Her Cheers In Her New York

She's a regular at this Irish sports bar and restaurant where all the locals clinging to their neighborhood go to.

The waiter knows her name, her favorite booth, and the fact that she has been having trouble sleeping.

Even though she comes in almost every night and even though it is a casual establishment, she still dresses for dinner. A sharp suit, carefully selected button earrings with a matching necklace and bracelet and a very nice purse she obviously has had for years.

This bar is loud with jovial voices and announcers shouting scores and the clatter of burger platters, potato skins, grilled chicken, onion rings and fries. The waiter leans down to hear her describe the new sleeping pill her doctor gave her. He then helps her to her feet, kisses her good night on the cheek and guides her through the crowd of all the other regulars from the neighborhood, one where everyone knows everyone's name.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Why I Still Write

I still write because I am inspired and fired up by Ela Thier's workshops (I've taken several and each time my work gets better and better and better).

Otherwise, the joy from knowing how to build a story would have withered away from lack of knowledge.

If you want to attend a FREE evening workshop, then see below:


FROM ELA THIER:

Back by popular demand!

It's been over a year since I've offered a free screenwriting workshop. The time has come for another one:

If you haven't sampled my workshops yet and are wondering why everyone is raving about them, this workshop is free and open to the public. If you've attended my free workshops in the past, I've made many changes to my presentation and you're in for a treat.

Writers at all levels of experience are welcome to attend.

TIME:
Thursday, July 1
6:30-9:30

PLACE:
University Settlement Community Center
184 Eldridge St, Manhattan, NY

Reservations are required.

Six Brief Moments Of PS 139's Fifth Grade Graduating

Sunday Memories: The First Home

When the younger one was dying, even with her life filled with tons of decades fully rooted in a loving, embracing community in a city she wasn't born in, she wanted her older sister. They weren't on the easiest of terms or necessarily best friends. But even if nothing was left to it except her older sister holding her hand the younger sister wanted to go back home.

Years later, when the older one, in a California nursing home that looked like a country club, began to forget things like how to eat or why it was even important to eat, she would greet her brother every daily visit with the same question. When would they be going back to Henry Street? When would they be going back home? A cold water, rat-infested tenement. That was home.

He now clings to a spiderweb of little lists that are his daily memory. What doctor when. Who is coming on what day. Where did he put what he can't remember he was looking for. Yet siting on the couch uncertain of the last five minutes or the next five minutes, home becomes sharp and specific and stories about Home like those of his sisters come tumbling out.

It's A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood...

Ed, Mary and their dog, Butta hanging out on their stoop old school style the way the old ladies and sometimes the old men did on Grand Street in their beach chairs talking to everyone reminding them hey you are in our neighborhood you are in your neighborhood I'm your neighbor so I'm gonna talk to you whether you like or not and sure enough just like the old days in old neighborhoods all over the city, everyone talked back with Ed, Mary and their dog, Butta.

And Butta got a lotta love. As she should.

Time Flies When...

It was supposed to be a brief meal.

Four hours later, I was still laughing too hard to write down everything Dana said.

But she had been warned. When one encounters a better writer than oneself one can only rip off said writer in self defense.

On certain attempts of style:

"He combs his hair with a washcloth."

On the insults of aging and limited mobility:

"I could fool anything but a flight of stairs."

On the fact her doctor is moving her office right across the street from her apartment:

"I won't be late if there's no red light."

And last, but not least, on our favorite actor:

"He's a walking sex experience."

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Encores of Early Posts

SUNDAY, MARCH 30, 2008

Sunday Memories: In three acts G dies in Manhattan in 1993

I

He’s at Cabrini on 19th Street.

The nurse who loves him the most is six feet tall and has just finished becoming a woman.

She could pick Frazier up when he was bigger and now, as he dwindles into the bed, she still swoops him up into her arms and we can all see how much he has left from how small he is in her arms.

His family comes in from Queens to visit. Four of his six brothers are wearing his suits. They are either too tall or too short, too thin or too fat for the suits. Looking at them in Frazier’s clothes is like looking at Frazier in funhouse mirrors.

When they leave, Frazier turns to Michael.  “Couldn’t they have just waited until I died?,” he asks.

II

I turn the corner onto 14th Street to go to the wake at the funeral home and see the big straight brother who hates gay people beating the shit out of the thin delicate gay brother who in his own words is “a screaming queen”.

Somebody calls the cops.

The gay brother’s suit, formerly Frazier’s, is ripped in many places.

III

It’s the day of the funeral. I turn onto 14th Street to go to the church across the street from the funeral home.

Cop cars line the street. My heart sinks. It’s only 10 in the morning.  More trouble already?

When I get to the steps of the church I find out it’s just Law and Order setting up for a shoot later on in the day.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Encores of Early Posts

Encore posting from the early days show the more things change, the more things...


Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Why I Miss The 70's


Like Brittany Spear's vulva, her wallet stuck out and begged to be taken.

I leaned over and said, "Miss, your wallet is going to be stolen."

She gave me that arrogant thank-fuck you of all those who moved here more than six years ago, but not before it was safe enough to walk down the street without getting your ass kicked in. 1996? 97?

I sat there and rued the day Florence caught me stealing, had me return the penny gum to the newspaper-candy store on Delancey, apologize to the owner and then made me promise never to steal again.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Encores of Early Posts

Encore posting from the early days show the more things change, the more things...

Thursday, April 24, 2008

He Could Say It In Four Languages If He Wanted To


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."

Sunday Memories: When We Were Young

The family was still in Bushwick...



...before the money really ran out, before the beatings got worse and more frequent, before they had to move to Henry Street on the Lower East Side...



...where the rats were bigger than Mitzi the dog.



In those Brooklyn days being left handed was not allowed. He was sent home for not knowing how to write with his right hand.

And of course on the first day of school, his name, a Hebrew one, was changed to an English one.

The Fountain of Youth

There was no such thing as bottled water. Just bottled cola. And maybe juice.

And these were the perfect height if you were little but now you have to do yoga to get closer to getting a drink. Which is still just as warm as it was then.

School's Out For Summer

Stairwells were the subways to our classes, filled with pushing and shoving, the dreaded chance collision with the boy everyone had a crush on, the bully everyone feared, or news of the big people's world like the older brother who came back from Woodstock covered with mud (we were all really interested in the mud part).

It was on that last day, everything draining out from the school these old walls and stair emerged into view.

Sunday Memories: Part Three: Home Where My Love Lies Sleeping

The last in a series to visit when on the road which is where I have been for a week or so.



Happy Memorial Day, a day where we honor fallen soldiers of many wars, some that happened between apartment walls, others inside a hidden broken heart.

Part Two: Home Where My Love Lies Sleeping

A series to visit when on the road....


...which is where I am for the next week or so.

Part One: Home Where My Love Lies Sleeping

A series to visit when on the road....


...which is where I am for the next week or so.

Sunday Memories: Part Six: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Me. 1976.



How did I know I needed this corner? I didn't know what it was I was supposed to be doing in that corner. I wasn't anything but a kid who didn't know I was a kid, paying rent, going to a deadend job and only allowing myself to dream of a future when everyone else was asleep.

But something deeper and smarter than myself pushed me one night in those early days to borrow an old drill, get brackets and, while listening to Jean-Luc Ponty and aching from loneliness from a recently departed stab at love, put up shelves and start to fill them to stuff to remind me I was actually going to use that corner in all its incarnations for the rest of my life.

Part Five: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.



Kosky

For fifteen years he has walked the gaunlet of competing lights from two Indian restaurants to get to his front door and to a room that on its own might be generous but stuffed with the important elements of an apartment - a kitchen, a bathroom, a small alcove pretending to be a bedroom but barely able to accomodate a bed - it is small. Quiet, filled with gentle curry smells, but small.

In the early days of internet, his dial-up would hog the phone line. So while the file was uploading or downloading, he'd run downstairs to one of the two payphones to discuss what was being sent and then run upstairs to check on the progress and then back downstairs to the payphone to continue discussing and then back upstairs...

Now the payphones are gone, internet whizzes through the air, and he uses a cell. And now looking around he yearns for just one separate room. Just one. A room where he can't see every corner of the apartment, or where, when he reaches his arms out wide, he doesn't bump into the kitchen.

Part Four: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Victoria



It had originally been one of only a couple of rooms in an apartment in a building filled with squatters on a block with lots of drug dealers and she was a single woman.

But then the neighborhood changed, and she got a union day job and then a husband and then a baby and then another baby and then another apartment below and then one day twenty or so years later each one had a room of their own. And this room was hers.

And when she steps into this room to paint, either during brief weekend afternoons or on the night shift, fear of failure stays outside and she can go face a painting that is pissing her off.

There is nothing in this room she can do wrong.

The Night Shift

Sunday Memories: Part Three: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Florence


This was the only place in the apartment she ever looked like she could breathe.

She started practicing between 9 and 10am. When I was little and on rare occasions came home for lunch, she would quickly make french toast and returned to practicing. When I got bigger and wasn't in risk of setting the house on fire, on those rare days, I made my own french toast.

After school it was my turn in that room and I practiced the piano (until one rare day I refused to) and the violin (which was the price I paid to not practice the piano anymore).

And when all that was done and some dinner put in front of me or my sister or both, Florence returned back to practicing until it got dark enough for neighbors to complain.

No one ever did.

Part Two: Home Work

A series on the home we give our work.

Adrian

I’ve made things ever since I can remember. By the age of 5, I was happily drawing perfect horses on demand for family members. In those days, crowded into a home with 7 other people, I drew anywhere and on anything I could get my hands on. Even then, drawing was an essential part of who I was

My first studio, the first space I could physically walk into, close the door and focus on only creating work was in New York 25 years later. Having cleared my world of many of the obstacles that repressed my art-making, it was here in this studio that I set forth to clear the mental obstacles that remained. More important than the drawings, videos, curtains and dresses that I made in that space is the personal growth the space allowed.

This is what my office space looked like in Brooklyn, NY, 2007.


This is what the space looks like in my head.


superadriancito