The Trip – Day 14 – St. Louis MO, Jerry Seinfeld

I can’t believe this is the 2 weeks mark of the trip. Everything seems to have happened so long ago – New York, Canada (4 different planes total), Washington DC, the drive over here. All this happened in 2 weeks time. It’s a strange feeling. Still 71 more days to go on this trip. Wow :)

Today I went again into St. Louis. I thought since the Jerry Seinfeld show is in a place called Fox Theatre, around it must be some stuff to do in the hours prior to the show. I was wrong – while the architecture is very nice, the place doesn’t offer many attractions during daytime (at least not on a Saturday.) Just a few art galleries (some are open, most are not) and that’s about it.

I was hungry so I went into a place called “The Best Steak House.” I feared this would be a place where I will be forced to order an 80$ steak that I can’t appreciate, but instead was met with a long line of people with trays. I thought it was strange but nothing prepared me for the next thing that happened – the person operating the grill (let’s call him the griller) yelled “NEXT!” and then some people in the line started shouting their order for the griller to hear.

I started to get nervous as I didn’t know yet what I was going to order and didn’t feel comfortable shouting my order for everyone to hear my funny accent. It turned out, though, that it was a first time (and therefore an embarrassing) experience for many of the people in line so eventually I said my order out loud to the griller when it was my turn. The food was very good and later I realized that this is some kind of a local establishment since 1968 or something like that. It’s nice when a good meal is also a cultural experience :)

One good thing about St. Louis is that all restaurants have free Wi-Fi access. This way I could pass the time before the show catching up on my RSS feeds and writing this post.

Fabulous Fox Theatre is a very beautiful theater. Originally a movie theater, it’s preserved from 1929 and has a long history of famous shows which you can see in posters and pictures on the walls. Before Jerry Seinfeld went on stage, Tom Papa came on first. Tom Papa was very funny, but Seinfeld was hilarious. At one time I had tears coming out from laughing so hard. I always imagined that Seinfeld stands in one place on stage and doesn’t raise his voice, but he actually moves a lot on stage (for one joke he lay flat on stage) and would occasionally raise his voice for jokes.

After he was done with the stand-up, he came back to answer questions from the audience. I really liked that. He answered questions like “what’s your favorite Seinfeld episode?” to which the answer was it’s not an episode as much as it’s jokes from episodes like Kramer managing to hit the golf ball into the whale’s blowhole, George killing his fiance with the poisoned envelopes and Jerry stealing the rye bread from the old lady. Another question was what happened to the puffy shirt. It turns out the shirt is in the Smithsonian (where I was a few days ago.) And finally someone asked about future projects. Unfortunately the exact answer was “I’m old, I’m rich and I’m tired… [pause for audience laughs]… This is not a motivated person.”

Tomorrow: driving 692 km to Salina Kansas. I don’t expect to have much to do there, being a small city and all. But it’s half way to Denver CO and that’s where I need to go.