Wendy Wasserstein is one of the Pulitzer Prize winning American Playwrights that has had a play produced on the Broadway stage. The Heidi Chronicles opened at the off-Broadway company Playwrights Horizons in November of 1988 and then transferred over to Plymouth Theatre, now known as the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, on Broadway the following year in March of 1989. The show became an instant success with critics and the audiences loved it. It was popular with both men and women though many attempted to label it a chic script. Guests at some of the best hotels in Manhattan frequently include a trip to Broadway as part of their main trip agenda, and for those lucky individuals who were able to catch this play the Plymouth during its year and a half run were particularly lucky. In this growing age of musical oriented Broadway productions it becomes increasingly difficult for non-musical plays to get staged. And when they do, it can generally be taken as testimony to their overall quality and audience appeal.

The production was directed by Daniel J. Sullivan, who had also directed a workshop production of the Chronicles at the Seattle Repertory Theatre earlier in 1988. Sullivan directed both of the New York productions and had a great feel for how to stage Wasserstein’s work. Joan Allen starred as the original lead, whose character’s name was Heidi Holland. The production also featured Peter Friedman and Boyd Gaines, with Sarah Jessica Parker playing some of the parts in the Playwrights Horizons production. Cynthia Nixon assumed those roles when it was transferred to the Broadway stage. Other actors who appeared in this early production include Brooke Adams, Tony Shalhoub, Christine Lahti, David Hyde Pierce and Mary McDonnell. This is another great aspect of the New York stage, which is that many of the greatest and most famous actors are attracted to these productions and tourists are frequently inclined to choose a production based on the famous actor who is staring in it.

You know, everyone associates New York with a lot of theatres, right? Well, that’s true of course, but do you know what else New York has a lot of, I mean besides great restaurants and clubs and stuff? It has a lot of zoos. That’s right, I said zoos. Or at least it seemed that way to me when I was there with my family last year. I noticed this when we were in the Bronx and were going to go to the botanical garden. We got lost, like we always tend to do and really got an overall tour of the Bronx that day, but one of the things we found was the zoo.

So, we stopped in and decided to make the Bronx Zoo our destination for the day. It’s funny how my parents can make almost any accident seem like it happened on purpose. Wait a minute, maybe that’s there trick. We drove around for so long that maybe my sister and I were just happy to be anywhere because normally she didn’t like going to zoos, but that day she was just happy to get out of the car and didn’t complain. I think I’m on to something here.

Anyway, the next day my dad and I decided we wanted to go to the Central Park Zoo, which was already on the plan. My mom and sister wanted to go shopping so we had breakfast at the hotel café and went our separate ways. Wait a minute, why would my dad purposely want to go to two zoos two days in a row? I mean, we loved them but my mom and sister don’t. Maybe I was wrong and they really do just make a lot of mistakes and get lost a lot. Anyway, the Central Park Zoo is really cool and we had a great time there. I really liked the Polar Circle with the bears and penguins. I also liked the monkeys though, they’re almost always my favorite. My dad likes big cats, and he really liked the leopard exhibit.

While you are staying in a hotel in San Francisco www.hotelsanfrancisco.com you may want to spend part of a day or night walking around Chinatown. There is a large Chinese population in San Francisco and the Chinatown area is like a celebration of an ornate community. This Chinatown in San Francisco is the largest Chinese communities out side of Asia and is the oldest Chinatown in the United States. It was originally established in 1840 and is has always been a very important for the Chinese immigrants and influential in the history of our country. This is were it starts for many Chinese immigrants and it is a well visited tourist attraction. In fact, there are more visitors to Chinatown each year than to the Golden Gate Bridge.

There are some influential people who have come from Chinatown such as Russell Leong and Amy Tan who, together, wrote The Joy Luck Club. Growing up in Chinatown gave many experiences in life that contributed greatly to their writing. There is also the Chinese Six Companies, which an association that acts as an umbrella to the Chinese community across the country. They have their head quarters in San Francisco’s Chinatown. If you have come to Chinatown for some great Chinese food than you should know that this is were recipes of the more westernized cuisine came from this part of the country. Some of the restaurants have been featured on cooking shows including Martin Yan’s.

There is, of course, the use of Chinatown as a back drop for the entertainment industry. You can see some shots of the area in movies like Big Trouble in Little China which stars Kurt Russell and The Pursuit of Happiness starring Will Smith. Grand Avenue is a great place to wonder through with lots of shops and restaurants.

This is the metaphor that would give birth to love, just like Milan Kundera predicted.  Or wrote without intentionally predicted.  Would it be better to say narrated?  If he were narrating our lives, if he were the author, and he continued to deny his own authority, then how would we ultimately write ourselves?  My fear was always one of repetition, or rather, afraid of repeating anything.  This is because I was born in a time when the generation before me built a set of values that favored repetitions of work in order to replicate lives of fathers, and these constructions were always falling apart, revealing their cracks everywhere we would look.

I met her in a state I was not born in, a state of both panic and delirium.  Delirium would come to signify that most pleasant forgetting for both of us, and something we would pursue almost to madness.  Panic would drive us there, and delirium offers its own sweet rewards.  In Singapore, eating here had the power to change our lives, and not simply or subtly, but completely, because it was always at the beginning of a night that ended much too late.  At the time, we didn’t think it was an escape from history, but it certainly wasn’t a history lesson we would gladly speak out loud.

There were very few times that talking would leave me breathless to a point where I could not do anything else.  But she did ask, during one dinner, if I had considered how the repetitions of the fathers lead to how we learned to love?  At the time, I thought it was a ridiculous idea, or at least a very uncomfortable one, and nothing to talk about on a night we were playing in.  Do we play in history like a great sandbox?  Or is it possible that we play in it like a sandbox without realizing it’s an ocean that is losing its own grip on the very forces that keep water molecules together?  And this unbearable lightness may not be the beginning of our troubles at all, but the end, and that the end of troubles is also the end of love?

It doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to convince me that a fleeting moment can turn into the ride of a lifetime.  Sometimes these things have to be taken slowly, where you have to just let yourself get caught up in the whirlwind that’s starting to form.  Other times, I don’t know how it happens, but I know it happens, at other times you can see it open up in front of you, and with a little finesse you can just jump in and the ride is suddenly revealing itself as being totally dependent on you.  It’s a hard line to negotiate, and if you miss the moment forever, you have to resign yourself to quiet desperation, but if you jump when it’s not the time to jump, that can be even worse.

I love a great Italian restaurant, and although I’m perfectly at ease eating Italian in Italy, I like it better in other places.  I like the people in the restaurants in Italy, and the food is probably more fantastic there than anywhere, but I feel like that’s cheating.  To recreate a cuisine far away from your homeland is the real test of a great cook, and it’s also a nice way to think about how culture develops and travels around the world.  So I’m in Singapore, enjoying pasta fagioli, and am happily resigned to giving into the moment and letting it pass.

There is a sense for the good life here that you don’t really see anywhere else in the world.  The city’s got a remarkable capacity for a truly cosmopolitan outlook, and the centuries of working with other cultures in trade has paid off in terms of exchange of ideas.  There are places here where it seems as though the best part of the world’s religions and philosophies are all mixed together, with no contradiction.  I am sitting at a table.  There are people around me that I like.  I have a story to tell, and I love to tell stories, and I like to talk too loud.  At this moment, things stop suddenly, and I decide to keep my mouth shut.

I would tell whoever might ask that the reason I was there was for my health, which is true enough in some respects.  People do go to Malta for their health, now and in earlier days, to help improve their constitution.  I needed help with my constitution, because it was in a state of desolation.  It struck me fairly early on that the others who came here before me may have been suffering from the same malady, even though most of them did not know you, most likely.  I like the idea of rocky landscapes, and endless water, along with luxurious hotels.  Malta has a strong and healthy supply of all of these.

I imagined that surrounding myself with healthy things might make me healthy by osmosis, or perhaps it might even be peer pressure, or perhaps my heartache would just give up and leave out of boredom.  But I was only halfway through a small volume of poems by Dun Karm when I started to understand that the peculiar malaise from a loss in love leads to a state of boredom that is sufficient and necessary to hearing the sounds of the sea.

I would have preferred to think that I had come here to find myself alone, and from that position I could indulge in my own sadness in order to throw it off of my shoulders once and for all.  Something in the air, and something else in the water, mix to make a most peculiar magic.  I understand the things that move the great poet of Malta, and sometimes in solitude I can understand the decision to move from writing in Italian to Maltese.  This was a shift for him, a change in how he saw the world, and an acceptance of where he was.  It was also an invitation to allow this magic to enter and begin to work its healing powers.

I was so close to Seattle, being in Vancouver, I decided to spend a day to check the city out; Seattle was on my list of places to visit, so it wasn’t too hard to convince myself. I was really excited about seeing what this Pacific-Northwest scene was all about. I took a hopper flight from Vancouver and then took a quick shuttle from the airport to the hotel I booked on line at this site for Seattle hotels:, and managed to get a great deal.

I dropped off my bags and headed down to the Pike’s Place Market to see the famous flying fish (fish being tossed by fishmongers to other fishmongers over customers heads) and across the street I found this fantastic place to eat lunch; one of the fishmongers told me about Matt’s restaurant and how most tourist would never know it’s there, but that Matt’s serves the best meals. He was right! This small restaurant had a wonderful selection of local micro-brews and the best tuna melt sandwich I’d ever had.

After lunch, I headed to the Seattle Center, which is where the Space Needle is located and the Experience Music Project. I was some what disappointed with the shuttle system that take’s people from Macy’s to the Seattle Center, it did only take 5 minutes and it cost $2.00 and that’s it’s only purpose. There’s no other stops it makes, what a waste. As I stepped off the useless monorail, I headed into the EMP to experience the Seattle grunge scene and bow down to Jimi Hendrix; there was an entire room dedicated to him! I really enjoyed the jam session room, I got to rock out on all kinds of electric instruments. EMP compared to the Cleavland’s ‘Rock Hall of Fame’, the latter is supreme, but the EMP was worth a visit.

While at the Seattle Center, I took a quick trip through the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, which was exhilarating to say the least. The model of the Death Star was great and it even played the Emperor’s March and got all lit up if I pushed a button. There were some Japanese toy robots on display and those were awesome. I found this museum better than the EMP. Maybe it’s because I’m bias, I am after all a huge George Lucas fan.

My great aunt Viva lived in West Palm Beach, Florida when I was a child. She just recently moved here to Tucson, Arizona to be closer to her family though she spent most of her adult life in Florida where she lived with her husband. They never had any children and he died almost twenty years ago now. He had already passed when we visited her though I can’t say how long it had been. That was a great summer though. My parents decided to rent one of those large RV motor homes and we drove all over the place, or so it seemed at the time.

We stopped at the Grand Canyon, which oddly we had never before been to. I really can’t remember all of the stops we made, but I certainly remember endless days of sitting in the back of that RV playing rummy with my mom and sister while miles of dry flat scenery unfolded behind us. The RV seemed like a great way to view the country as we traveled but in actuality the trip wasn’t planned out well. We didn’t have time to really explore the land as we traveled it was just non-stop driving in a hurry to reach our destination. I did enjoy the Grand Canyon, but we weren’t there very long, basically just long enough to take pictures of us looking out over it to prove we were there. I also have strong memories have staying at our aunt’s, which was the highlight of the trip. There was a great hotel in West Palm Beach that had an RV hook up lot right on the property.

West Palm Beach is a beautiful city on the coast of Florida and every day was fabulous to wake up to. We went to the ocean every morning and I remember being awed by its vastness. Of course I knew the ocean was that large but seeing it up close felt like I was on the verge of another world. We had dinner one night at an Italian restaurant called Il Bellagio and the food was fantastic. I don’t remember what everyone else had but I had a pesto pizza. In fact, I think that’s what it was called, Pizza Pesto. My sister had some delicious pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts, spinach and garlic but I don’t remember what it was called. We ate here the night before we left and that’s when I realized the best part of traveling in an RV, we got to enjoy the leftovers the next day on the road.

I was in Los Angeles in 1991 after having returned to the area from Boston. I had just graduated college and I remember thinking I had the world in my hands. That first year back was really almost magical. My boyfriend Matt was still there and his band was getting gigs in local clubs. He was singer songwriter who also played the keyboards and during my time in Massachusetts he would often complain about his band and their lack of commitment and tendency toward partying. However, the year I returned they all really seemed to have it together and were playing out quite frequently. One night, shortly after I arrived in town I decided to go see them play and they opened up for a band called Mazzy Star.

The show happened in a club I had only been to a couple of times and I can’t remember its name. It was off of Sunset and close to a few local hotels and a deli we always used to go to. That’s as much as I can remember now, but the point is how incredibly great Mazzy Star was. I didn’t even know who they were, well they weren’t all that famous at the time. In fact, I don’t think they were even nationally known. It was right around the time their first album came out and I’m not sure the show was before or after it did. I was blown away though. Oh, and I almost bumped into Hope Sandoval as I was coming out of the rest room. She was just standing there, you know, like a regular person talking to a couple of guys that worked at the club.

So I was walking out of the bathroom and turned back for a moment. I almost plowed right into her when I turned back around and just said, “Oops, excuse me.” She just smiled and shook her head like it wasn’t a problem. Then she turned back to the guy who was talking. I didn’t even know who it was until I sat back down and my friend Sara, who had come with me, told me. I didn’t really think anything about it until later when she was performing. I was stunned. She seemed so small and quiet offstage and dang, she turned into this amazing charismatic singer. It’s not that she was wild or crazy onstage, she just drew in everyone’s attention and had a great voice that I wouldn’t have imagined to come out of her. Yes, that was a great year.

The world can be a very beautiful place, especially where there are lovely beaches, gorgeous Miami luxury hotels, and a night life that drives with a manic and exciting pulse.  Time spent here always seems short, like all vacations would, and it’s easy to arrive, and so difficult to leave.  But it’s a very difficult road for a supermodel who is making a move into live professional DJing.  All of these elements are coming together in a spectacular way, to help heat up your nights in one of the country’s most exciting cities.  Miami really does have it all, and when it seems like it’s about to run out, it goes and gets some more.

There are always plenty of live events to see in town.  There are many different shows for cable, television, and internet that are made here on the beaches of Miami, showing the world the incredible night scenes, and the gorgeous days that have parties in the sun, so there are always fantastic new groups coming into town.  There are also plenty of kitschy revivals coming through here as well, and it’s often a genuine smorgasbord of entertainment, except it’s not exclusively Swedish!  One of the hottest acts coming to town this year, to make Miami hotter than hot is DJ Sophia Lin.

She also goes by the name DJ Hustle-Lin, which is a play on words that plays on the meaning of words in a few different ways, but it’s very playfully done.  This career demonstrates the power of fortitude, and speaks of struggle, and winning against all odds to come out swinging.  She has almost always been in the spotlight, going from bikini model to spokesmodel to actor, and she’s always had a thing for music.  So when she finished her real estate degree, she found herself at a crossroads, one of those moments where your life can change forever, if you decide to go the right direction.  Thankfully, she took the fork at the road, and that has made all the difference.