The Sorensens take Manhattan

Last Friday I had two sisters, two brothers, and one mother come visit for the weekend, and we had two days to do everything that everyone wanted. That's impossible, of course, and luckily everyone was good natured about it. So here's the play-by-play of what we did do. Friday night I met my family after work and we all put our names in for either the Avenue Q lottery or The Dirty Rotten Scoundrels lottery for my brothers. Eric won two tickets for DRS, so they were all set. We left them to wander the theatre district and went up to Lincoln Center for dinner. We couldn't get into the Mexican restaurant I was hoping to dazzle my mom with, so we ended up at Ollies, which was fine. Then I dropped the girls off at the Met for a 4-hour opera, while I worked at the temple.Saturday morning I got up and made thank you brownies for the AA box office because they got my sisters and mom in to see the long sold out The Pajama Game, (and my friend Scott got the boys into Spamalot!!) and we were all so grateful. It was a good weekend for the Sorensens and Broadway, that's for sure. Then I hurried over to Lincoln Center for a little opera of my own (I was not disappointed that my opera was only 2 1/2 hours-no siree) with Rachel Newcomb! It was very light and fun, although I did wonder how a little how they stretched a 20 minute plot over 2 hours! Afterwards Rachel and I headed over to the nail salon and got pedicures, which was very fun, and then it was time to meet up with the family again. We went to dinner at a diner downtown (say that three times fast) called The Silver Spurs, and it was very fun. Afterwards, since we were already farther so far south (in my opinion), I suggested that we go find the Joseph Smith statue that I had not been to see yet. Luckily Erin led the way, or I assure you, we would never have found it. It was nice, although we were intrigued to see that someone had gone to the effort of scraping one of the sentences on the plaque off. I would have thought I'd have heard about that at church, but I didn't. Anyway, it was fun to see, but once you've looked at it for a couple of minutes there's really nothing else to do, but it had taken 20 to get there, so it felt a little unbalanced. So we walked over to the park to see the Statue of Liberty. I tried to convince everyone to take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, but Meg was the only one I could convince, so we didn't do that. Instead we walked back to the subway by way of Ground Zero, and ended the night at Ben & Jerry's near my family's hotel. Warning: Their chocolate peanut butter milkshake has nuts. (that was a bit of a shock to me as I was drinking it through a straw) The Rochester party left early Sunday morning, but Anne (who stayed at our house) accompanied me to church. Of course the times you want something crazy to happen, it never does-the week before we'd had two entire sacrament meetings planned, so we had one after the other. I had a great time seeing everyone, and I hope they had a good time too. I always feel slightly stressed playing the hostess, especially in NY which is such an amazing city, I hardly feel I can do justice to it. I guess that just means everyone has to visit a lot, so we get a chance to see everything. Something to keep in mind, Donny Osmond is joining the cast of Beauty and the Beast in the fall; just in case you needed an incentive.