends from Nebraska, Maine, and Louisiana that I had made behind but I was also excited because us kids from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina were going to go to Niagra Falls and on into Canada and then swing back down through Gettysburg before heading back to Virginia. I still had another week of being with Cynthia and Jeff and Heidi and another week of not being around my awful cousins and crazy aunt.

To be continued...