Nostalgia for Naivete

When I first arrived in NYC in 1997, I thought I was only catching up to a friend of mine who had already bravely entered 4 years earlier, part of NYU.  She had a head start on bravery and balls, on going to parties and drinking and doing drugs. Everyone I thought was cool ended up going to AA before they graduated college.

I don't regret all the drugs I didn't take. I'm glad to be ignorant of that, of all the stuff we do to ourselves before we even embark on our life mission.

All those dark kids, those who felt comfortable at night, hanging out in doorways, enough money to go out drinking & with money left over for cigarettes.

How cute we all were, thinking that our drama was dangerous. That the plot and the in-jokes were a secret we kept from the audience.  Only after theater & art going (MOMA) and parties where everyone was trying to shock everyone else, and everyone was trying not to be shocked.

It was the best education.  A finishing school for my later return to the city, My Dinner With Andre. New Yorker Sundays, listening to Jonathan Schwartz while watching the Hudson River from the 8th floor.

It was so exciting, we were all so young, even the dirty air smelled like electricty.  Before things were torn down to make way for glass and steel stripped of history, of graffitti and the layers of paint.  We enjoyed the wealth of a space that everyone else had abandoned. Until it got sold. Collective Unconscious.  Surf Reality. (Nada Surf?) Nada Surf Reality.

And Ohio....

Gilmore Girl dejavu

In this last (final) 4 movies of the Gilmore Girls, we find Rory going crazy & aimless (here & there) because she does not have a "real job" because she is a writer.

Even the crappy website which has even courting her turns out to be an overhyped flop. She returns to her moms hotel room after a one night stand (2hr?) with a Wookie. Engaged bfriend in London.

And she doesn't want to admit to being "back" in Stars Hollow.

Sound familiar anyone?

*There's even a Thirtysomething group of kids just like her, who have returned from the outside world.

Performance & Publication

Big month!! 

Published a short story in the Morris- Jumel Mansion Anthology ("The Making of A Modern Woman")

And doing a monologue from my series of short stories currently called "Imaginary Friends and Other Enemies" (info below)

GOLDEN FLEECE LTD.
THE COMPOSERS CHAMBER THEATRE
Lou Rodgers, Producing Artistic Director

presents

THE ARGONAUT SERIES

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2016 AT 8:00 PM
ARGONAUT SERIES #74 (PLAYWRIGHTS IN PROGRESS)

Presenting Playwrights:

Sal Anzalone
Stuart R. Brown
Julia Genoveva
Lou Rodgers
Tammy Rose

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Studios 353
353 West 48th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), 2nd Floor, New York, NY

FOR RESERVATIONS AND INFORMATION, CALL (212) 691-6105.

There is a naivate

Girls come to the city

(Boys enter the house)

They come they come

fresh from the midwest, with the best cynical face they can put on

Trying to stay open and judgemental

The tyranny of taste, keep up or reject it, but you cannot ignore it.

All with short hair, cute short hair.

A smarter version of themselves from back home.

NYC as a Time Travel Mechanism

Walking by a (de)struction site, you can smell 1963.

Or at least the smell of decay and generations of inhabitants.

There are many buildings, like people, who have seen better days, and other ones with newfound (and probably temporary) wealth.

There are museums, for those that want to travel officially and a lot more corners and people who have not been discovered.

The archeological digs may require a shovel, or a conversation.

It is up to you to find all the time capsules.

Thoroughly Modern Millie

What kind of production has Chinese supertitles?

Chinglish by David Henry Hwang?

Yes, the first major Bway production (drama) that has Chinese spoken onstage.

The first musical has a strong series of Chinese stereotypes.

Pity, because it's the epitome of the "naive yet determined young girl going to the city".  Other shows include Wonderful Town. And LOTS of Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd comedies.

Cabaret

Funny how we all believed that Stanton & Ludlow was the center of the world.

We were all deeply embedded in the idea of the glory of backstage. Some of us were beautiful and wanted the spotlight, some of us were shy and could pass for cute.

Everything was a Caberet, and since we couldn't afford to buy things and enjoy them sitting at the bar, we worked on the other side and embezzled whenever we could.

It was history not repeating itself, but rythming. A beautiful group of young kids, like in Berlin 1931. 

We were there in the late 90's.

Before the turn of the century.

Before 9/11.

Yard Sales & Imagining NYC

Albums:

And then the New Yorker & NYTimes, to be read in an urbane manner.

In a rich apartment, overlooking the river.

Thoreau in NYC

"It's a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there"

He was on Staten Island, living with Emerson's Brother & tutoring his kid (story there!!)

You can always see home more clearly when you are away from it.

And the city is too hectic to visit, just for a day.

Vaudeville is Alive & Well on Orchard St!!

Trav SD has done it again!!

At a fundraiser for I'll Say She Is!! The Marx Bros musical, he offered several different acts!

A ventriloquist, a stripper, a vocal acrobat, a prestidigitator and the Marx Bros all walk into the Slipper Room.

The real frights were outside, the block along Houston St which is GONE.

RIP Bereket & the pizza parlor with the wax cups stacked until they sagged in a half circle above the servers.

The Flapper's Guide to the Lower East Side

What if a girl came to NYC, only having seen "Thoroughly Modern Millie"?

And "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"?

And "Breakfast at Tiffany's"?

Would she be a time traveler if she lived in the modern world, but didn't have a digital life?

Could she put on everyone around her?

Like a Kimmy Schmidt, but with no references to the internet?

Dr Sanderson?? Help, please.

Do you stay or do you go?

Is it great to be living in the city, even when it hits the depths of your loneliness?

When all your friends are selfish?  And you are sick of sleeping on the floor?
Or is it your first and best taste of independance??

What a choice.

Katz's Deli as an Ad for Samsung Pay

I remember it as an ancient business on the Jewish Lower East Side.  I was doing a project in college, investigating a neighborhood in the big city, trying to figure out history.

(Things would have been different if I had gone to NYU, when each of the streets was part of the campus)

And then, during Fringe, it was the "anchor" business of the neighborhood, like the largest store in a near empty mall.  On Ludlow street, there was "The Piano Store", with one baby grand still in the window, and then we tore things down to the beams.  I walked into a rehearsal room that was all plywood.

There was a hpster bar called Standard Notions, and Amy's Hat Store, kittykorner across from El Sombrero.  (Really).

There were fireplugs that were painted pschedelic colors, and nobody had any cash in their pockets because they were all poor college students, some of which escaped from Barnard without a college degree (or someone like me, who graduated from a lesser school-having already had my nervous breakdown in high school)