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US first couple's date: dinner and a Broadway show

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-05-31 10:33

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.

U.S. President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama walk out of the White House toward Marine One in Washington on May 30, 2009. The Obamas are traveling to New York City for a personal visit. [CFP]

"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.

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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 curtain call 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.

The White House declined to say how much the trip was costing taxpayers, and even before the smaller jet left Washington, the there-and-back trip drew criticism from the Republican National Committee. The RNC issued a news release that chastised Obama for saying he understands American's troubles, but then hopping up to New York for "a night on the town."

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