the first days.

Greetings from the Great White Way! I decided it might be a good idea to start a new blog as one way to keep in touch while being here in New York. I know most of you read The Milanese Exploit, so hopefully you will continue to read this one. In Milan, however, it was not as easy to keep in touch, so the blog was my main form of communication. Here it’s a different story. So just because I’m writing a blog doesn’t mean you get out of calling/writing/emailing me, and I will try to remember that on my end, too.

It’s been over a week since I’ve been here, but it definitely seems like longer. I pride myself on the fact that I’m quick to adapt, and I’ve found that after spending this short time here, I’m pretty well-adjusted. There has just been so much that has occurred in the last eleven days, so it’s been a little emotionally volatile for me.

First of all: I love my internship. For having so little idea of what I’d actually be doing at Manhattan Theatre Club before I came to New York, I am quite pleased with how this has worked out. The people are fantastic: it’s a really fun, young crowd that runs this multi-million dollar theatre company in the middle of Times Square, and I’m so excited that I get to be a part of it. Yesterday, we had a full-staff meeting (about 80 people) with introductions (the artistic director of twenty-some years, Lynne Meadow, is taking a year sabbatical and a well-known Broadway director named Daniel Sullivan is filling her spot for the time). It was really fitting for MTC: an interesting mixture of serious business and joking around.

My department (Development) has a lot of cool people as well. My bosses are pretty demanding--yet very nice--and they are willing to answer any and all questions that I have as I adjust into the position. Overall, my job consists of several different areas. Here’s a brief outline…

I manage the Patron Lounges at both our theatre—the Biltmore—and the New York City Center where we rent space for our smaller productions. These Patron Lounges are perks for those who give MTC a lot of money each year to be patrons. So, basically I handle all the scheduling, ordering, facilitating between the space and the company, and other random tasks.

I also speak with patrons on a day-to-day basis through the Patron Hotline where they can call to order and exchange tickets and make other various requests/demands. These people are the highest of the high when it comes to New York A-Listers. We’re talking Tom Brokaw, R.L. Stein, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies…the list goes on and on. For this part of the job, I have to learn this software application called Tessitura that is used by most large arts organizations to store patron info, book tickets, and perform everything else you could ever want. My head is still spinning from “Tess Training”, but it is a really useful tool that will become indispensable to me in the future. I am trying to learn it thoroughly so I don't look like an idiot when I talk to someone who makes more than the GDP of most Latin American countries.

I also do a variety of other tasks, from conducting patron research (part of my job is to know all about these people from their jobs to their kids to their interests...but it's okay: I can find SO much information about them on Google!) to creating auction letters and certificates (basically every New York foundation asks us to donate tickets to their black-tie event’s silent auction). I won’t bore you with the other things I do, which, being an intern, includes the obligatory occasional copy duty and phone duty at the front desk.

The office itself is pretty neat. It’s two floors of a large building and the floors are connected with a nifty open staircase in the middle. The 8^th floor holds reception and all of the studio spaces and the 9^th floor houses all of the offices. Everywhere you look on the walls hang large photo stills of most famous people you can imagine in plays they starred in at MTC. Right now, we are in rehearsals for our first play of the season, Mauritius, so I often see the actors when they are not in rehearsal and it’s pretty surreal. No one too famous in this show, but people you would know if you saw them from their roles in various TV shows and movies (Allison Pill, Bobby Cannavale, F. Murray Abraham). Other big casting agencies will rent space from us as well to use for auditions because we have a pretty sweet set-up, and in the past week I've been there while auditions for Les Mis and Wicked were taking place.

The other interns are great, too. We have intern lunches and get to go to a lot of free theatre events around the city. I have a feeling that we’ll be hanging out quite a bit in the future.

I have spent a lot of time when I’m not at work trying to explore the city and get my bearings. I’ve learned the subway routes pretty well just by going around. Ground Zero, the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Statue of Liberty, Union Square, Bryant Park, Soho, the Village…I’m making my way. Right now I’m living by the A train and the 1 train in Washington Heights (WAY up north on Manhattan). This is probably the part about NY that I am loving least right now. My apartment and building is nothing to look at, and by nothing to look at, I mean a bit dirty, noisy, and generally gross. The neighborhood is similar. But, that’s what I get for paying by the week, and I keep telling myself that Alex and I will find a place soon enough.

Speaking of which, he came into the city on Saturday and we started neighborhood shopping. For our price range, we’d like to live in Queens because it is a little bit cheaper but still safe. He is finished with his job in New Jersey tomorrow, so then he will come up to the city for a couple days and we will hunt more aggressively. I swear I will truly love this town once I get settled and have a place to call my own.

I met up with Laura Zeccardi (a Mac friend) this last weekend. She is going to grad school at NYU and lives in a dorm in a really nice area of Brooklyn. Since we are both new to the city, we went exploring, particularly in the Soho neighborhood, a really upscale, trendy area with a lot of bars and shopping. The next night I went out with a Waverly friend Cindy who was in town visiting some of her friends from Jersey. We went to an Ethiopian restaurant and then headed down to Little Italy (it took me back a bit).

Well, I should wrap up for now. Tomorrow I get to go to the invited dress rehearsal for staff for Mauritius, and there is a pre-show cocktail party at a bar nearby the Biltmore! Then, on Thursday the show opens for PREVIEWS. While open to the public, they will tweak things before all the big critics, Tony voters, etc. come. So, the Patron Lounge opens Thursday as well with me working it, so I have been scrambling to get everything ready for that.

I hope you all are well and have been enjoying the past couple weeks. I promise the future posts will be more thoughtful and reflective, I just got a little carried away with getting a whole bunch of info into the first one. I will try and post some pictures very soon of some things I have seen so far, but the internet connection at my apartment is very, very slow and spotty (we have to steal it, of course), so it might take awhile before those get up.