Broadway shows
With my theatre school as a high school senior I took a weekend trip (it was over Halloween that year, actually, I think) to Broadway. We saw two Broadway shows (Wicked and Servant of Two Masters), visited a film studio, toured backstage at Phantom of the Opera, stayed in a hotel, and ate lots of pizza.
We visited the drama bookstore: packed top to bottom with plays, monologue books, books about "the business," books about film, acting, directing, playwriting, design, technical theatre, how-to books, celebrity biographies, plays, plays, and more plays. I spent two hours there and certainly could have spent more.
We experienced the Broadway ticket brokers scene. We woke early in the morning one day to wait in line at the TKTS booth to get reasonably priced tickets (or at least, reasonably priced for Broadway tickets).
After Wicked, we hung around to sneak peeks at Idina Menzel (still in her Tony-winning role as Elphaba) and Kristen Chenoweth (still playing Glinda the Good Witch). This is totally not my scene, but it was fun to experience the hordes of autograph seekers for a few minutes.
We went to the Halloween parade. We rode in taxis and ran around the city all night. At the film studio we visited, we had faux screen tests. Screen tests are strange things: we watched ourselves afterwards. They are too up-close and too personal. They catch everything. I could never be a film actor. I lost my glasses in the film studio and had to have them mailed to me when they found them a week or so after I had left.
The goal was to give us an idea of what it's like to be a practicing theatre artist in New York City. I just wish that I had known at the time that I wasn't really going to be interested in acting anymore. I wish I had known enough to ask the theatre professionals we were introduced to more questions about playwriting and directing. But I was star-struck, and on the wrong track. So in that sense it was a relatively wasted opportunity