NEW YORK — President Barack Obama made good on a campaign promise to his most important supporter Saturday night — his wife, Michelle.
The president and first lady jetted to a date in New York late Saturday afternoon, aides and media in tow.
“I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished,” the president said in a statement an aide read to the press.
After dining a little more than two hours at Blue Hill, a West Village restaurant touted by New York magazine as a “seminal Greenmarket haven” that features food grown by chef and owner Dan Barber on his upstate farm, the president and first lady headed to the Belasco Theater to make it in time for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”
The play by August Wilson is about black America in the early 1900s, with residents of a boardinghouse recalling their migration from the sharecropping farms of the South to the industrialized North.
As the motorcade left the West Village and drove up Sixth Avenue to the theater, crowds of people, at times about eight deep, gathered on the sidewalks of the blockaded streets to wave as the Obamas passed. Some cheered. Cab drivers opened their doors and stood on the frames of their taxis to glimpse the president and first lady.
In an interview before his inauguration, Barack Obama said he and his wife like having “date nights,” usually on Fridays. Since moving to Washington, the Obamas have managed to fit in at least a few nights out in the nation’s capital.
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