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Youth & the Arts

Dinner & A Show

The American Girl Place: It is Every Young Girl's Dream

This month, we surprised four young girls--Amelia, Marianna, Annabella and Mackenzi--by spiriting them off to the American Girl Place in New York City for a show: The American Girls Revue. They didn’t even know they were going until they jumped in the car on their way up. Located on Fifth Avenue and just a block from the Rockefeller Center, the American Girl Place is a three-story building with everything you can imagine: a cafe, theatre, and three floors of shopping for you and your doll. However, you have to see the show.

The girls in the show each performed one of the original stories from American Girl, all on a tiny little stage the shape of a square with no props but a chair. The production started in modern-times with eight girls in a club meeting. One had just moved to town. The girls tried to make her comfortable and even tried to explain the club to her: this was just an escape from the real world where the girls could use their imagination and have fun together. Then, the storytelling started and each girl told their favorite American Girl story to the audience.

Each story included a hardship the girl had to overcome. Amelia, Annabella, Mackenzi and Marianna agreed that out of all the girls, Addy, a slave who escaped during the Civil War, was the girl who had the most frightening journey. From our seats, we could see the sound room and a man playing the piano, playing the flute, and another piano that played special sounds. The unique thing about the set was that it changed for each girl’s story, because each story took place in a different time-period. To display the time-period, they dressed up and changed the set. If you’re going to go, remember: almost every little girl wants to go see this show and there’s never an empty seat.

If you have time after the show, you can go shopping. Each floor has a different theme. The first floor is all for today’s American Girl, and it has books, dolls’ clothes with matching clothes for the girls, and a doll salon. At the doll salon, your doll can have her hair done and sit in a miniature salon chair. The girls were ecstatic upon seeing all of this, and the excitement continued on the other two floors.

We went straight up to the third floor for our tea reservations and afterwards we went down to the second floor. On the third floor however, the girls were constantly laughing and smiling. Did you ever have a tea party with your dolls when you were little? That’s sort of what it’s like at an American Girl tea party: you use fake food and have full conversations with your favorite dolls. For the girls, teatime was a favorite. Each doll received a miniature chair, cup and saucer. In the event that the girl forgot her doll, there were extra dolls so that no one felt left out. The room was full of excitement. All of the girls loved the flower print booths, pink and black striped walls, along with the rest of the room’s décor. I liked the table settings: each table setting came with a complimentary flower hair tie to remember the American Girl tea. (Teatime is only at 4 p.m., although breakfast, lunch and dinner are also served.)

After tea, we decided to walk along Fifth Avenue. We stopped in at Sephora and the two of us had fun giving each of the girls a mini-makeover. Then, we walked through Rockefeller Center to get back to the parking garage. In the car on the way home, we asked the girls what they thought about the day.

All of the girls agreed that it was the best surprise ever. Mackenzi said it best: “There hasn’t been a moment today that there hasn’t been a smile on my face.”

For more information, call 1.877.AG.PLACE or visit the Web site, www.americangirlplace.com.

Katie Jillions is a Sophomore at Holy Cross High School. Juliet Piccone is a Sophomore at Moorestown High School.