Sunday Night in East Harlem: Elizardi Castro's Made in Puerto Rico at The Poet's Den Theater and Gallery

(Video courtesy BoricuaRick)

Art Pants Company releases the web series Williamsburg 30-Second Mystery Theatre: The Complete First Season

Williamsburg 30-Second Mystery Theatre

Friday Night in the East Village: The Tony Show presents Open Mic at UCBeast

(Video courtesy Atticus Alien)

Friday Night in Park Slope: Piper Theatre presents "The Miser" outdoors at the Old Stone House

Tonight in Park Slope, we saw a phenomenal and extraordinarily professional production of Molière's The Miser put on by the Piper Theatre outside the Old Stone House. Cleverly adapted and directed by Welker White, this was a remarkably funny and relevant version of this classic farce, updating the satiric comedy to the 21st century.

We see a lot of outdoor theater in parks around the city (avoiding the big productions at Central Park's Delacorte Theatre, which we know are great, due to our allergy to waiting on line). Most have to begin early because they have no artificial lighting and you want the audience to be able to see the action. The Piper Theatre's high production values gave them the advantage of professional lighting, so tonight's performance didn't begin until after 8:30 p.m. (making our dumbphone camera kind of useless).

The lighting was only one example of the top-notch production values on display tonight: a highly effective sound system, a real inside-theater set, and the effect of watching a play indoors. While this takes away some of the fun of having the action going around all around you, it's closer to the experience of being in a real theater.

Welker White, the director, has worked as a film, stage and TV actress with some of the top directors and although she only last year received her MFA in Directing from Brooklyn College, we're pretty sure this belated academic credential was didn't mean she could have taught some of the graduate courses she'd taken at BC. Tonight's production was evidence that she's already an experienced and accomplished director.

Particularly brilliant was her choice, in adapting Molière, to combine both contemporary elements (Clèante's iPod and addiction to fashion blogs are just two examples) and those from the play's 1668 debut (when the playwright himself played the title character, Harpagon) -- and then adding just a soupçon of funny fourth-wall-breaking references, like Harpagon's inveighing against the noisy gangsta teens in the playground and the pampered Park Slope tots "and their lesbian mothers." If it sounds like it wouldn't cohere, you're wrong: everything worked perfectly in this well-oiled machine.

Which is not to say that the play felt slick. Still, this felt like one of the few outdoor plays we've seen that was seamlessly ready for prime-time. For one thing, the lead actor, Damian Young (Harpagon), was utterly in control all the time. The role is a tricky one; despite his almost inhuman greed and utter disregard for the feelings of his son and daughter, much less anyone else, he's got to appear simultaneously a ridiculous buffoon, an instrument of real (if banal) evil, and at least somewhat sympathetic, if not endearing. In his modulated virtuoso performance, Young strikes all the right notes.

He's helped by a very strong supporting cast, especially stage veteran Jan Leslie Harding as Frosine, the matchmaker -- here played as a combination of the unctuous real estate broker and the kind of artsy older woman who puts a pencil in her hairbun -- who serves as Harpagon's foil, enabler, ally and manipulator. The unfortunate kids of the miser who are being kept from their true loves by his plans for mercenary marriages for the entire family are played with wonderful flair by Todd C. Bartels as the trend-obsessed Clèante and Hannah Jane McMurray as the hapless, romantic Elise.

David Bachman probably gets the most laughs as LaFleche and especially as Jacques, the miser's coachman cum cook. With the exaggerated French accent of a children's cartoon character, he is such an adept physical comedian that he comes close to stealing his scenes. But the other actors do manage to match him, and the laughs keep coming quickly, the key to a high-functioning farce.

But all the actors here were memorable: Gilbert Cruz as both Simon and a comic-"Law and Order" style police commissioner; Zac Hoogendyk as an earnest yet sarcastic Valere; Alice Winslow as the sweet but distracted Mariane; Tom Tammi as a hearty and jovial Anselme, and the younger actors playing the miser's put-upon, despondent, passive-aggressive servants.

The Piper Theatre production of The Miser is not just a highly entertaining, very funny farce, but it also kept us thinking about our present economic situation, like the line that asks who's worse: the borrowers who take out enormous loans they can't possibly pay back or the greedy lenders who give them the money with the complete awareness that these people will default?

In the end, the old curmudgeonly miser here and his children and their loves and everyone else get a joyously happy ending, made more even upbeat by the cast's boisterous final musical number. If only the greed of the past decades would end so happily! We're grateful to the Piper Theatre and the Old Stone House for giving us this wonderful evening in the theater.

Saturday Afternoon in Prospect Park: The Bent Quill Players present Molière's "A Doctor in Spite of Himself" at the Music Pagoda

This afternoon we were lucky enough to see The Bent Quill Players' boisterously funny production of Molière's A Doctor in Spite of Himself at the Music Pagoda at Prospect Park. Directed by Eli Thacker Taylor and featuring a talented cast, the play caused us to laugh out loud at least half a dozen times, and we're normally a lot more dour.

This was the fifth play we've seen at the Music Pagoda in the past couple of years, and it's a wonderful setting, leafy and comfortable and low-key. Today there was little of the noise competition from elsewhere we've noticed in the past (just a couple of times we heard the dim hum of a motorized scooter).

It's best to bring a blanket or towel to sit on, because the ground isn't that grassy in the best of times, and we'd suggest leaving early to give yourself enough time to find the Music Pagoda; the signs aren't that clear, even when you locate the place on the park map, and as many times as we've been here, we always manage to make at least one wrong move and have to backtrack on the paths to the site.

Last year we saw our first Bent Quill Players production, in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights, where they presented Susanna Centlivre's 1709 comedy The Busybody, which was absolutely delightful. Today's Molière play featured the same high-quality acting and fast-paced and innovative direction, with more accomplished musical accompaniment and probably more hearty laughs. (Interestingly, Centlivre wrote her own take on Le Médecin Malgré Lui, titled Love's Contrivance, so obviously the two playwrights share similar sensibilities.)

As the Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature notes in its entry on "comedy of intrigue":

The Doctor in Spite of Himself [1666], which begins as a farce based on the simple joke of mistaking the ne'er-do-well woodcutter Sganarelle for a doctor, gradually becomes a satire on learned pretension and bourgeois credulity as Sganarelle fulfills his role as a doctor with great success. The Doctor in Spite of Himself, which begins as a farce based on the simple joke of mistaking the ne'er-do-well woodcutter Sganarelle for a doctor, gradually becomes a satire on learned pretension and bourgeois credulity as Sganarelle fulfills his role as a doctor with great success.

The Bent Quill Players used Aurand Harris's sharpened 1968 adaptation of Moliere's play in a cleverly directed production. Like all the other plays we've seen at the Music Pagoda, they employed both the raised stage of the pagoda itself and the space in front of it (and around the sides, especially well-used during fast-paced, hilarious chase scenes). The well-crafted and whimsical original music was created by Patrick Metzger, who on banjo was joined by Tamara Jaton on violin and Curtis McMurtry on saxophone, to provide some moments that perfectly highlighted the comic business of the actors.

We were impressed with the black, white and gray costume design of company co-founder Meaghan Cross as well as the cleverness of the props, which were farcical and outlandish enough to deflect and lighten what might otherwise be somewhat uncomfortable moments for an audience sensitive to physical violence in general and spousal abuse in particular.

The comedy works on several levels, most broadly as slapstick farce (what the little kids can appreciate) as well as quite sophisticated and still sharply relevant satire, as Sganarelle's delicious commentary on his success as a Catch-Me-If-You-Can medical fraud (here in another translation):

I find it the best of trades; for, whether we are right or wrong, we are paid equally well. We are never responsible for the bad work, and we cut away as we please in the stuff we work on. A shoe maker in making shoes can't spoil a scrap of leather without having to pay for it, but we can spoil a man without paying one farthing for the damage done. The blunders are not ours, and the fault is always that of the dead man. In short, the best part of this profession is, that there exists among the dead an honesty, a discretion that nothing can surpass; and never as yet has one been known to complain of the doctor who had killed him.

Molière himself played this part, and today Alessandro King gave a wonderfully modulated performance as the increasingly less reluctant and more assured fake physician, managing to seem at once the dopey, lazy woodcutter and the sly trickster who gets the better of his social betters and everyone else foolish or desperate enough to believe in him while he convincingly plays both the woman-chasing lout and the cupid reuniting thwarted young lovers. Like many of the performances, King's was both broadly comic and surprisingly touching.

The ensemble of Meaghan Cross, Norah Elise Johnson and Katharine Tool in their French chambermaid outfits and Owen Scott as a kind of slightly sinister Cabaretesque MC did yeoman's duty keeping the somewhat loose plot strands together. Leah Weingart, as Martine, Sganarelle's wife who is as much a trickster and ultimately a softy as her good-natured husband, seemed simultaneously feisty and, in the end, well worth giving up fantasy for.

Last year, in The Busybody, Nevan Scott expertly played the father of the ingenue, determined to keep her from marrying her true love in favor of a more wealthy potential son-in-law. Here he employs a slightly more intelligent version of the same character type in his portrayal of Geronte, keeping apart his daughter Lucinde (a charming, insouciant faker of muteness, Jillian Nicole Barrels) and her stolid, handsome young boyfriend, played deftly by Nathan Wiley. All three actors prove surprisingly good at physical comedy, as does the entire cast, as the play turns from satire to Keystone Kops-style hijinks.

Hico Oshiro as the excitable Lucas and Marri J. Wright as Valere are the pair of Geronte's hyper-excitable servants who forcefully enlist Sganarelle into the medical profession, and in the role of Jacqueline, Lucas's wife and the object of Sganarelle's lust, the droll Giverny Petitmerment is clearly the only one onstage who's clear-headed and intelligent enough to understand exactly what's going on at any one time. Eli Thacker Taylor's direction

Compared to Molière's more trenchant "major" comedies, like The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The School for Wives or The Imaginary Invalid (which we saw a great production of way back in 1980 right here in Park Slope, in one of the Seventh Avenue churches, with our friend the playwright Judd Lear Silverman playing Cleante), some might consider A Doctor in Spite of Himself to be a slightly lesser effort.

We've never thought so (we liked the play enough so that in 2002 when we were asked to write -- for a cool thousand dollars -- an autobiographical essay for Contemporary Authors, we called it "A Writer in Spite of Myself"), and today in Prospect Park, under Eli Thacker Taylor's expert and multi-layered direction, the Bent Quill Players had us even more convinced that presented right, it's a first-rate comedy of its time, and yeah, of our own time, too.

If you can get to Prospect Park tomorrow (Sunday, May 1), you too can enjoy the fun of this classic French comedy, which is appropriate for all ages -- the kids around us were really entertained by it -- at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. It will also be playing next Friday, May 6, at 4 p.m. and next Saturday, May 7, at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Late Saturday Afternoon in Long Island City: Curious Frog Theatre Company presents Aristophanes' "Plutus" at Queensbridge Park

We saw a really nice production of Aristophanes' Plutus late this afternoon in Queensbridge Park. Presented by the Curious Frog Theatre Company, which also has been staging the Romeo and Juliet we enjoyed last Sunday in Prospect Park, the production did a good job of making an enjoyable 100 minutes out of what we've always thought Aristophanes' least funny and interesting comedy.

Unlike Lysistrata - which we've loved teaching the last three spring semesters at the School of Visual Arts - or The Clouds or The Frogs or his other comedies, in this late play, produced three years before his death, Aristophanes is not commenting on a current situation in Athens or satirizing a particular individual or event. Plutus is kind of an allegory about wealth. Critics classify it as the only extant ample of ancient Greek "middle comedy," between the "old comedy" plays listed above and the later "new comedy."

We'd read the play and found it pretty boring, so we were interested to see what Curious Frog could do with this rarely-produced comedy (as near as we can tell via a New York Times search, it hasn't been offered in the city since 1963, when an organization called the Group of Ancient Drama, Inc., presented it at the Fashion Institute of Technology).

As it turned out, Curious Frog managed to make Plutus both surprisingly fast-moving and relevant with a skillful seven-person ensemble directed by Whitney Aronson performingly engergetically in a beautiful setting.

The script by written by Whitney Aronson and Reid Aronson, while maintaining the basic storyline, employed everyday language, contemporary references and broad humor. It was already over the top in ancient Greece - the big emphasis on flatulence for laughs - but the adaptation and the choices made in the play definitely improved Plutus from what we can recall numbed us on the printed page.

As the somewhat dense Chremylus and his much smarter and wittier slave Cario, Derby Thomas and Jodie Pfau had some wonderful bits of business and worked off each other effectively, whether they were bantering or doing slapstick. Like the other talented actors, they sometimes directly addressed the audience and broke character as they acknowledged the artificial nature of the farcical situations. They worked really well in tandem and in scenes with the other characters, most of whom played multiple roles as well as served as the chorus.

Some things were played for pure slapstick. Beforehand, the audience were shown YAY and BOO signs, and they were employed cleverly at moments. There was a parody of Don McLean's "American Pie" (with a big sheet of the most relevant lyrics for us to sing along with) and parodies of other pop songs like "The Chapel of Love."

There were echoes of burlesque dancing and vaudeville routines, references to Bernie Madoff (given a Greek name) and some moments that were just so slapsticky-absurd that the audience couldn't help laughing.

These included shtick like the times Serge Castillo - who played Blepsidmus, Mercury and the Honest Man with different comic accents - stormed off ranting in Spanish in response to another character. (He's good on the guitar, too.)

Or when Nick Maccarone (who was very good in Romeo and Juliet, which will play one last time tomorrow in Astoria Park at 4 p.m.), lumbered maniacally about as the Dishonest Man with a Groucho mustache and a carrot-Pinocchio nose.

As the blind god of wealth Plutus, Allen Sermonia (whom we also admired in R&J) succeeded in being funny without skirting the offensiveness of milking visual impairment unduly; of course Plutus is also smelly and filthy (it's still okay to make fun of that as much as you can!), and after his cure, Sermonia mocks the over-the-top triumphalism of contemporary athletes.

Lauren Ashley Smith was probably the most charming in the cast, light and ingratating whether she was Chremylus' daffy wife or Cassandra or the Oracle, and as the Chorus's lead, she had a sweet singing voice - actually the whole cast was pretty tuneful.

Larissa Dzegar proved so versatile that it took us a long time to realize that this actress was both the goddess Poverty - which the hapless Chremylus and his entourage finally learn is a necessary spur to human progress and happiness - and the hysterically funny Old Woman (picture Estelle Getty in Golden Girls talking like Melina Mercouri) reacting to her abandonment by her young airhead boyfriend, Nick Maccarone.

The humor in Aristophanes is not subtle, and the Curious Frog company took advantage of that in their delivery, the musical numbers and their stage business. We were also impressed with the way they gracefully and unobtrusively made changes in the set. And there's actually woven into the play a final short lecture, complete with flip chart, by the god Mercury (Serge Castillo), relevant to our current financial near(?)-disaster.

This was definitely a Plutus for the Great Recession, and far better than we expected from our experience reading Aristophanes' final comedy. Again, we were happy to give a contribution into one of the Greek-themed (like a diner "We Are Happy to Serve You" coffee container) containers used as props and then as a collection plate. We hope Curious Frog will return with two new productions as good as the ones they performed brilliantly this summer.

We're grateful to Curious Frog Theatre Company and to the MTA for the weekend subway constuction that made our trip from Williamsburg to Queensbridge Park such a snap, just 4 stops on the G train and then a shuttle bus took us back and forth - only three passengers each time - to the F train Queensbridge stop not far away from our destination. A lot better than the usual schlep!

Thursday Night in Bay Ridge: "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" at the Narrows Botanical Gardens

This evening we moseyed over to Bay Ridge to a green spot that didn't exist - was basically a (literal) dump - when we were growing up. Now it's a little oasis, the Narrows Botanical Gardens, where we went back to that time of our early twenties and New York City's nadir with a free showing of the 1975 film of Neil Simon's recession-relevant comedy The Prisoner of Second Avenue.

It was great to be back in what for us seems so familiar. Although we didn't grow up close to Bay Ridge, it always felt like the neighborhood we lived in. Non-brownstone Broooklyn may never be as pretty as where the writers, artists and musicians are, but for us, it's home, a place of comfort.

But not comfort stations. So we were smart to get off the G train and Fulton Street and make a pit stop at the Atlantic Terminal before taking the D and R trains to Bay Ridge Avenue, because there wasn't a working bathroom in sight at the Narrows Botanic Gardens or the nearby beautiful pier or Owl Creek Park. We wondered what other older people, and little kids, do.

This is obviously a sign of our age, but the crowd at the movie had as many people over 45 as it did younger ones. The weird thing seems to be that the younger the crowd, the more bathrooms supplied by the local park. The pool parties at East River State Park seem to have plenty of facilities, though to be fair, they do serve a lot of beer.

Okay, that's our bathroom rant. We got off the R train and waited for either the B1 or B9 bus to take us to Shore Boulevard. It was nice to see the kind of block we remember in the old Bay Ridge of our youth, when they still taught Norwegian to the girls at Bay Ridge High School and we walked around in our underwear at Fort Hamilton for our draft physical. (No connection between the two events.)

For some great Bay Ridge online tours, go to Kevin Walsh's indispensible Forgotten New York for "Leifs That Are Green" and "Bay Ridge Fever."

Getting off the bus by Xaverian High School, we were amazed by the Narrows Botanical Gardens. The prose on its website description is a little too fuchsia for us, but we agree with its thrust:

Since 1995, this verdant collection of hills, pathways, and gorgeous harbor views has blossomed into a lush conservatory of nature’s beauty and brilliance, providing an unequaled opportunity to stroll amid fragrant blossoms bustling with butterflies, a bubbling brook where turtles sun on the rocks, majestic Redwood trees that seem to touch the sky, and delicate orchids growing wild in a Native Plant Garden. Linger at our city’s only roadside lily pond, or promenade through the towering Linden Tree Allée. Snap portraits at the picturesque Rock Wall bench, or find meditative calm in the Zen Garden. . .

And, when you have visited the Narrows Botanical Gardens, strolled its pathways and smelled its roses, you will be amazed to learn it is wholly created by, built by, and nurtured and maintained by volunteers, making the Narrows Botanical Gardens one of the largest community gardens in our great City of New York.

This used to be a vast wasteland, a no-person's land, if we recall correctly from the bad old days.

A Russian sign stood in this little garden. We wonder what it says.

It's a big change, thanks to the volunteers who must have put in hours and weeks of hard work.

They were just setting up the screen when we arrived in the meadow.

The crowd ended up fairly small for the large meadow, maybe 100-125 or so. (Oddly, we learned about this event from the hipster-centric L Magazine, which has a suspiciously large number of Bay Ridge events or references, so we assume a staffer lives around here.)

There was a stand selling refreshments.

Despite the demographic changes, this is still the Brooklyn we grew up in: New York City as small-town America. Like these people looking out at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

The book cover from our forthcoming Autumn in Brooklyn also features the bridge, which opened when we were 13.

We had time to walk on the nearby pier.

Strollers (the kind with two legs) co-existed with strollers containing tots, fishermen, and people in wheelchairs,

on skateboards, skates, scooters

and bikes - including a little girl whose training wheels have just come off.

"Vamos, vamos," her dad encouraged her, reminding us of how Grandpa Herb guided us on our two-wheeler in an empty Rockaway parking lot (back at the bungalow court we were still unsteady enough to collide with an old man in his walker).

On our way to Owl's Head Park, boys appeared to be playing the dozens in Arabic. We moved on.

We walked around the park we last encountered in a mound of 1970s snow and watched a little of girls' soccer.

Back at the botanical gardens, they took their time for the film to start, selling 50/50 raffle tickets and handing out the flyer with the gardens' events (this was the last of three summer films, but there are art shows coming up and a harvest festival and Halloween canine costume contest in the fall).

"What movie is playing tonight?" said a passing woman of a certain age with two little girls.

"The Prisoner of Second Avenue, the 1970s Neil Simon comedy," we said.

"Oh, the one with Peter Falk. . . Sorry, girls, this is a picture for grown-ups, not kids," she told her charges.

Actually, Peter Falk starred in the Broadway production, but we understood her mistake.

To be honest, we can't recall if we saw the film of The Prisoner of Second Avenue in a theater or not. When it came out, we were in our second of four semesters in Brooklyn College's nascent MFA in creative writing program and were teaching our first freshman comp class downtown at LIU right after our Tuesday/Thursday BC fiction workshops.

But we saw it later on TV for sure and reread it in the mid-1990s, when we were working as a staff attorney at the Center for Governmental Responsibility in Gainesville, Florida. We contributed one of the 16 essays (ours is on Simon's gay characters) to the 1997 Neil Simon: A Casebook, edited by Gary Konas, and in researching it, so we read all of Simon's plays to date, including The Prisoner of Second Avenue.

Surprisingly, while it evokes another era and has a sitcom-ish feel, the work doesn't seem as dated as we thought it might. It's aged better than some of Simon's earlier comedies.

Just yesterday, the New York Times featured a review of the play, "Downsized Before There Was a Word for It," in which Charles Isherwood noted that the current Berkshire Theater Festival production doesn't seem so outdated:

There are no jobs for 47-year-old men,” wails the newly and miserably unemployed Mel Edison in Neil Simon’s temper-tantrum comedy “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.” The plaintive cry elicits robust chuckles of sympathy from audiences at the Berkshire Theater Festival here, where this play from 1971 has been revived during our own summer of seething economic angst.

“Is the whole world going out of business?” moans Mel’s equally beleaguered wife, Edna, when she too is faced with sudden job loss.

Boy, do we feel your pain, Mel and Edna. The trials endured by this middle-class Manhattan couple, portrayed with keening intensity by the talented actors Stephen DeRosa and Veanne Cox, strike a distinctly contemporary chord. Noisy neighbors, wailing sirens, burglaries and fridges on the fritz may be the wallpaper of urban-nightmare stories from the 1970s, but the larger troubles Mel and Edna face have a potently topical punch in this timely revival, directed by Warner Shook. As the nerve-rattling struggles of the Edisons remind us, green shoots of hope can be hard to discern when the world around you seems like a blasted heath.

Here is the original March 15, 1975 New York Times review of the film by someone named A.H. Weiler:

If Neil Simon's adaptation of his 1971 Broadway hit, "The Prisoner of Second Avenue," which arrived at the Sutton yesterday, is less than an overpowering study of a married couple driven to distraction by the irritations and indignities of local middle-class living, it still scores valid points, both serious and funny. This time, the largely farcical kind of Manhattan madnesses Mr. Simon observed in his 1970 film, "The Out-of-Towners," have the impact of reality that has been humanely dulled by injections of relevant comedy.

Comparisons are odious, but it should be noted that the play hasn't been changed appreciably in its transition to the screen. And, if Melvin Frank's direction is polished but not innovative, he is ably aided by a cast headed by Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft, who project forcefully natural characterization that are as realistic as the authentic Second Avenue and other New York sites caught by the color cameras.

As in the original, New York is hardly a wonderful town for Mr. Simon's principals. Mr. Lemmon is frustrated and anxiety-ridden because of the faulty air-conditioning and inconsiderate neighbors in his high-rise apartment house, among other things. And, his fraying nerves aren't helped much when he is dismissed by his faltering firm. As a jobless ad executive, he cannot be blamed for railing at an unemployment office clerk. And he shouldn't be criticized for banging on fragile walls, cursing the neighbors, who douse him with water in retaliation, and developing neuroses inflamed by enforced idleness and visits to a non-committal psychiatrist.

If Anne Bancroft, as his truly loving helpmate who resolutely gets a job to support them, becomes tense and confused to the point of paranoia, she, too, can't be faulted for her rising fears when she loses that job and must decide whether to accept financial help from her husband's concerned, if questioning, relatives.

The audience at the botanic gardens - well, except for maybe a couple - weren't expecting to see Sylvester Stallone in the film:

Mr. Lemmon, no stranger to Mr. Simon's work ("The Odd Couple," "The Out-of-Towners"), and Miss Bancroft are simply an unromanticized, believable team as recognizable in their comic and serious give-and-take as many of New York's scrambling millions. And they get sturdy, pointed support from Gene Saks, as Mr. Lemmon's well-to-do, plain-speaking but doting older brother and Elizabeth Wilson and Florence Stanley, as his careful sisters, among others.

They aren't involved in Greek tragedy or in common-place television situation comedy. Mr. Simon is serious about a theme that isn't earth-shaking and he understandably cloaks its gravity with genuine chuckles that pop up mostly as radio news bulletins such as the flash that a Polish freighter has just run into the Statue of Liberty. And, with a cast whose members appreciate what they're saying and doing, the gnawing problems of "Second Avenue" become a pleasure.

The night out in Bay Ridge really did prove a pleasure to us (even more so after we used the restroom at the Starbucks on Third Avenue before getting on the R and G trains back to Williamsburg). We're grateful for the Narrows Botanical Gardens and its volunteers for the fun and the memories.