Sunday Memories - Our Other TV

It was normal for our parents to take us to the Metropolitan Museum. Not sure why. Just was. Only recently I realized those big tableau paintings were, after Lang's fairy tale books, my illustrated bible stories, the Family Of Man photos, and Friday night at Gramma's, a way to see a movie of the passion I felt in my soul.

YELLING! SHOUTING! BABIES AND OLD PEOPLE CRYING! BIG BURLY MEN CARRYING BIG DELICIOUS WOMEN!!! WHAT'S GOIN' ON HERE!???!!


HAPPY MOMMY AND DELICIOUS BABY LOVED BY HAPPY MOMMY JUST LIKE ON TV!!!!


ANGELS AND MAGIC DO EXIST! THEY'RE GONNA MAKE IT ALL BETTER!!!


LOVE! LOVE!! THE GIRL LOOKS LIKE THE GIRLS IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD YOU KNOW BIG AND JUICY!!! LOVE IS POSSIBLE FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME!!!!!!!!!


WOW!!! LOOK!!! SHE'S IN THE MIDDLE OF A MYSTERY!!! LIKE JAMES BOND ONLY DIFFERENT!!!!!!



* All photos taken, possibly against the rules, at the Met this past Friday night.

GUEST ARTIST: DANA - The Sad Little Crone

Another one of Dana's short New York stories.

I seem to have trouble visualizing accurately how my face betrays my age. Especially when I hit a patch of exhaustion and my color drains completely. On my birthday I went to Trinity Church to hear a concert by a group called Alhambra. They specialize in Sephardic songs accompanied by very exotic instruments. Sensuous and rhythmic 14th and 15th century melodies. When they ended, I was caught in their spell. But hunger and fatigue had to be remedied. I crossed the street to a dingy pizza joint and ordered a large orange juice. Then I plopped down at a corner table to simply rest. I closed my eyes for a moment and awoke suddenly when a young Asian woman poked her nose in my face and asked tenderly “Are you all right?” followed by, “May I buy you some lunch?”

My first thought was “I really must buy a new winter coat. My God, I must look dowdy."

“No lunch, please.” I told her I was enjoying my birthday but just needed a little rest. Then I stood up and left the place. She followed me asking where I lived and how I was planning to travel home. I kept reassuring her that I would take the subway, as usual. She offered to escort me down the steps. I refused her kind help Then she put something in my right hand and ran into the crowd. I opened my hand to find a neatly folded $5 bill. I was truly shocked but also touched and somewhat ashamed at her judgment of me. Her compassion brought tears to my eyes. So that’s how I appear to her!

When I got home I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. There she was – the dear little old lady or perhaps the sad little crone needing a good meal. I swore I’d save that $5 bill forever. But I broke my vow 4 days later.

Like Summer In San Francisco

Staring at a street that used to be in a bad neighborhood, we sipped expensive coffee in designer cups and talked of the weather.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: ALL ABOUT DICK!

I'll be reading the first 12 pages of the new novel, ALL ABOUT DICK, which I started to keep me sane while finishing WIRE MONKEY. It did not keep me sane but now I'm in too deep to stop.

ALL ABOUT DICK: the night just perfect for love, that corner about to be turned, a really bad joke told by God


Writer's House Reading Series
Kettle of Fish
59 Christopher Street
New York, NY

June 24
7pm

with Carola Dibbel (bohemian slapstick!) and Elizabeth Smith (cowboys and tampons!)

Sunday Memories - Getting Out Of Town

Except for the rare trip on the Greyhound Bus to Philadelphia and later, after a purchase of a car, two trips to Atlantic City, leaving New York happened on public transportation - the F train to Coney Island or the Staten Island Ferry to... well... no where really. All we did was get off the ferry, run around the corner and reenter the terminal to wait to go back to recognizable land.

Later, when I had my own set of wheels - a three speed Raleigh bike - or enough carfare to take the Madison bus to the First Avenue Bus connection in Chinatown, that ferry ride because respite, refuge and freedom. I'd stand in the back of the boat as it slugged it out with the water and learned perspective. I lived in the most beautiful city in the world, on the most beautiful harbor in the world and I was going to be OK. Everything was going to be OK.

A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

In the tradition of Union Square's more than 150 year history as a meeting ground for social change, today's demonstration of Iranians and Iranian-Americans demanding a fair election in Iran.

Old School High Tech

Before ipods, before walkmans, before tvs, before cable, even before satellites left the world of sci-fi and went into the sky, it was a transistor radio stuck to your ear, the crackle of the announcer "foul... rbi... and he's... OH AND IT'S.... bullpen... " and the fiddling of the tiny dial not a button preset but a precise touch and turn that required the finesse of an ancient watchmaker.

Sunday Memories - Yeudi

This is how she looks today and it's also exactly how she looked 40 years ago when we met in 5th grade. She was one of the new girls transferred from PS 134 on East Broadway to PS 110 on Broome Street. She was exotic and worldly and exciting. She was clean and graceful and unwavering. I was a baby monkey on caffeine. I longed to be her elegant grace. I still do.

I had my first real birthday party at her house (it was a surprise). We suffered through the punches and grabbing and pushing at J.H.S. 56 together (she chased Willie Joe down Pitt Street after he sprayed her hair with Pledge. It was a fierce sight to behold.) And after that we went on to survived the High School of Performing Arts where the dancers and actresses ruled the boys and us musicians had to be inventive just to be seen. (I gave up and hid in the staircase during lunch for two years.) We ate, drank, and partied together and at some point in our late teens, maybe early early 20's, we were roommates in my first and only apartment. I still have her lamp, table and the dish, cup and bowl she left behind. She still looks like she lives here when she visits.

But what I remember most and always of Her New York was the day in 6th grade we got back our creative writing assignment. I don't remember what I wrote. But the moment I read hers my life changed. This, I remember thinking, is real writing. This is literature.

Little Mitzi and the Welbilt Stove

"What are you doing with your mother's stove? You going to sell it?"

(Actually it was more like "whatcha gonna do wit ya motha's stove ya gonna selit?")

Little Mitzi was finishing off a day of collecting signatures in front of Moishe's Bakery for I don’t know what.  We were walking back to the building she and Florence had lived in as neighbors on different floors for 50 years. She had been a school aide at PS 110 when I went there.

Talking to Little Mitzi, punctuation didn’t exist.  At least in the conventional way.

”I used to visit your mother we have the same stove a Welbit I lost some knobs she said here take one of mine I said NO! what are you going to do NO! keep your knobs NO! but if you're going to sell the apartment because they don't make those knobs anymore I called they said they don't make them anymore I love my Welbilt I used to visit your mother she was lonely she told me."

I promised to give her the knobs if we ever sold the apartment. When I asked to take her picture she said "No! I'm a very private person" and flounced out of the elevator.

New Home Edition!

Before


After

RAIN DELAY: Special Home Addition will be posted Tuesday Evening

Sunday Memories - The Domino Effect

What happened when in 1982 an ex-roommate from Holland told her best friend to come visit New York because we had a ton a space for guests:

January, 1982: Best Friend sits next to Strange Young Woman on plane and tells her "Oh I know a place you can crash at in New York."

Best Friend and Strange Young Woman show up at apartment after wild party. Beds made, pizza offered, party continues. Strange Young woman corners me as I make up guest beds and confesses she just met Best Friend. I think, "Oh God, we have a serial killer in our house.""

Strange Young Woman turns out to be funny and smart and a great gossip. We figure out a way to kick out Best Friend and keep Strange Young Woman.

We become great friends. I leave the United States for the first time and visit Strange Young Woman in Holland. I also find out they have toothpaste and toilet paper too.

Because of Strange Young Woman, I am introduced to Lesbian Nation, meet first, second, third girlfriends, get involved with Lesbian theater, become an actor, become a writer, go to graduate school, survive my return to dating men, become a film/video maker, go to another graduate school, visit Spain with Strange Young Woman, and together survive family weddings, gatherings, passages, memorials, heavy breakable ceramics we buy in whatever country we are in, drink, eat, gossip, grieve, walk, watch, consider, grow, bury, celebrate, survive break ups, break throughs, kittens, dogs, homes, ice cream, and shopping sprees of teeshirts...

Until...

One day it is not 1982 anymore. It is 2009. She is no longer the Strange Young Woman. She is family and it is 27 years later. From that one accidental meeting on a plane and her accidental stay at this home, my life became irrevacably changed and forced onto the road of its destiny.

Shelter From The Storm

It could be perched on top of a recycle bin by old windows.


Or around a conference table, the florescent lights becoming windows to a better way of living one day at a time.


And sometimes it's just a familiar bench by the bathrooms waiting for a movie to start.

Pets of Our Lives: Part 3 - Horses

Well, there were horses in fairy tales and history books. There were toy horses that raced across the bedroom floor. There were horses at the Metropolitan Museum although they just felt like blown up fairy tale horses. And although there were the $1 pony rides at the Central Park Zoo, I'm not counting them because they were just ponies the size of a big dog.

Then there were these horses, huge fierce powerful metal ones about to leap off the stone boxes and gallop into traffic. I didn't know the size of a real horse until later when I began to wander into neighborhoods that had mounted cops. And the first time I rode a horse, I was shocked. Those reins didn't feel like the handle bars of my bikes. So I returned to admiring the metal ones.

Sunday Memories - A Bridge to Groovy

The teacher in charge of us singing was one of the very few hippy teachers at P.S.110 on Broome Street in the 1960s. He had a mustache that wasn't like the Hasids' facial hair and wide lapels and he was lanky and moved fast and languid at the same time, not like the men in the neighborhood who moved in various forms of clenched misery or defeated surrender to beige meals and lives.

Our class was required to sing at some general assembly and I, who remember nothing, not what movies I have seen or books I have read or conversations I have had, still remember the words to the song he had us sing:

Slow down you're moving too fast
you gotta make the morning last
just kicking down the cobble stones
looking for fun and feeling....

*Simon and Garfunkel
59th Street Bridge Song

For All Other Things....

Clean biking clothes: zero dollars

Trader Joes brownies for Hostess: $3.49

Gas: $5.00

Going 80mph on the Ducati: *&#$&@# priceless


*thank you to Yvon Nives

A Day in the Life in Three Short Movements

Sunday Memories - On The Radio...

We had no TV. Florence was worried we wouldn't practice our violins if there was a TV in the house. Instead, we had lots of books, two record players, a small but substantial record collection and many, many radios. There were radios in the kitchen, living room, their bedroom and ours. There may have been even one in the bathroom.

Books were gotten at the library, but records were rare purchases. Besides, I was too little to travel to places that might have had record stores. And even if there had been one in the neighborhood, I had no money, my skill at stealing cash from my father to come much later. So if there was a song I wanted to hear, I'd have to wait to hear it on the radio.

So I clung to the little radio by my bed. Like some of my favorite books it was a portal out, even if I couldn't leave. Late at night it pressed to my ear I'd tune that dial so carefully, bring in WABC AM, my favorite station and wait as long as I could stay awake for the song I needed to hear.

And one summer The Edwin Hawkin Singers sang Oh Happy Day. And night after night I waited to hear a song about something so far from any thing I could recognize, yet singing something I heard in my heart, what I thought was a sound of joy and hope. Years later, like last night, in reading the lyrics I wonder how a little kid's brain could have understood the deeper lesson of watching, fighting and praying.

OH HAPPY DAY

He taught me how
He taught me
Taught me how to watch
He taught me how to watch
and fight and pray
fight and pray
yes, fight and pray

And he'll rejoice
and He'll, and He'll
rejoice in things we say
and He'll rejoice in things we say
things we say
yes, things we say

Oh happy day, Oh happy day
Oh happy day, Oh happy day
Oh happy day
Oh happy day

The Village

The apartment building spanned from one avenue to the next.

We were at a tiny rooftop party across the street.  Standing there, I felt like I was in that Fellini movie where all the little rowboats bobbing on the sea watch the huge ocean liner pass by.

Bernard gazed at the enormous building.   "It's probably the same size as a village." Since he is French, and France has villages, I assumed he was right.

Light from hundreds of TVs flickered across the hundreds of windows.   Bernard checked his phone again to see if Jacques left a message of when he’d be meeting us.

I took another picture. "They think their homes are unique and exclusive, but really they're just boxes."

Since I grew up in New York amongst sprawling apartment buildings of boxes piled on top of one another, Bernard assumed I was right.

We continued to wait for Jacques, watch the soccer club of middle-aged guys mug for pictures and count how many TVs were being turned on and off.

"One Day I Wrote A Sentence"

How Dana, Guest Writer, started writing.

Ghost Longing (excerpt)

“His homecoming every night was thrill enough for me because his physical presence was sexually provocative. I loved the intimate challenge of living with a stranger. Present, but not completely knowable.”

Sunday Memories - Mother's Day Then

I remember the day because it involved a car.

Maybe I was 10 or 11. My father had not been transferred out to Long Island yet so we had no car. I don't think he even knew how to drive until the transfer. And the only person I knew who did own a car was the uncle of a little boy I played with. That uncle's car had windows that rolled up and down on their own. The uncle's hands rolled up and down on their own as well. Since he hadn't been around the neighborhood in years there were no cars to speak of in my every day life.

Until that Mother's Day.

Paula's father had a car. I am not sure how we all knew where to meet or who was going (since using the telephone was expensive and discouraged in my house) but somehow I weedled my way into the crowded back seat with the girls from the better co-ops by the river so that we could all travel uptown to buy our mothers a mother's day present. A plant.

Prior to this particular Mother's Day, presents consisted of a bottle of perfume that had a tiger skin covered cap and a pair of cooking tongs (used for the next 40 years - don't know about the perfume). After this particular Mother's Day, presents consisted of Mom's request we stop calling her Mom and start calling her Florence.

But on this Mother's Day 'Mom' and presents were still allowed and to have a rare car ride included in the mix was heavenly.

It was cloudy and even a bit cold. The streets were empty and this little store was the only thing open on the block. The selection was dazzling. But to this day I have no memory if I bought anything or not, knowing Florence's dread of any living being that might require her attention. I also have no idea how I had any money, it being highly unlikely my father would have given me any. A vague shimmer of a little cactus for a $1 sometimes swims in my eyes. Regardless, those lost details seemed so unimportant compared to the adventure itself.

And then as all things do, things changed. Mom became Florence, home became other places and plants became exotic and exciting pets that didn't need to be fed every day. I'm not exactly sure when this happened, but one day, a few decades in to living where I now live, I realized the beautiful little plant store around the corner was the very spot of that rare day.


THE FLOWER STALL
143 East 13th Street
NYC

Cornell Edwards, Proprietor
212.780.0980

http://citysnapshots.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/placeshot-the-flower-stall/

Standing Witness

***
BLACK MADONNA
May 6 to August 1, 2009

HP Garcia Gallery
580 8th Avenue, 7th Floor
NYC
hpgarciagallery.com

Pets of Our Lives: Part Two - Squirrels

They were exotic beauties rarely seen unless we went uptown to Central Park. I'd squeal and jump up and down at the sight of one, prompting my father to spit under his breath, "rats with fuzzy tails, that's all they are..."

Still, to me they were as magical as the fairy princesses in the picture books. Yet when Mrs. Fass at P.S. 110 on Broome Street gave me my first reader, "squirrel" was the one word I couldn't remember how to read. It was such a foreign concept.

Now, they are all over the city - the courtyard where I grew up, Union Square, Bleeker Street. And all I see are rats with fuzzy tails. Even with therapy, I've become my father.

Sunday Memories - Night Office

It was 1980 or 81. Computers had just been introduced into small crowded room filled with clerical workers willing to punch the same things over and over again. Some important company with a name that included Dynamic had a small room it needed crowded but only at night. They were paying a ton of money, $7 an hour when the good going rate was more like 4 or 5. That the Dynamic part of the name was rumored to have something to do with nuclear submarines was troubling but the money was too good, the hours too perfectly situated after the day job and the relaxed dress code just right. As darkness fell, a small group of us would take our places in front of bulky clumps of terminals, face green screens with tiny pulsing cream colored numbers and letters, and with occasional trips to vending machines suddenly more affordable, tap away.

Same *&@*#$ Corner

...stopping by B. Altman's to see someone I thought was a friend the clothes too expensive for me to buy coming from City College on the bike trying to beat the red light so I could barrel down on that hill past 34th beating the bus avoiding the construction on 33rd standing on the corner waiting to cross 5th year after year after year headed to a job sustaining me while slowly killing me that Wednesday night late no one out but me walking off furious tears heartbreak and hopelessness who cares if the Empire State Building was a block away a rut carved into this stretch of city...

The Normal Heart

She's a housing activist.

He's an artist.

There was a time when many a friend and neighbor used to be just like them. Times, friends and neighbors are different now. Still, he's managed to hold onto his apartment, but his studio is now surrounded by luxury stores. She had to move to Brooklyn, but she swears she is happy there.

Sunday Memories - ... Coming of Age

It seemed normal at the time because in New York that's what you did at the neighborhood bar. You brought your kids, your kid brother, your kid sister, whoever... after all that's how I went to the bar the first time. Florence took me. I was 17.

So for me to bring Sissy to the bar when she was 12 was no big deal. (Well, she did look 14.) And it's not like I let her drink or get too interested in all the very grown men flirting with her. (Well, to them she did looked 18 and that was legal drinking age back then.)

Now Sissy got three children and she says she's not letting them visit me until they're 30. Well, it's not like I would take them to bar or anything. For one thing, I barely drink these days. And for another thing, there's just not enough other kids hanging out at the bar anymore to keep them company.

Home Is Where The Heart Is

Before she lived here, Dany lived uptown when it wasn't fancy fancy. Just kinda fancy. More importantly, she knew her train lines by their proper names, not what color they were.

Then when she was seventeen, she moved in and learned many things about living downtown. More importantly, she knew which ice cream and cake to get when sodden with one too many drinks. That was many, many years ago and drink, ice cream and cake are now infrequent treats, but she still looks seventeen. Annoying, but true.

One day she moved out and became a scientist. This was very surprising to me because I didn't know people who became scientists. I didn't know any girls who became scientists. Writers, yeah. But scientists? I had read a book once about girl scientists. Well, one girl scientist. Great American Women, Chapter Fourteen: Madame Curie. And Curie died on the job.

Dany didn't do that. Instead she fell in love with tidepools, blew up worms, and is now growing tadpoles with two tails. She is going find the cure for cancer or stupidity... one of them. Or maybe something even more important than either of those.

But, more importantly, she still calls this one of her homes. How we began then is how we continue now. And really, after 30 years, that's all that counts. I mean, beside finding the cure for cancer.... or stupidity.

Taxi

He talked as fast as he drove.

And as we barreled down Fifth Avenue at 1:30 in the morning the history of New York and the art of bowling unfolded through stories of his family and his passion and pride for being one of the best amateurs with 19 consecutive strikes one late night up in the Bronx.

Sunday Memories - The Bar: Part Two - I Call Your Name*

When cell phones didn't exist and home answering machines had cassette tapes, when there was no such thing as voice mail, and texting meant typing a letter on a typewriter, this bar's telephone booth was my starship of an attempt to reach out and touch someone. The third martini was my fuel and with a finger swirling I took flight, drunk dialing Florence or my father or errant lovers across the country to tell them all how much I loved them.


*I Call Your Name (The Beatles)

...Oh I can't sleep at night, but just the same I never weep at
Night I call your name, I call your name...

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: THE LUNCHEONETTE HAS BEEN SELECTED FOR THE PEN & BRUSH CONTEMPORARY EXPRESSIONS

THANK YOU ALL FOR HELPING ME WITH THIS CONTEST!

PEN AND BRUSH
16 East 10th Street
New York, NY 10003

The opening reception for the Contemporary Expressions show will be on Thursday, May 28, from 4:00 to 7:00.

As Time Goes By...

Twelve years of Lombardi pizza (six years in finally admitting I couldn't eat mushrooms), always red wine, tea, tarts and tarot cards and the conversation ages as we do, from workouts and diet to incoming babies to milestones of survival to new love to lost love to elderly parents to great leaps of faith to life.

Beauty In The Eye of...

Any bar that's a real bar has her over the cash register. This bar has had her there since the 1970's and I'm sure my cigarette smoke is part of the layer of grime that coats her.

I don't know if she has a name or if each bar names her themselves. I just know that at 12:09 on a Sunday night  - or Monday morning if you’re really going to be a dick about it - sitting at the bar by myself and recapturing the weekend's highs and the lows of perseverance and loneliness, I find it reassuring to see a voluptuous woman command such respect and radiate such beauty.

Sunday Memories - Where We All Now Live

What is it about stuff, a friend writes. The haunting of stuff discarded from her mother's house or the boxes of stuff imbued with her soul , what she calls evidence of who she has been, what she has done, now tucked away in her attic.

"I think, if they were gone, I would still be me, wouldn't I?"

I have briefly stop sifting through the remnants of Florence's and her mother Sophie's life because it's like finding the only proof that a once great pyramid stood are three teeny tiny pieces of rubble.

Or this crossroad of our family... not yet metamorphosed into Chinatown by fleeing immigrants... my grandmother, my other grandmother, both my grandfathers, my aunts, my uncles, my father, my mother, my sister, myself walked, often at night, stores closed, conversations murmured, sometimes pork buns eaten from Hoy Hung on Mott Street, that sign is just a teeny tiny piece and if I didn't see it would all that had happened still be remembered?

Jutta's Kitchen Meets The Internet

George and Jutta met when they were both quite young, just past teenage-hood but not by much. He was a Jewish refugee from Berlin via Palestine. He came to New York and stayed with his aunt, also a refugee. Jutta's family, Germans, welcomed the refugees into their home, 88th Street or 89th on the Upper West Side, then still a neighborhood of modest incomes and new immigrants. Friendships grew. When WWII started, he enlisted and was part of the troops that liberated a concentration camp.

After the war, new marriages, new homes and new lives separated these two old friends.

Decades passed.

Then Al Gore invented the internet. And one day, fifty years later, Jutta mentioned George's name and wondered if there was a way to find him on the computer. A half-hour search and these two old friends spoke to each other once again.

Three Decades At Veselka's

At this restaurant I wrote a huge book of miserable poetry, sat at a rickety old table with a milkshake and begged the ex-girlfriend of the artist I was crazy for to explain to me the secret of loving him, stared at the mural artist for decades wondering when he was going to put me in his pictures, and spent years at 3am in the morning staring into coffee and tea cups wondering if art and love was worth it because it all hurt too damn much.

But now billions of minutes later, here a new year, a different medium, an unfolding life that says yes art and love are still worth the effort I invite Joel to try the borscht I needed to eat before I performed, and so I ate that borscht for 10 years, night after night after night.

Joel, in turn shows me new pictures of his new love and the places they visited I have only seen on TV and we machine-gun rapid ideas and concepts and feedback and then even more ideas. We both have our cameras out and snap furiously at each other. And thirty years later love and art are still on the table.