As astute readers who picked up on the subtle and not-so-subtle hints over the last week may already know, your PopCulteer was in The Big Apple for a few days last week.

What you may not know is that I came back, finished up a pressing outside assignment, and then promptly found myself under the weather with a narsty non-Covid respiratory crud.

So today, I’m going to take it easy and just share a few photos from the trip. Then I’ll crawl back into bed and resume coughing.

Our main reason for going was that Mel really wanted to see two shows that are having limited runs. One of them was the hilarious “Guttenberg” starring Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, from the original cast of “The Book of Mormon.”

The show is presented as two wannabee playwrights from New Jersey, who have booked a Broadway theater to hold a “backers audition,” hoping to attract investors for their musical about the inventor of the printing press, Johan Guttenberg.

The humor comes from the fact that the playwrights perform all the parts themselves, with the aid of ballcaps printed with the character names, and also, since their Google search didn’t turn up much about Guttenberg, they made up most of the story.

Our first hotel (we hotel hopped to take advantage of Hilton Honors points), had this view of The Palace Theater, where we saw The SpongeBob Musical more than five years ago. Since then, they have shut down the theater so they could raise it 30 feet. It’s due to reopen soon, fully restored, but no longer at street level.

I had a weird thing happen during Guttenberg. My eyes uncrossed. So for much of the rest of the trip I didn’t need glassses. Times Square is a cool place to be when you have perfect vision all of a sudden.

We didn’t get a chance to see this show on this trip.

We did get to sit on Father Duffy’s Steps and watch the famous and annoying Times Square mascots. King Kong was impressive, but I took the photos from a distance so that I didn’t get hassled by Spider-man, who I think was acting as Kong’s mascot pimp.

Crap! I think he saw me!

Advertising is everywhere in Times Square. I think these were promoting a Broadway adaptation of the Monkees’ movie.

Finally, we had a view of The Empire State Building from our second hotel. Tomorrow PopCult will bring you STUFF TO DO, as your humble blogger attempts to recover.