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A Small Part at The New York City Opera
by Raul A. Reyes 02/26/2010Neighborhood: Upper West Side
The only thing I never liked about performing at Lincoln Center was the fake snow. During the years I worked at New York City Opera as a “supernumerary,” or stage extra, the tiny bits of confetti used for winter weather effect bugged me. I would be acting away, as much as possible without lines, while [...]
The Piano
by Raanan Geberer 09/14/2009Neighborhood: Across the River, Bronx
The old upright piano was in the living room from my earliest recollection until the day my father died. He must have brought it sometime in the early ‘50s, soon after he’d gotten married. Dad would spend hours playing Brahms, Schumann, Clementi, Chopin. At the end, he would always start playing an old Russian folk song [...]
The Sadistic Pleasures of the Guggenheim Café
by Thomas Beller 07/19/2009Neighborhood: Upper East Side
Sometimes I sit in the lunchroom of the Guggenheim Museum and write. If I can, I sit at the rear wall, where there are many framed black and white photographs of the museum’s benefactors, artists, and scenes of the museum’s construction. A bearded Brancusi sits with his dog; they resemble one another, both smiling. Thomas [...]
A Comic’s First Open Mike in NYC
by Clara Morris 11/18/2008Neighborhood: West Village
Some people take their High School Senior Superlatives a bit too seriously. No, I’m not talking about Mary, my class’s “Worst Driver,” devoting her life to turning over a new leaf as a professional chauffer. I’m talking about my very own “Class Clown” award spurring my standup comedy career. Ever since my first time performing comedy [...]
At the Minetta Tavern Without Joe Gould
by Roseann Lake 11/10/2008Neighborhood: West Village
He was puckish and presumptuous, impudent and ebullient; a bantam and bumptious, dastardly and delirious hand-out seeking hotdogger with a bare head, bushy beard, and bushels of personality. On many nights he could be found fast asleep on a bench in Washington Square Park, his belly careening with gin and ale that he had bamboozled [...]
Naked and Never Hungry: How I Come to Know This City
by Temim Fruchter 07/27/2008Neighborhood: Lower East Side
I don’t know what I’m doing here. It is a Thursday night and I am in a tiny Lower East Side theater at a dress rehearsal for the play I’m in where I am going to take all my clothes off. Now, generally, I don’t act and do not, by any means, take all my [...]
Little Devil
by Roberta Allen 07/01/2008Neighborhood: Upper West Side
After work on Tuesdays, my mother comes home to the apartment in the Ansonia Hotel where we live with my grandmother and takes me to acting class. The year is 1952. I hate acting class even worse than I hate second grade! My mother says I will learn how to speak with “charm and grace.” [...]
My Blue Period
by Daniel Krieger 06/22/2008Neighborhood: East Village
I was temping at a law firm, stocking the goodies that helped lawyers get through their miserably long days. My supervisor told me to be peppy when I brought them their Diet Cokes and cappuccinos, their Toblerones, Mrs. Field’s and macadamia nuts. But peppiness not being my forte, I performed my duties sullenly, and often [...]
The I of the Tiger
by Peter Wortsman 02/23/2008Neighborhood: Midtown
Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? –William Blake For years he sailed around the city, his effigy an urban fixture beaming from the side of a bus, the prototypical comic book superhero, blond, blue-eyed and brawny, toying with the tail [...]
Rules of Genius
by Frank Ventrola 01/19/2008Neighborhood: West Village
In the hiatus between semesters during my years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, I often decamped to New York City, ostensibly to find a job during the break, but really an inducement to be somewhere—anywhere—else. One hot summer day while plodding along the sidewalk of MacDougal Street south of Bleecker, I [...]
Elliott Gould and The Men In the Truck
by Tom Diriwachter 12/01/2007Neighborhood: Times Square
The American Theatre of Actors is located at 314 West 54th Street. The same building as Midtown Community Court. During the day, you have to pass through a metal detector to enter, emptying your pockets into a plastic tray and running your bag through an x-ray machine, under the supervision of NYPD. Fortunately, when court [...]
The Opening
by Roberta Allen 12/01/2007Neighborhood: Manhattan
In the gallery, I saw a woman on video shave her pubic hair and later, walk naked through Venice, but it turns out that I missed the best part of another performance piece in which an artist slowly releases a raw egg from her vagina, throws it at the screen where it smashes–as though in [...]
