More of What the Tourists Didn't See

It was another one of our long walks-and-talks.

But not on the main avenues and thruways...there were just way too many tourists pouring over the the city, slowing down for the good weather or stopping suddenly for the map that always seemed to be upside when I would peek over their shoulder.

So we walked with other tired and rushed New Yorkers in the know, weaving along back streets and odd walkways.  For a brief moment it was as if it was a sleepy day in an almost empty city.

Tillie needed to get food before heading back to the western part of downtown. 

Forty years ago, there was no place to shop for food because no one lived there except industrial sites and diners.  Now there was no place to shop for food because everything was exorbitantly overpriced, often in triplicate because most of the people living in the former industrial sites were billionaires.

"I have to repack my bags," Tillie said and we stopped in one of the small side streets that also doubled as a parking lot and was once named after a police commissioner now in jail.

And that's when I looked up.

**
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What the Tourist Didn't See

I don't know what the tourists were snapping away at, but I looked up.


**
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Lin Zexu

Sunday Memories Encore Of High School Stairs

That movie, Fame didn't come out of someone's wild imagination.  It was a real school and a real place and yes there was dancing during lunchtime but not in the street and certainly not on top of taxis.  Those guys needed to make a living.  

In the street there was pot-smoking, hanging, walking and, according to some rumors, the pouring of bubble soap into the expensive public fountain that heralded the prestigious theater across the street.

Photo: Phil Posner

This Saturday night was the 40th reunion of the class of 1975 - one of the classes that partly inspired that movie.  Lots of picture-taking and memories shared, and maybe some secret regret none of us knew enough to enjoy those days more then.  (Well, Youth is wasted on the young.)

But, like Joni Mitchell said about memories being like tattoos, the faces, the joy, the embraces, the LOUD ENERGY (as the young waitress remarked) were the same.  

 photo: A. Skylar

Surrounded by a city of constant challenges, we traveled on subways, buses and ferries from the five corners of the city to Performing Arts.  It was there we had safety and respite and a home to become ourselves.  We were barely not children, but practicing our disciplines like adults - picking up the instrument, the ballet shoes, the script every day and working at it like professionals.  

 photo: A. Skylar

And there was so much less time for bullshit because there was only so much time for art before we got back on the subways, the buses, the ferries to return to the five corners of the city.  And the next day we'd do it all over again. 

 photo: M. Andreano

With special love to Yeudi who survived with me, the cute violinist I still adore, and the pretty oboe player who I'm delightfully back in touch with.  

And in memory of the Prodigy who recently died too young, too soon, from cancer.

**

Originally posted November 28, 2010:

Stairs in the former High School of Performing Arts 

on 46th Street

My withdrawal to the back staircase during lunch hour had nothing to do with any sense of integrity or autonomy. It was a full body retreat. I just gave up trying to fit in with the kids who seemed to have figured out how to be human.

So I sat by myself and to this day I wondered what I was eating for lunch since I don't remember anyone at home making any more food during those days.

Not sure how it started but the cute violinist came across me one day and asked if he could join me. He too needed a break from attempting to fit into a scene completely foreign to him.

Soon after, the accordion player who was the only one in the school found us. I think the cute violinist had said something.

The 13 year old Prodigy sent to New York by himself, living in a walk-up railroad on the east side by himself, taking care of himself by himself, began to eat with us.

Then so did the pretty oboe player, who the Prodigy liked.

I had without realizing made some friends.

**
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What Is Normal

Yeah, weather is something we stick our heads out the window to find out what we should wear that day.

But it is also something we know intimately, watching it through our landscape of water towers.

**
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Night Cruise

The whole avenue became part of a cruise ship as the guys waited for the crane to finish its job.

I knew all those lights that made this huge tinker-toy glimmer in the night would soon disappear into glass and rents so few of us could afford.

Just for a second, though, all of us belonged to this adventure.


**
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Sunday Memories: Hineni

This is Rabbi Math.

I didn't expect to see him today. After all, going to a large bar mitzvah with all the Mariner's family present, I didn't expect to run into anything or anyone from my past.

And it's not like Rabbi Math knew me or my past or even that I included him in my past.  That's not how life-changing moments work.   They work when all a person is doing is their job...

And Boom! Someone's life changes.

It must have been the very early 1990s and times were lean.  Graduate school, student loans, part-time jobs all demanded only the essentials got paid for.  The rest had to be scrounged for.  

Which is why I snuck into the Village Temple's Yom Kipper service at Cooper Union Square. Actually, it was pretty easy.  On the second day, people came and went so walking past the ticket table looking hungry was enough to snag a seat in the back.

I wasn't religious at all.  I wasn't even interested.  Still not.  But on the holiest of the holy and the highest of the high, at that time, not observing just felt too risky.

The evening program began and somewhere, in between the standing up and sitting down and my listening to prayers and songs I had no idea how to say or sing, Rabbi Math began talking.

He looked hungry. And he looked tired.  And there was, like, still an hour to go.

He began telling this story about his mother in Florida. One day, she called him, saying he had to come down, something was wrong, he had to come down right now.

When an elderly parent calls and tells you to get on a plane, you get on a plane. He got down there as soon as he could.

The light in the refrigerator had burnt out.

Rabbi Math stood there staring at the dark refrigerator completely bewildered. And then it dawned on him.

“Hineni.”  Rabbi Math told all of us, who five minutes earlier had wished it was dinner time but now sat still, listening.

It is what Moses answered, when, standing before the burning bush, he heard his name called.

"Hineni", Rabbi Math said to his mother.

That night, I wrote that down on a tiny piece of paper "Hineni" and stuck it on my bulletin board.

Twenty-five-odd years later, I had to write about what inspired me to face the page every day. There were precious sayings by several important people stuck on my bulletin board: Jean Cocteau; Frank Lloyd-Wright; Satyajit Ray.

But on the tiniest of paper scraps was the word, “Hineni.”

“Here I am,” said Moses to the burning bush.

“Here I am,” I say to the page every day.

 **
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Summer Time

... And the living is easy. At least, if you are the Buddha or a cat.

For the rest of us, it's the dreaded swimsuit and a discussion about thigh chaffing.

What Dana Says: Why I Visit Dana Or How I Keep Writing

Bits and pieces of Dana are slowly beginning to visit other places.   

Yet, she is like a lighthouse.   

When you least expect it, her brilliant light explodes into clarity and words that change the world.  Over the next while, old stories and new moments of Dana will be noted.  What Dana Says is worth pulling close and holding tight.

Originally posted August 3, 2010.























"[Writing] makes me feel so close to my mind."

"Drag the brainless pen across the passive paper and see the result."

And on facing a blank canvas:

"The canvas is just four lines. What I put down is the fifth line. Let's see what the fifth line is."

**
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Sunday Memories: Fifty Days Later

Fifty days after leaving Egypt, Moses went up the mountain to receive a lot of stuff.

Now in the Ten Commandments we all know that Edward G. Robinson started trouble, whipping up all the hundreds of extras into a wild orgy of gold worshiping and pretend sex that took three weeks to shoot (prompting one extra to ask who she had to fuck to get out of the film).

But this woman at the all-night Shavuot celebration told a different story.  Gathering all the dancing, singing, cheesecake-eating community around, she unfolded a tale of Moses' sister, Miriam, who on her way to get water, stepped into the the core of all that Moses was about to receive.  And there an old woman told her that while Moses would be doing some heavy lifting, she, Miriam, would bring back the gift of space.

For it wasn't the water that made a river, but the space, the canal in which it flowed, that made it a river.
 
It was that space that Moses created when he parted the Red Sea and that space that the Hebrews were too frightened to step into.  But Miriam did, singing and dancing and leading the people to the other side.

And it was that space between words that would guide, not the words themselves.

So Miriam took that gift and brought it back and it became the space that allowed water flowed in the desert.

Once again, women rock.

**
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Amy In Action

I have never known her to walk in a room and leave it unchanged.  It's just never happened.

I have never known her to talk to someone and not change their lives.

I have only known her to melt people's fury, resentment, fears, crazy-ass beliefs into their hearts and re-introduce them to their own sense of hope.

Like above.  We were at dinner and by the time we paid the check the young waitress (that's her on the right) was clinging to every word Amy said. 

And it was Amy who once told her story to an auditorium of 500 people about becoming a writer even though she was told she should only be a secretary; how she fought through her own doubts, once facing a blank wall in a Paris hotel and determining right then and there she would write the best screenplay ever (which she did); how she sought the words that would propel her always forward.

It was because of her and that Paris wall, that I too faced a blank wall in an Argentinean hostel, determining right then and there....

She was the one after reading something I had stuffed away who said "This must be published." What if I had not heeded her words?   This wouldn't have happened.

And those words she sought that she so generously shared with me?  They are my roots, my touchstone and my daily commitment to keep facing blank walls and always propel forward.

But that's what Amy does.  She moves through the world and leaves it transformed.

So it should be no surprise what she recently did.

Click on that link.  Click.  And it will be like Amy was right in front of you and before you realize it your life will never be the same.


**
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In His California, Handsome IsAs Handsome Does...

I took one look at that photo and blurted out, "Len, you were trouble!" 

Len just laughed.

But one look at that cocky stance and what else could you think?  All 18 proud years of him barely filling out his sailor uniform but bursting with vim and vigor, standing outside the house he grew up in, vegetable garden in the back, small town, one-room school house, and a ton of brothers who could make their own basketball team.

71 years later he still got that wicked dimple and that smart-alecky swagger. 

Stomping three times around the mall early in the morning, walking up the stairs, not down, down was the easy way, reroofing his house, clearing the gutters, terracing the backyard garden, laying down patio tiles (97 stones to be exact), tending the flowers, the fruit trees, the lawn, the kids, the home, my dad, the world...

I can't keep up.

But when I grow up I wanna be just like Len.

**
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Sunday Memories of a Normal Day: We Fall in Four Languages

While recovering from a red-eye, the fragility of being here gets revisited.

Originally posted April 28, 2008

Rush hour, everybody rushing home.

Except for the nicely dressed lady lying on the ground by Greeley Square.  Between the serious men's clothing store and the Dunkin Donut.

There are a lot of people over her making sure her shopping bags and her purse are O.K. There is a cup of something by her and the security guy or police chief or whatever he is is talking into a walkie-talkie.

Me and two guys hang out on the curb by the flower pots and watch a skinny homeless guy shout at the crowd. He looks like the guy who kicked me in the ass when I bumped into him on a rainy day. Wouldn't be surprised if it were. This is his neighborhood.

The two guys said that she began to fall and the homeless guy caught her and was shouting GET HELP GET HELP and once non-homeless guys showed up and shooed him away he got upset. After all, he was there first and just because he was homeless didn't mean he was less of a hero.

The daily convoy of twenty-five blaring police cars roar up Sixth Avenue. None stop.

"She fell. Her heart, her blood pressure or diabetic. They give her an orange juice with some sugar. Look, she is fine."

A third man joins us. His patter sounds like poems made of rain on a roof. When I ask if it is Arabic, his friend nods. "I speak Danish too. And Spanish and English and Arabic."

We look across the street at the woman again. Two ambulances come as she sits up and talks on her cell phone.

One of the guys says to me, "We are nothing. A heart or something and we fall... we are nothing."

The Call of Nature

A friend can't even get me to visit some ducks she knows in Brooklyn.   There are too many trees around and honestly, it threatens to become sentimental.

The geese that I waited for every year at least lived in a recognizable landscape, that is until they disappeared.

But when the young woman keeping my dad safe and sound pointed out something I've only seen on TV or in children's books...

... well... how could I not run out, get a feeder and then home-make sugar water for the itty-bitty-smaller-than-a-manderin hummingbird and her little babies?

My father, hearing all the squealing and picture snapping, shrugged.  "If it isn't an eagle or mockingbird, the hell with it."


**
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In His California the Time is Now

The day is no longer a single unit.

It's been exploded into a billion slivers of seconds, each exactly the same as the one before and the one after.

The tough conversation that needs to be had about the future is had over and over and over again - a hundred new suns rising on a hundred new day...

 Except when we talk about New York.

Suddenly everything is crystal clear and he remembers how sweet my Now is these days.


**
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Special Encore for Mother's Day

It's Mother's Day.  

In Her New York, it was not a day celebrated in a conventional manner.  That's because in Florence's mind everyone was a mother...

So.  Happy Mother..... Day.

Originally post Mother's Day 2011

**

Florence at her mother's apartment in Knickerbocker Village

These days, I am amused at the accolades on Mother's Day that often include the passing down of make-up tips and the special shopping trips for new clothes.

These were not the gifts Florence gave my sister or me. And although I inherited her love of lipstick, it's what is not found in a tube or a store that reminds me of my mother.

It is, instead, a ferocious, unending, tenacious, gut wrenching, miserable exhaustion, banging-head-against-wall, exhilarating 'til-death-do-us-part relationship with the work of an artist.

Personally, there are days I would have been just fine with a new dress or some blue eyeshadow.

An Encore of Sunday Memories -Return To The Promise Land

It was on Clinton Street between Rivington and Stanton. There was a cat clock that wagged its tail and rolled its eyes to each ticking second. The leather seats were burgundy and the lights were of course florescent. Only uptown stores where rich people shopped had real lights.

This was Kaplan's shoes. And we went there for our once-a-year-ugly-pair-of-oxfords that wouldn't become hip for another twenty years. In the interim, the meaner girls in their white go-go boots called me "baby shoes" which is devastating if you're only 8 and suddenly in the 4th grade with older kids.

Still, fashion exile or not, Florence's rule was whatever you picked at Kaplan's you had to wear out of the store. This showed commitment to the shoe you'd be with all year. And since it was the only items we always bought new, you had to really know if the shoe fit.

The pressure was tough. But those ugly oxfords were made so good, and Mr. Kaplan's measurements were so precise, somehow everything worked out, except for the part of looking like a dork from a-turn-of-the-century picture by Jacob Reis.

I spend the next forty years wearing shit that looks hot if only to avoid shoes and shoes stores like that. But there is a God and she does wear lots of shoes because ugly became even hipper than before, especially if the jeans were tight. It was time to wear something other than hot shit. It was time to find a place where the oxfords were made so good and the measuring so precise.

And when I walked in I felt Home.

**
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 "Half the section was totally lost.

But I started with them and I ended with them so I can't complain."

 (photo: A. Joseph)

**
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Philadelphia Story

Forty years ago, I got sent to Philadelphia.

It's not the first place that comes to mind when I think oh gee where should a 15 year old girl be sent for her last year of high school so she doesn't do any more running around 1970's New York night streets.

But Philadelphia it was, with family who must have been nuts to take in a teenager, but who also paid a lot of money for me to go to this Quaker school right down the street.

From a New York City public high school with a billion kids, no sports, lots of art and academics only pretending to teach us stuff...

...to this teeny tiny carpet-on-the-floors, full-length lockers CLEAN building with modern toilets that flushed.  And the bathroom stalls even had DOORS and the senior class was about maybe 32 kids - give or take.   It also had lots of sports and some arts and academics that you were actually expected to learn.

The thing about New York is everybody knows what street you're from and everybody knows what you know from that street.  So I assumed all these new kids knew what I knew.

The thing about kids who have been attending the same small Quaker school together for years and years and years is they all thought I knew what street they were from and what they knew from that street.

Lemme tell you we didn't know jack shit what the other was saying, including any word that had an 'R' in it.  I remember having to spell out 'furry'.  They swore I said 'fuhvrwee'.   I swore that I had to like dig a tunnel with my mouth in order to say 'ferrrrrrrreerrrrrreeeee'.

Learning to sound like an American was a skill that has paid off handsomely and I thank each and every one of them for that.  I do hope that the favor was returned by my teaching them the proper way to say fuck, fucking, fuck you and motherfucker and I do hope it helped them in their own endeavors

Still, across the abyss of language and culture something happened.  I became friends with people who may have not known anything about the lower east side, but they knew a lot about heart and soul.  And they became friends with me - not the girl who might have been maybe running a bit too wild on 1970's New York night streets but with the beginnings of a self that was preparing to go write the world a story.

It's forty years later. 

Let me rephrase that.  It's fucking forty years later.

And I swear looking into each face -  no matter some of us have more hair or less hair (mostly less hair),  or if we are bigger or smaller (maybe a little bit of both) - there still is this indomitable aliveness and I see the place I became my own beginning.

In fucking Philadelphia.

**
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Ben's Birthday

Sunday Memories: Please, Mr. Postman....

Robert joined the Post Office in 1982.

He started delivering our mail shortly after.

He watched our lives change through the names that joined us on our boxes and the names that disappeared from our boxes. 

He saw hundreds of beautiful decorated letters arrive and witnessed their dwindling numbers as computers became our envelopes.

He dropped off packages at our doors, said hello to us by name and always asked how things were doing.

And seconds after I decided to give up my dreams, he was the one who rang my bell with a registered letter telling me I had won a grant and to cash the big check enclosed therein.  It took all his diplomacy to get the letter back so he could scan it.

He was there at the boxes while it poured outside or when the sidewalk buckled with heat.  He showed up in snow and he showed up on beautiful days that were meant for playing hookey. 

And he often took his last brief break of the day in the vestibule, where Olga would join him after work.  They'd sit and talk about grandchildren, children, work and life.

When she died, he came to her funeral and paid his respects.

How many of you know your postal delivery person by name?  

If you died, would he or she pay their respects?

Tom sent an email around the other day.  Robert was retiring and his last day was the next day.

Emails flew around the building, plans were quickly made, hearts broke and almost every mailbox held a card to Robert.  Thanking him for a life he spent putting catalogs and flyers and bills and sometimes even beautifully decorated letters into small boxes that let him know the mundane and the magnificent, the heartbreaks and joys in this old building.

**
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...and Justice for All

People began gathering at Union Square in solidarity with Baltimore.

The sound of four or five helicopters hovering over the Square got louder and louder and the intermittent police sirens got more and more frequent.

But the one sound more important than any sound this evening - the flapping of the American flag -  never stopped. 

**
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