What's a Motto with Times Square?

Musings on a 48-hour trip to New York City (and our stay at the Motto Times Square)

I’d like to think that I’m pretty hip, although opening a Substack post with said hunch is probably evidence of the contrary. But during my two years living out of a backpack, I’ve traveled to some pretty cool places. I’ve spent weekends at a no-wifi hostel in the Elqui Valley and booked a trip to Seattle so I could take a road trip to Snoqualmie Falls. I spent a night in Hat Yai just because a bus stopped there.

So I understand that Times Square is not hip. I know it’s for tourists. I know that New Yorkers are proud to be too cool for school, and “school” probably includes Williamsburg now. Once, a native New Yorker tried to rush my co-ed fraternity. A brother’s ears perked up at the potential rush being from New York, and she began oohing and aahing while she reminisced about going to the Hard Rock Cafe at Times Square. I remained silent as the native New Yorker rolled her eyes and lightly berated the brother for choosing the worst place to go in the whole city.

We didn’t let her rush the fraternity, but we all got the message.

So when I say that my fiancee and I took a trip to New York this month and only walked so far as Hell’s Kitchen, I understand we are nothing but a pair of no-good, easily swindled, silly little tourists. But we had a really good time and I don’t see us staying anywhere else when we impulsively decide to fly to New York, see two Broadway shows, and promptly fly home.

The Itinerary

The idea to visit New York sprang to our minds after I left my job and a weekend in November suddenly opened up. This weekend was supposed to be the last weekend of the Broadway show Oh, Mary!, and I had been frothing at the mouth over the play for months. Katelyn made me a deal: if we flew to New York to see it, would I never mention it again?

Oops.

So, what the heck is this show about? Oh, Mary! stars Cole Escola sporting bratty curls and a giant hoop skirt as the Former First Lady. I had heard bits and pieces of what the actual show was about. Cabaret ambitions? Alcoholism? A Presidential assassination? I had no clue what the audience was in for, but I knew they ate it up.

When was the last time you were so curious about a show? Trailers spoil movies with shocking impertinence. Most TV shows are based on unoriginal ideas or well-known books. All I knew about Oh, Mary! was that celebrities flocked to it every night and claimed to have wet themselves with laughter. I had to know why. Curiosity has killed the cat in the past, yes; but Oh, Mary! wasn’t portraying any true stories. In this retelling, curiosity booked the cat two impulsive seats on an American Airlines flight. At least they were nonstop.

The Hotel

My father always told me that when I grew up, I would become a Republican like Abraham Lincoln. My father was incorrect, but I did become a very loyal Hilton Hotels guest. (To some, they might be one and the same.) I became a Hilton loyalist when I escaped from the bedbug-infested hotel in Malaysia where I had been living for six weeks, and my parents gifted me a 10,000-point night in a Doubletree in Kuala Lumpur. I had been hip enough to enjoy $1 mystery meals from a food stand outside the hostel every night, but one can only look so cool examining their bug bites. (Bedbugs bite in straight lines. I was safe.) I still remember the hotel’s French fries, the episodes of Drag Race I watched while rotting in soothing white sheets, and the massive pool where I recouped and booked a bus to Penang. How can I go with Marriot when Hilton provided me with such a refuge in my time of need?

Hilton has locations pretty much everywhere, with a variety of different brands to cater to various hotel needs. When Katelyn and I and our dog Binx (who is now killing squirrels over the rainbow bridge) took a road trip from Texas to Pennsylvania and back, we sampled Hilton’s “less fancy” brands: the bright and campy Tru, the middle-city-professional-conference-vibes of the Home2Suites, the bold and sassy Hampton Inn. All three are reliable and almost eerily consistent, down to the mustaches on the Hampton Inn paper coffee cups. In Cancun and Portland, Katelyn and I splurged for the more glamorous Canopy brand, a beacon of light after roughing in at the Club Med and Acadia campgrounds, respectively. In Kansas City and Boston, Hilton locations in historic buildings blended old-school charm with upgraded service.

We had plenty of Hilton options in New York and Times Square, but we chose the Motto for its rarity and chic decor. The Motto is attached to a combination Hampton Inn and Home2Suites, but shares its lobby with a quaint coffee shop and bar that caters to hotel guests, Times Square tourists, and (maybe?) New Yorkers alike. As we walked from the E line to the hotel, we pointed out the tiny coffee shop with a delicate font as a potential place to grab a drink after we checked in, only to realize that we could bring those drinks up to the room.

The Motto design is sleek and modern, but I can’t get past one element of most Motto locations: bunk beds. You can find bunk beds in all the Motto locations: New York (Chelsea and Times Square), Tulum, Cusco, DC, Philadelphia, Bentonville (is Bentonville cool now?), and Rotterdam. Is this an attempt to market to bachelorette parties? Group trips converting back from the church of Airbnb? Polyamorous digital nomad throuples? I’m not entirely sure. This is a qualm that I’m just going to have to let go of, as there are plenty of options without bunk beds. And the decor, not as eerily consistent as some of Hilton’s other brands, makes up for the confusion I have surrounding the room setup.

Katelyn and I wanted as much space as we could get in our 155-square-foot room, so we stuck with a single queen bed and spent our downtime looking out the window to the Hard Rock Hotel and the street below. We didn’t exactly have a “ball drop” view, and we could only take two steps between the bed and the toilet, but we were in New York! Stick a dozen people in front of us every few minutes, and we have enough creativity to entertain ourselves. You can’t get that kind of people watching in Park Slope. Or can you? We have no idea, because we didn’t want to spend our whole trip on the subway.

The view from the doorway

The Shows

The time we did get to lounge in our hotel room was spent working or sleeping, so we didn’t feel claustrophobic by the bordering-on-capsule size of the hotel room. It’s hard to complain when you look on Google Maps and see that you only have to walk five minutes to the theater.

Due to Spirit Airlines canceling our Thursday morning nonstop flight and graciously offering to replace it with a twelve-hour flight, we booked a flight for Wednesday to see Oh, Mary! on Thursday and fly home on Friday. This gave us a free night to…play pickleball? Watch the world go by? Plan a trip to Bentonville? No! We made a beeline to Death Becomes Her for our first Broadway show of the trip.

Death Becomes Her is one of those movies your gay friend references that you know isn’t Valley of the Dolls, but it’s got to be similar, right? I’ve never seen Valley of the Dolls, but I did watch Death Becomes Her for the first time this year. Between DBH and The Substance, I guess I’m into body horror as long as it's a critique of how Hollywood discards a woman at her first sign of aging. The movie (and Broadway play) centers on two fabulous rivals, an actress and an author, who take a potion that allows them to stay young (and live) forever in Hollywood.

The stage version of the show knows its audience. Their opening number touts that everything they do is for the gays gaze, and the show looks camp so hard in the eyes that it plucks those eyes out, polishes them, and promptly puts them back in. Megan Hilty even used Meryl Streep’s bio for her own in the show’s playbill, setting the absolutely unserious and fabulous tone of the show.

10/10. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you’ll love the sparkly numbers, dramatic lighting, and pure silliness.

And then there’s Oh! Mary.

I don’t want to give anything away because the satisfaction of watching a fever dream play out in real time is so extremely rare these days. So that’s what I’ll say. It’s a fever dream. Bizarre, bawdy, and strange. It was unlike anything I had ever seen on a Broadway stage before. And that made up for every angle of Times Square that I had seen a million times before.

New York is more than Times Square. I get it. Times Square is just a few blocks filled with gaping jaws, cigarette-smoking mascots, and clueless bike riders. But my jaw was on the floor after seeing both Death Becomes Her and Oh, Mary!, and I couldn’t just pick it up when we walked out of the theater. Our quick trip began the day after the election, and Times Square had just enough stimulation and chaos and queer success that I can only applaud this little crowded corner of the universe.

We’ll be back, although we may leave some extra room to take one subway ride out of Times Square next time.