I’m All Lost In, #94: Tap-and-go; ta-da!; portable magnetic wireless power bank.

I’m All Lost In …

the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week

#94

1) Tap-and-go (and other Transit Notes)

The MTA is phasing out its iconic yellow fare cards by the end of 2025; no more swiping only to be greeted by an obstinate turnstile. It’s all tap-and-go now: Tap your credit or debit card; use an MTA OMNY card, which you buy at vending machines much like traditional pre-loaded cards (and ride free of charge after 12 taps per week); or easiest of all, tap on with your phone, as I did this past weekend on my excellent NYC visit.

Hewes St., Brooklyn, 9:45 pm, 7/26/25

And there’s no fumbling around. You don’t have to open your smart phone wallet first and then double click and hold your card to the reader. All you have to do is touch your phone to it. Shazam. You’re in—to midtown for a movie at the air conditioned MoMa Film Center (Jean Renoir’s ridiculous 1955 flick French Cancan); to Bushwick to see late night comedy at the Tiny Cupboard; or leaving town from Delancey St. and Bowery on the J Train to Sutphin Boulevard where you catch the AirTrain to JFK.

And here’s another note on transit system innovations from my travels back East last week; this one from WMTA, the DC Metro:

On my train ride to the northwest Maryland suburbs for my visit with Mom, I was bemused that during the first leg of the commute on the Silver Line from Dulles, the announcer kept saying: “This is a Silver Line Train to New Carrollton.” New Carrollton is not a stop on the Silver Line. It’s at the end of the Orange Line.

Stare as I did at the map on board the train, which showed that while the Silver Line runs parallel to the Orange Line (“interlining”) through the city, it does not continue to do so in the suburbs out to New Carrollton. Rather, it showed, as I thought, the Silver Line staying course through to Downtown Largo, its own suburban terminus to the south of New Carrollton. None of this was relevant to my trip, I was changing trains at Metro Center and taking the Red Line Northwest to the NIH station. But still. I was curious and flummoxed. Was there a shuttle at Largo that went north to New Carrollton? How did this work?

When I alighted at Metro Center, I saw an updated Metro map. And indeed, indicating a seamless change up with a hatched line, it showed that every other Silver Line train split to the northeast onto New Carrollton as the train made its way into Maryland. This type of heads up routing—based on things such as where the train yards and turnarounds are (New Carrollton) and transit hub efficiency (go to slide 12 here to understand the smart overall frequency benefits)—demonstrate the kind of nimble and simple construction-free changes you can make to fixed-right-of-way subway infrastructure (as opposed to highway infrastructure for cars) that improve commutes for more people proportionally speaking.

As I texted my Sound Transit workmate Eliza upon this discovery: “Cool. Silver Line doesn’t merely interline w/ Orange; it has two different termini. Every other Silver Line train takes you to New Carrollton (trad Orange Line only) without a transfer.

One last transit planning win I noticed this week. Hitting NYC for the weekend after my stay in DC, I sent Eliza this picture from Manhattan showing a subway stop at W. 4th St. embedded in the entrance of an Uzbeki grocery store.

I captioned it: “Fantastic TOD.”

“Be Still my heart,” my transit bestie Eliza wrote back when I sent over this pic of Transit Oriented Development perfection from the West Village in Manhattan. 7/26/25, NYC

2) ta-da! at the Greenwich House Theater

ECB is an expert at finding plays for us to see whenever we’re in NYC; not the easy-to-scout-out Broadway shows, but sneaky gems playing in the Village. On ECB’s prescient recommendation during last year’s trip together, we saw the Tony-award-winning Broadway hit “Oh, Mary!” long before it took center stage. Theater Cred: We saw it back in March, 2024 in the West Village at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher St. We had front row seats.

This week, just a few blocks away from the Lortel, we saw a show called ta-da! at the Greenwich House Theatre on Barrow St. 5th row.

ta-da! at the Greenwich House Theatre in the West Village, 7/26/25

.Like the madcap Oh, Mary! this was an amphetamine-tempoed comedy showcasing a self-deprecating gay guy. Unlike Oh, Mary!’s ensemble-cast madness though, this was a one-man show—an 80-minute monologue delivered by a lanky muppet-like actor/writer named Josh Sharp. Occasionally slowing things down with his brainy former-SAT tutor chops to explain how things like parallel universes work, Sharp otherwise performs the piece as a Ted Talk on Benzedrine, chasing a wordy PowerPoint that spits out jokey amended commentary on the script. This smart aleck slide deck plays the role of traditional Greek chorus standing in as Sharp’s candid alter ego.

It’s an I-laughed-I-cried (though, mostly laughed) stand-up routine about Sharp’s belabored coming out journey. He didn’t come out until he was 22 when his still-young, once-vibrant mom is dying from a rare form of cancer.

One side-splitting bit from this bittersweet coming-of-age story features Sharp, who grew up in the closet in the rural south, recasting a hayseed bro’s drawling boast about “wrestling parties” where the ladies “lift they skirts and show you they pussies.” Hilariously, Sharp turns the boorish rap into a thespian poetry reading (in iambic pentameter). He caps this absurd sample by leading the mostly gay male crowd in an audience-participation read along.

Unbeknownst to ECB and me, ta-da! was directed by Sam Pinkleton, the same guy who directed Oh, Mary!

We got to town right on time. Here’s the 7/22/25 NYT review. ECB was tipped, though, by a fairly unclear 7/25/25 New Yorker review.

But all my comparison’s to Oh, Mary! are misleading. Where that show charged along without dynamic variety, Sharp adheres to the competing drama masks. He gives us both play and poignance, nonsense and nuance.

3) My New Wireless Portable Phone Charger

As I write this, it’s petering out on the table at the coffee shop. But still. The portable Belkin magnetic wireless phone charger I bought in the throes of my latest bout with an Apple iPhone that refuses to connect to the cable cord and take a charge, is a revelation.

After getting the scripted empathy at the SoHo Apple Store from a salesperson (I’m not blaming you) about maybe a mutant dust bunny in the charging port or a possibly fraying cord—thanks for acknowledging how shoddy your products are— I charmed my way around scheduling a dreaded appointment at the Genius Bar and fast forwarded the process.

Why don’t you first try the portable charger to see if the problem is the cord ? a young salesperson asked me standing her guard position atop the escalator (where I’d been sent by the first nice salesperson).

You have portable wireless chargers?, I asked glimpsing a table off to her left dappled with wireless portables—and also glimpsing my light at the end of this tunnel.

No less than five minutes later, I was back out on Prince St., early on a Friday evening, with this elegant best-thing-since-sliced-bread fix tucked away in my Apple bag.

Death to phone charging cords.

It packs two 100% charges-worth of power once it’s all filled up itself; which admittedly, you have to do with a charging cord.

And I do have some complaints. “Magnetic” is an overstatement. It’s never evident if you’ve securely locked the phone in position to receive a charge; you have to blindly suss this out without ever feeling the phone click into place. Furthermore, when the phone is actually in position, you have to or don’t have to? press the power button to start charging; it’s hard to tell because, again, it’s never clear if the phone is in the proper position. Additionally, there’s enough awkward delay time between getting the phone into place and getting some sort of sign that the phone is actually charging, that you often assume it’s not and are inclined to keep nudging it around the slippery block. Shall I continue? The sometimes satisfying oversized charging icon that appears as a green circle on the face of your phone to display the battery’s charged percentage, comes on or doesn’t without rhyme or reason; often it doesn’t appear even if the phone is in fact being charged. In this instance, it half-heartedly sometimes says “charging” in small print at the top of your phone.

I’m impatient. I’m a Gen Xer. Which certainly explains some of my maybe-user-error disappointments. But I’m all in anyway. This $60 solution to the predictable and interminable erratic life of Apple’s shitty charging cables rates right up there with the charm of using your phone to tap-and-go on the subway.

My watch recommendation of the week: a 1949 B-movie classic, Side Street.

Lastly, this week’s movie recommendation: 1949’s Side Street, a noir B-movie starring Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell. I came across this enchanting number because when I got back to Seattle this week, I couldn’t let go of my trip to the Big Apple. You see, this tell-tale heart, cat-and-mouse police procedural starring a tripped-up working class hero and his benevolent loving wife, a crooked lawyer and his cold-blooded henchman, a no-nonsense detective and $30,000 gone missing, a sad lounge singer and a compromised Upper East Side financier, plus lots of bartenders, decoys, and dead bodies, was filmed on location in NYC. Check out one fan’s obsessed blog post that maps out the whole thing with screen shots from the 1949 film that morph into the present day sites of the locations. One of the locations is the same as it was in 1949, a bar called Marie’s Crisis. During our trip, ECB and I actually went to Marie’s Crisis. We didn’t know anything about Side Street at the time. We went because the place is evidently a historic Stonewall-adjacent queer piano lounge. (I could have done without the pianist’s baby boom pedagogy on the night we settled in there.) I figured out the Side Street connection after the fact when I was googling Marie’s Crisis and the entry mentioned that it shows up in this old movie. That was my cue to search out Side Street on YouTube. The bar shows up the film’s stand-out scene. It’s when the aforementioned forlorn lounge singer traps our working class hero into his final misstep.