First of all, I want to welcome you to New York. Despite what you may have heard, New Yorkers are the most generous, kind and passionate people on the planet earth and we are genuinely happy to have you experience us.
If you are lost: approach us and we will become your two-foot Uber.
If you are hungry: we will keep you from eating street pretzels that taste like four-hundred-year-old-charcoal-briquettes. We also recommend that you shy away from street hot dogs as they have the same consistency as a little league hardball.
If you are in Penn Station or the Port Authority, do not allow a vagrant to become your go-to valise carrier. Despite appearances, they do not work for Mayor DeBlasio's office.
New York is all about giving and showing off, so feel free to wander around Central Park or any one of our seventy-five thousand museums (like The Museum of Museums which is all about, well, museums. And yes, there is a Museum of Sex where exhibitions are called exhibitionists.)
If you want to take in a great basketball game, we suggest you wait until you get home, especially if you are from Cleveland. The Knicks and The Nets mean well, but it's kind of like having to sit through your four-year-olds' game in the Fisher Price League. The most suicides in New York do not happen on our forty-thousand bridges. They happen in the cheap seat at Madison Square Garden and The Barclays Center.
The same goes if you are an American League fan. The Yankees are like your ex-wife. Sometimes you can tolerate them, sometimes they remind you of who they were, and the rest of the time you wish they were dead.
We do have The Mets and on exhibition; there is Bartolo Colon who is the oldest-living, still-active pitcher in the history of the world. He actually lives at the Museum of Natural History so you can see him there as well.
Now, since we are doing SO much for you, we do have one request and it's a simple one.
Please stop dressing in flip flops, wicker sombreros, and their deranged-fashion-statement younger brother, cargo shorts, when you go to the theater.
For some reason, despite its high-priced tickets and sophistication, the Broadway theater is getting confused with Jones Beach on Memorial Day.
Frankly, sitting through three hours of The Crucible is hard enough, but having to look at your bunions and hairy toes is crossing the line.
We do encourage something here and it's called respect. We tend to care as much or more about the history of something that we do the thing itself. Even though I kidded the Yankees earlier, I am and will always be a hardcore, blue-blood fan as that is how I was raised.
Baseball is the torch of the heart that is passed from one generation. For me, it was the time spent uninterrupted with my peanut shell breaking dad. By the time we'd leave a game the husks would be up to our necks.
But nothing was sweeter than the pow wow of son-to-dad discourse that was held during those all too brief nine innings.
Every time that I return to the stadium I am more than likely communing with all the Casper the friendly ghosts of my past. In seconds I'm transformed back to a seven-year-old kid, the wind whistling through the gap in my mouth where my temporary resident teeth used to live, listening Red Barber or Mel Allen on the transistor radio, thrilled by every hit to the outfield that creates the illusion that it's a home run... only to watch it drop like a petered fireworks.
At any given moment, no one is their age in a ballpark. Sitting in every single seat is an enchanted or re-enchanted child.
Now, here the uniform is the actual uniform or like in most ballparks, you typically should dress in some kind of hometown color in order to properly represent.
This is not mandatory. And here, in this very moment, THIS is where the flip-flops, cargo shorts and wicker sombreros are indeed appropriate.
Knock yourself out. Spit all you want directly in the eye of the Anna Wintour angel of fashion.
But when you go to see a play, I'm begging you: don't go wearing something rotten (as in "disaster') that looks you need 911 help from Motel the tailor.
Be one of us. Respect our history the way that we do. We are not in your backyard drunk throwing frisbees to your hostile poodle, Fred. We are not in Walmart grabbing two-for-one slightly damaged socks from the discount bin. We are not at NASCAR recreating a childhood spent with Hot Wheels.
In this case, we ARE theater. And you bet your ass we are snobby about it.
Look, we're not perfect. Trump Towers is here, which is the Statue of Liberty of perversion.
We do really stupid, thoughtless things all the time, just like you do. We shoot people with automatic weapons and slash people in subway cars for sport, it seems.
And if we forget how horrible we can be, we have the New York Post to remind us every single day via their many blood-splattered decapitated headlines.
But when it comes to theater, for two or three hours we get to put all that in our rear view mirror and transcend while being genuinely inspired.
It's just something I cannot do wearing a Simpsons T-shirt while I suck down my Slurpee.