In September 2003 for their 60th wedding anniversary my sister and I took our parents to New York City for a couple days to see some sights and a couple Broadway shows.

We saw the Bernadette Peters revival of Gypsy, which was excellent, and I’ve always believed she was robbed of a well-deserved Tony for her performance by Arthur Laurents’s bad behavior in connection with that production, but that’s a story for another time.

We also saw the Mel Brooks mega-hit The Producers, which was already in its third year of a six year, 2,502 performance run. That was also a lot a fun.

Some years later I began to watch the Larry David sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I went back and watched the seasons that I had missed.

As it turned out, the entire fourth season was built around the idea of Mel Brooks casting Larry to take over the lead in the Broadway production of the musical. Furthermore, that season was aired at the beginning of 2004, and the final one hour episode was actually shot in New York City sometime in 2003, with some scenes taking place in the St. James theater itself.

There’s a scene where Larry is in front of a newsstand with lots of magazines, and when I saw that, I initially got the idea that perhaps they had been shooting just a week or so before we had been in NYC.

Or so I thought.

Anyway, I’ve been watching the entire Curb series again, and when I got to that episode, I decided to take a closer look and see if I could really pinpoint the date of one of the magazines. Initially I tried for the Cosmopolitan magazine because you can see the full cover with blurbs like “Sex Survey” and “Get Naked!” It ought to be easy enough to find that cover on the Internet. But although I found a site that purported to have all the Cosmo covers for 2003, none matched that one.

So I tried something else. In the image below, you can see the partial cover for New York magazine lying on its side with the blurb “The Call of the” clearly visible. So I went looking for that one.

And I found it! 

Dated August 4, 2003.

Which means that most likely the film crew was in NYC in late July.

Which actually makes a lot more sense.

If Mel Brooks was going to close down his Broadway show for a few days or maybe a week so that the Curb crew could shoot their scenes, better to do it in the doldrums of summer than in September when business would be picking up again.

So we actually missed Larry David and company by about six weeks.

Here is the short video I made of the New York City trip.