A Barney's window display of Lady Gaga's work has legendary multi-media performance artist Colette's notorious creations written all over it.

Colette, whose seminal performance art and multi-media installations originated out of New York City's vibrant art scene in the 1970's has traveled to museums and galleries all over the world; including the Guggenheim; MOMA; and The Whitney.

Upon seeing Barney's Lady Gaga window display in midtown, Colette takes to the streets in protest to send a clear message to the Gaga camp that Colette is standing outside the door and must be invited in and given proper respect.

It took me a few moments to make sense of the situation. The man on the steps was a puppet-maker, and he was presenting a proposal to spend about $1,500 of the movement’s money on art supplies for the construction of large puppets. These puppets, he explained, would join the occupiers’ upcoming march on Times Square. Behind him, a ghostly puppet of the statue of liberty stood about 7 feet high, head and hands made of paper mache, body made of sheets. Many members of the crowd wiggled their fingers to show their approval of the plan.

“As an artist,” said a voice without a body. "AS AN ARTIST!" shouted the crowd. “I respect this proposal.” (I RESPECT THIS PROPOSAL!) “But as an activist” (BUT AS AN ACTIVIST!) “I can’t forget” (I CAN’T FORGET!) “That people are starving here.” (THAT PEOPLE ARE STARVING HERE!)

The puppet maker nodded sympathetically before responding. “But if we do not fund the arts” (BUT IF WE DO NOT FUND THE ARTS!) “my concern is” (MY CONCERN IS!) “who will?” (WHO WILL!?)

This was the human microphone, also known as “the people’s microphone”. One person speaks, and the surrounding people echo in unison; the crowd functions as a bullhorn for the individual.

The human mic imposes a set of formal limitations that shape the way communication is happening within the movement. If you want to say something, you have to know exactly what you are going to say and how you are going to say it before you open your mouth. That may sound, initially, like a self-evident prerequisite of speech. But think about all the particles and modifiers and interjections and digressions that normally punctuate improvisatory human speech: um, like, so anyway, whatever, uh, yeah, hmm, by the way, which reminds me, etc. There is no room for these at the General Assembly. You have to minimize waste and maximize content. You have to economize.

You also have to impose line breaks. The people (your microphone) can’t parrot more than a few iambs of unmemorized speech, so you must staccato-cize your sentences, pausing after each fragment for the crowd’s echo. The result is poetry. Witness the following stanza, extemporized by an anonymous woman:

As someone who used to work
In Times Square
I happen to know they have
A lot of horse cops.

Or this, spoken by a frustrated young man standing on a table:

I’m waiting for something to happen
And when that thing doesn’t happen
I’m disappointed.

At Occupy Wall Street, it’s hard to distinguish between functional and performative speech. If you close your eyes, a General Assembly can pass for a poetry reading, like the one I attended at the park on October 14th. The reading was organized exactly like a GA meeting: Anyone could stand up and read, and the surrounding audience repeated each line. Eileen Myles, former director of the St. Marks Poetry Project, performed a poem called “Anonymous”:

No I’m the poet
No you’re the poet
No he’s the poet
No they’re the poet
No she’s the poet
No that’s the poet
No this is the poet
No I’m the poet
(repeat)

Myles repeated this sequence several times over, and by the end she was jumping excitedly at each emphasized pronoun, and the audience was also jumping and shouting each line back to her, echoing her hoarse fervor.

She told me afterwards that she had written “Anonymous” specifically for this forum. “I was compelled by the human microphone as an incredible medium for writing for the group,” said Myles. “It’s kind of very ancient, to assume you have a chorus to read your lines. [Occupy Wall Street] is the first real talking back in a long and awful growing silence. So to be a poet writing into that space is to really have a job, and to have an audience that is the voice for the work as well.”

So in one sense, the human microphone is a crude, makeshift tool born of necessity: In New York City you need a permit to amplify sound electronically. In another sense it is an immensely powerful and multifarious metaphor. It is a metaphor for the vision of this movement, a governmental body that transforms the “I” of the individual into a larger, collective “I”. But even as it embodies the project of democracy, the human mic throws into relief the difficulties that plague its practice. Sometimes the individual “I” is  at odds with the collective.

From its beginnings in early September, the Occupy movement has been trying to model direct democracy, a form of government in which “the people” speak and decide for themselves, rather than appointing substitutes – congressmen, senators, lobbyists, commanders-in-chief - to speak and decide for them. Anyone can participate in the General Assembly, wherever it is being held; anyone can present a proposal and anyone can block a proposal, forcing the assembly to postpone a decision.

After about twenty minutes of redundant dialogue between the puppet-maker and the crowd, a man in a baseball hat suddenly leapt onto a chair and began yelling. “People are homeless! Do something substantial with the money, something that’s actually symbolic!”

For some reason the crowd did not repeat these words, maybe because his speech was too fast and passionate; he was not pausing to allow for echoes. “Let this man speak,” someone yelled, “he has something to say!”

Just like that, the order dissolved. The crowd was shifting and murmuring; strings of words, rather than being amplified and heard, were proliferating in distinct pockets. No one held the strings; the puppet was being pulled in many directions, about to be torn apart. “Mic check,” someone screamed. MIC CHECK! screamed the crowd.

Here was an ideologically diverse community of thousands, all with separate complaints, congregated in 33,000 square feet of park, the buzz of anger hovering in the atmosphere like charged particles after a big bang of creation. And this place was loud: Cars were honking, a jackhammer was hammering, there was a drum circle on the western steps. And you have a governmental model in which every voice counts equally. Abstracted, direct democracy is a breathtakingly simple idea. Standing on the corner of Broadway and Liberty, it was a logistical nightmare.

The facilitator of the meeting, a young black woman wearing an oversized striped sweater, spoke: “I personally respect this process!”

“That’s because it benefits you!” These words came from the center of the crowd. The boy (or man) was in his late teens or early twenties. He was thin but strong-looking, with a ruffled brown mohawk and a raspy voice. He had been sitting on the ground, but he now stood up. “You are an academic,” he said.

Mohawk boy: I do not respect the mob.
Crowd: I DO NOT RESPECT THE MOB!
Mohawk boy: My humble request is that you stop speaking for me.
Crowd: STOP SPEAKING FOR ME!
Mohawk boy: Please stop.
Crowd: PLEASE STOP!

“Respectfully,” said the facilitator, “this is not the time/ to make proposals. This is the time / for clarifying questions / related to this proposal.” The puppet-maker nodded his approval.

The puppet-maker nodded his approval.

“There is never a time for love in this community,” cried the boy with the mohawk. A space had cleared around him, and he was swiveling in it, appealing to those nearby. No one repeated is words. “There is only a time for agendas. It’s an insiders' group,” he roared, as though he was going to cry.

“It’s open to anyone,” said the facilitator. IT’S OPEN TO ANYONE! echoed the crowd. “Lies!” screamed the mohawk boy. “Forgive my passion! Lies! Forgive me. Forgive me.” Then he headed for the periphery of the circle, where a young woman was waiting to give him a hug. After the hug he began talking heatedly to a tall blonde wearing a leather jacket.

The facilitator leaned forward and clasped her hands. “This is what / direct democracy looks like. / It’s not always easy, / it’s not always comfortable, / but right now/ it sure looks beautiful. / So thanks for sticking with it.”

“I’m still here,” said the boy with the mohawk, now standing at the edge of the crowd.

“And we love you for it!” said someone. Everyone echoed.

Jean Garnett lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up. She works at a literary agency and is pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction at The New School.

Sunday afternoon, hours before the play begins, Chola leaves church at the end of the Mass. She has received communion and now walks with her teacher, Sister Ramona, to the Dominican Sisters' convent which is to the left of the old grey-stone church built in 1886. In the role of the parish school principal she will dress in a set of garments, a costume that looks very similar to the holy habit worn by Dominican Sisters for hundreds of years.

Chola will be dressed by Sister Ramona and Sister Anthony in the common room in the convent. I wait for her in the school auditorium for over an hour before the play, eyes fixed, heart beating with great expectation. When Chola enters the auditorium she wears a black cotton tunic, the holy habit, that covers her body and falls to her ankles. A round shaped stiff white collar, a gimp, surrounds her neck and shoulders. It is heavily starched and extends outward and away from her body. A belt made of woven black wool tightens the habit around her waist. Wooden rosary beads, large and small, hang from her belt to help her count her prayers. A large silver cross hangs from a black cord around Chola 's waist. Jesus hangs from the cross. His head is down so I know he is dead.

Chola 's arms are fully covered. I can see both long and three-quarter sleeves, the one flaring out over the other. Chola neatly folds the longer sleeves up from her wrist. I curiously touch the sleeve as she folds it back noticing its smooth texture, but Chola taps my hand, like Sister Jean often does, and says, "You can't touch." That's when I notice a wedding ring on her finger: did she get married in the convent? I panic. Then I remember that Sister Jean also wears a wedding ring, and so does Sister Ramona, Sister Anthony and all the Sisters at Our Lady of Good Counsel. When I once asked Sister Jean who she was married to, she said she was the bride of Jesus. I start to think. When Jesus came back from the dead, did he marry all these Sisters? I asked my dad how many wives a man could have. He said only one and if you have more than one wife you can go to jail. Now I’m worried. I can't let Chola marry Jesus and raise her children as a single parent. I want to solve this mystery just like Trixie Belden in the Black Jacket Mystery.

Chola's dress is mysterious, just like Sister Jean's, my 5th grade teacher. I search for clues and ask Chola about her habit, and she tells me she can't talk about how Sister Ramona and Sister Anthony dressed her or what clothing she wears underneath. What happened to Chola has never happened before -- to be dressed as a Sister and told not to tell anyone how she was dressed or what she is wearing underneath. This is her secret. When Chola walks on to the stage I peek for a glimpse of her underskirts. Her holy habit is a sign she will live her life for Jesus. She will take a vow of poverty and share everything that she has. I wonder if, last week, when Chola gave me half of her package of Twinkies, she had already been practicing her vow. Later that same day Chola gave me a set of three baseball cards from her bubble gum package. One card was a big surprise: "Campy" Roy Campanella, the catcher on my favorite baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. I hope that maybe next week she will give me the baseball cards packaged in her favorite potato chips.

I briefly imagine I would be happy for Chola 's vow of poverty if she joined the community of Dominicans. Maybe then she will have good luck. God will give her, and she will give me, the Mickey Mantle and Pee Wee Reese baseball cards that I've been searching for in every nickel package of Bubble Gum. I imagine the sun-filled day of her consecration. Chola gives me a special part in the ceremony that sets her apart to serve God. She asks me to recite the Lord's Prayer, a prayer I know by heart. I imagine the Dominican Sisters will serve my favorite foods from the school cafeteria for the celebration lunch: macaroni and cheese, slices of pepperoni pizza, and hamburgers with ketchup and sliced pickles.

Standing beside Chola after the play is over, I see her white coif, a headpiece that covers her neck and chin. A thin black veil is pinned over the coif and I remember how Sister Jean, sometimes at Mass, wore the veil down to cover her face. I don't like that I can’t see her soft brown hair beneath her cap. I am afraid that her face hurts, crunched in a moon circle, skin puffing out along the pressed edges of her starched coif. Chola doesn't want me to hug her now; she doesn't laugh when I try to be silly. I'm worried. If she is consecrated a Dominican Sister, she will change her name. She will no longer be Chola, and the tomato sauce stained apron that she now wears when she helps our Mom make delicious lasagna, cooked with sausage, ground beef and three types of cheese, will be replaced by a stiff white apron to protect the front and back of her habit when she works in the convent.

I walk out of the church and down the street. I know I am not allowed to cross Broadway alone. My Mom tells me all the time that she doesn’t want me to get hit by the Pesto Cheese Company truck, just like the one that hit Aunt Mary and broke both of her legs last year. But I’m sad and mad and feel like crossing the avenue on purpose. So I do. When I get home to my house on Madison Street, I go to Grandma’s apartment, turn on the television and watch Hector the Bulldog protect Tweety from Sylvester for the hundredth time.

Flo Gelo was born in Brooklyn, where she lived until her early teens. She's published numerous articles in professional literature about illness, death and dying. This story is one in a series about her life on Madison Street.

When I think of second-hand books, I think quite literally of anonymous fingers reaching out to me from beyond the grave. I can practically smell the stale breath of the book's past possessor and hear the words pass across his or her lips, buying vicarious intimacy for fifty cents or a dollar a pop. I'm talking about the way things were, when, as a painfully introverted teen in the late 1960's, I did my virgin browsing on Fourth Avenue, and when, unbeknownst to me and itself, this second-hand book Mecca was already on the wane.

Invariably staffed by a wizened old owl, himself hardly visible, perched on a stack of new arrivals (there being no room for table or chair), he might, if you were lucky, help direct you to the right pile, for the arcane inventory was locked in the folds of his brain.

But the secondhand books on my shelf derive from another source. I dug them out of a premature grave.

Down the block from where I have stubbornly plied my literary trade for more years than I care to count, the Eighth Street Bookstore, in its heyday the cherished haunt of aging Beat poets and bibliophiles, went up in flames decades ago, though it feels like the fire was only yesterday.

I happened to be on hand when the demolition men got around to clearing away the debris.

"Watch it, sonny!" one of the workmen muttered, pushing past me a wheelbarrow full of burnt books and broken glass. He dumped the contents into a huge metal garbage container parked just off the curb and broke for the day.

I reached in and plucked out the Complete William Blake.

Seconds later I was up over the edge of that great book coffin, as happy as a boy in a mud puddle, getting litera(aril)ly filthy among burnt books.

I stumbled over jagged sheet metal, former shelves and partitions, amid a hodgepodge of poetry and pornography: Sanskrit erotic verse, Fanny Hill, and Homer. Most of the books were singed but readable, with titles outlined in charcoal and price conveniently obliterated. They cost me nothing more than the effort to dig them out.

Jim, a philosophy grad student who happened by, joined me and together we set about to systematicallystrip-mining the bin.

"Kant here!" I yelled and flung Pure Reason at him.

"You want Williams?" he asked.

"Tennessee or William C.?" I asked.

In the beginning we mercifully glanced at unknowns. But sweat and greed made us choosy. And the obscure poets and thinkers went flying back into oblivion.

When a wall of psychology threatened to cave in on us we deserted the French Surrealists. Breton and Aragon, alas, got buried under Freud and Jung.

"I can tell there are a couple of book lovers here," said a well-dressed old collector with a canny smile. We helped him into the bin. He picked out a few French novels and The Whole Sex Catalogue, "for a friend," and dropped them into his straw basket. "Always find the best things in the trash," he winked, climbed back out and rode off on his bicycle.

"Any occult?" a woman called to us from the sidewalk.

"Come in and look for yourself!" I said.

The passersby got wise. By sundown the bin was as crowded as any bookstore, with browsers demanding: "Where's yoga?" or "How about art books?"

I loaded my haul into a one-wheeled shopping cart and dragged it back to my place. A little girl stopped me on the way.

"What you gonna do with all those books?" she asked.

"Read them," I said.

So the City swallows up its treasure. Life goes on.

After the fire, plywood planks replaced a once book-laden window display. Overnight the new wooden wall was covered with posters announcing upcoming events. The events took place. They too were forgotten.
 

A writer in multiple modes, including fiction (A Modern Way to Die), drama (The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words), and translation (most recently, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist), Peter Wortsman, the recipient of the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and The Geertje Potash-Suhr Prize of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, was a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. Also a widely published travel writer, his texts have appeared four years in a row in The Best Travel Writing 2008 - 2011. He is also the author of a new series of short e-Books: “The Urban Nomad – Paris” and “The Urban Nomad – Vienna.”

At 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning in May, a blank white truck pulled up curbside and the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in New York opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was dressed in black jeans and a spotless white t-shirt. His hair was military short. His eyes were the color of wet peat moss and dark tattoos ran down the sides of his neck and snuck up his sleeves. He extended his hand and introduced himself.

“I’m Jason,” he said, smiling a set of flawless teeth, straight and white, framed by lush lips. I’m such a sucker for polite, and for a good, strong handshake. I was immediately, completely undone.

My gaze traveled from our locked hands up his arms and across his chest—large but perfectly proportioned muscles, olive skin, a hint of Latino maybe. He smelled like fresh laundry.

“So?” Jason said.

“I’ll take you upstairs,” I said, snapping back to reality and turning toward the elevators.

In my tiny apartment, I showed Jason what had to go. I had separated the heavy things and the boxes full of books, along one wall, and I pointed these out, warning him about the weight.

“You like to read?” he said.

“Yeah. I’m a writer, or…trying to be.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “I like to read, too.” He asked me what I wrote and I told him I was working on a book about a cowboy.

“How can I get a copy?” he asked. I told him I’d have to finish it first. He said he’d watch for me. I decided not to tell him all about how I’d been working on the book for five years and was hoping to sell it soon, but how I was also too scared to put all my eggs in the precarious basket of being a writer and so would be starting a full-time, soul-sucking job the very next week for which I’d already bought a pair of black Kenneth Cole slingbacks, several conservative black suits and a professional handbag (black) to carry my office-issue Blackberry. He picked up a few of the book boxes and curled his arm around them, pausing in the doorway. I wanted to ask him what he liked to read, but I didn’t want him to have to answer my question while holding the boxes. Then again, I wanted him to stand there and hold the boxes for awhile, maybe all day. I was suddenly sorry the bed sheets were already packed. I desperately wished Dan would evaporate. The look on my face must have been confused.

“I know I look intimidating,” he said, unprompted. “But my friends say I’m a big pussy cat.”

All I could think to say was, “Okay.”

A half hour later, everything was loaded into the truck and the apartment was as empty as the day I’d moved in. Jason looked around, the way my mother does when she leaves a hotel room, making sure none of her things have blended inadvertently into the landscape of the space that is not hers.

“What’s this?” he said, picking up a stretched canvas propped against the corridor wall. It was a painting of two cowboys riding the range in black and white and shades of gray.

“Oh, that stays,” I said. “I’m throwing it away.”

“Why?”

“I never really finished it.”

“You painted this?” he said, his beautiful eyes wide. “You can’t throw this away. This is really good.” He held the painting at arm’s length and studied it the way people study paintings in museums. “Can I have it?” he asked.

“You want my painting?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think you realize how good it is.”

I think I smiled. I think I raised my eyebrows and smirked a little. It might have looked like a come-on. It might have looked like I wanted to puke.

“Sure,” I said. “You can have it.” And with that I closed the door to the apartment and we turned into the stairwell, Jason carrying the painting carefully by the frame.

Downstairs, Dan was pacing up and down the sidewalk next to the truck. It was drizzling and the door to the truck was open. Jason asked us if we wanted a ride to Brooklyn with him and I said sure. The subway would take us an hour, and it was such a dreary day. I climbed into the cab and took the middle seat and Dan got in beside me, his knees pressing against the glove compartment that was held shut with a piece of duct tape.

I wasn’t really sure, but I suggested we cut across to the FDR and drop down and cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Dan concurred. We wound up taking a wrong turn, and then somewhere along MLK everyone was honking. Jason looked in the side mirror and said, “Oh,” jerking the truck to the curb and jumping out. I looked back through the open window. Boxes were scattered down the street. “I’ll be right back,” Jason said. So Dan and I sat in the truck and waited. When Jason jumped back in the cab he said, “I got it all! Don’t worry!” And I trusted him completely.

A few minutes later, we were negotiating a series of one-way streets through Harlem when he spun around again, hit the brakes and wheeled the van around across traffic.

“Hang on a minute!” he said, leaving us idling on a sidewalk while he trotted into the open door of a junk store.

Dan looked at me, incredulous. “What the hell?” he said.

I shrugged.

Jason came back a few minutes later, got in the van and put the truck in gear.

“I just had to see about that juke box,” he explained without apology. “I collect ‘em. But the guy wanted eighty bucks, and that’s steep.” He pulled back into traffic, heading east, and I took the opportunity to look at his profile, his neck and hairline. “I watch Antiques Road Show,” he went on. “Do you know that show?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well I watch it a lot,” he said, “so I know what’s worth collecting. I really like slot machines and skulls and inkwells. You know what an inkwell is?”

“Uh huh,” I said. I didn’t look at Dan, but I was sure his eyes were rolling.

“I got this skull inkwell on lay away,” Jason went on. “Nine-hundred-dollar skull inkwell. You put the ink in the top of the skull. It’s crazy. I love it.”

By this time, I was sure we were heading in the wrong direction. In a moment, we hit Broadway.

“I think you can just turn left here,” I said.

“Okay, no problem,” Jason said. And for the first forty blocks or so the traffic moved at a decent clip. Just above Houston Street things got hung up and we sat for a long time watching the lights turn green, yellow, red. The rain was streaming down the windshield and Jason flicked the AC on.

“What’s your neck say?” I asked.

He reached a hand up and rubbed the ink embedded just above his collar.

“F.T.W.? It stands for Fuck The World,” he said. “I hate everyone, so this is my message.” He reached around the back of his neck, slipping his fingers beneath the collar, suggesting ink beyond the visible. His arm was as thick as my thigh. “I got a lot of these in jail,” he said.

I could feel Dan’s leg against mine, and it wanted to twitch.

“How long were you in jail?” I asked.

“Two years. On and off,” he said, and of course I was dying to know what for but was too afraid to ask. Luckily, he offered. “This last time,” he said, “I was in there for selling two hundred hits of X to an undercover cop. You know, Ecstasy. But the Tombs, that’s not an easy place to be. I recommend you don’t go there. It ain’t too cute.” Okay, good, I thought—drug-dealing. That’s safe. We’re safe. We’re not going to die between here and Brooklyn. We moved forward a block and a half.

“I just hang around with idiots,” he went on. “Like my friends, Mario and Carmine, they’re retarded. Mario comes up limping the other day, says Carmine stabbed him in the leg. But the next day they’re walking down the street holding hands like they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. And mostly I date strippers. I know I should date nicer girls, but that’s just the people I hang around with. I just broke up with this girl. It started off good, and then she got crazy. We used to go dancing at Copacabana. You been there? You like to dance?”

“Yeah, I love to dance,” I said. I hadn’t been in years.

“You guys should come,” he said. “Just don’t go on a Tuesday. Tuesdays is hoodie night. It ain’t too cute.”

I considered his offer. What would I wear? Could my tits compete with the stripper ex-girlfriend’s? Dan didn’t say a word, south along Broadway through Manhattan, over the bridge, through Brooklyn Heights, past Atlantic Street Center, up 4th Avenue to 3rd Street where we pulled up in front of my new place. It was still raining, but not as hard. We all grabbed something and went up to the second floor, a spacious one-bedroom, freshly painted.

“This is nice,” Jason said. “Really nice.” He looked up at the pressed tin ceilings, peered in at the newly-tiled kitchen, and I wondered where he lived, what it looked like there. He unloaded the truck in no time. And then we stood on the sidewalk, me with a wad of cash and him with an empty truck and my painting. Dan was upstairs and I could feel his eyes on us from the window.
I wondered if he was watching to protect me, or to see what I would do.

Jason held the painting out to me. “You should finish this,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t think painting is my thing.”

“But if you get famous, this is gonna be worth something,” he said. “I’m no dummy. I seen it all the time on Antiques Roadshow. Somebody gets famous for one thing, like they write a book or something, and then everything they’ve ever done or owned is worth a ton of money. So you’re going to write a book and then this painting is gonna be worth some money. You gotta finish it. Will you finish it and send it to me? I’ll give you my address. You gotta pen?”

I looked him all over, searching for something I still can’t name. I couldn’t imagine how a boy this pretty had survived in the slammer for even a day. He was a mama’s boy, a curious boy. He did his research. He liked collecting things. His eyes were open for opportunity. His eyes were open.

I pulled a yellow legal pad from my bag and gave it to him. I knew I wouldn’t finish the painting, but I thought maybe I could write to him instead. Maybe we could go dancing. He handed the paper back to me with his name and address written in a neat, blue hand.

“You know,” I said, looking at the painting, “I want you to have this one. I really do. If you like it the way it is.”

“Okay,” he said. “But if you paint another one, in blue, you can send it to me. I think it would look good in blue.”

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll see.” We shook hands. And then he got in the truck and drove away.

Upstairs, Dan said, “What the hell was that?”

“He wanted me to finish that painting.”

“What painting?”

“Of the cowboys.”

“Are you kidding?”

“He liked it. He thought it was beautiful. And he thinks it’s going to be worth a million bucks on eBay if I become a famous writer.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. Well,” I said. I ran my key along a seam of tape, opened a box and took some things out. There was no furniture in the place, nothing to sit on, so Dan sat cross-legged on the floor, asked if I wanted help unpacking and, when I declined, stood up and said he was going to go home.

I settled into my new place nicely, commuting every day to my job in Lower Manhattan and returning home to cook dinner for friends who would sit on the couch and balance plates on their laps, drink bottles and bottles of wine and make fun of my Barry-White-inspired bathroom, all black tile and gold fixtures. I worked 12 hours a day in my office with no windows and I got really good at running from one meeting to another in high heels. I had cocktails with the mayor at Gracie Mansion and rode around town in government-issued vehicles, with a driver who wore one of those curlicue wire devices behind his ear. I didn’t touch the draft of my book that sat on my desk for almost two years.

It would be a few months before Dan and I would break up, and years before I realized that at least one box of books and my favorite mug, stolen from the university student center in Reykjavik, were lost along that stretch of MLK in Harlem. Eventually I lost Jason’s address, too. For awhile I’d kept it, thinking I’d show up at Copacabana and try to find him, but of course I never did. I’m no dummy. Where Jason saw potential in my half-finished painting, in my half-formed self, I feared I would be disappointed in him. But who was I, in my suit and my slingbacks with my Blackberry, a nameless engine behind the powers that made the city go, go, go?

Much as I loved my new apartment, it was not who I wanted to be. I decided that after a year, I would move again. If I finished my book and became a famous writer, Jason could sell my painting on eBay and buy himself a cool new skull inkwell. I wondered if he would find the painting beautiful enough to hold onto until then.

Margot Kahn left New York City for Seattle where she hikes, bakes cakes and reads with her husband and son. Her book Horses That Buck, the biography of a Wyoming cowboy, was published in 2008. www.margotkahn.com

She asked if she could talk to me, was pretty, had eyes that were open and interested. Our faces nearly touched. Hers filled my vision completely, as though in an effort to block out all thought of the thriving city around us. She spoke fast. Her lips frothed with stats that I could barely hear, stats that meant nothing at all but SADNESS, though of course my head was nodding and—I discovered, hearing myself—I was making mm-hm sounds and even, on occasion, whenever the music of our exchange required it, saying the word "wow." I volleyed with her that way for an amount of time that felt significantly longer than any exchange in recent memory.

The clipboard that suddenly appeared in her hands was covered in stickers for her organization and cause. She was circling dollar amounts. I took it that these were my options.

When she stopped speaking her pen was resting on the smallest amount, the amount she said I could just give—as opposed to the higher amounts, which, if chosen, constituted an unqualified and fuller kind of giving. I then realized with not a little dread that she had mistook the sounds I had been making and the motion of my head as indicators of real interest, of sympathy or willingness, or—her eyes widening further—that I was a person on whom her words had had impact, a good person.

Now came the feeling that I had often felt before, one that I built my life, largely, to avoid—that I had committed myself falsely, that I had made promises I could not keep. It was a feeling, the fear of which had kept me from ever having once responded, either in the positive or negative, to a single e-vite. I did not know what I was going to do and liked very much to keep it that way.

How wretched and embarrassing it was for both of us that she had read me so closely and not taken heed of a person’s natural inclination to nod thoughtlessly to the tune of another’s speech. My head began to move the other way now, laterally, the side-to-side direction of no progress at all, a movement of the head that could have worked well in a modern art museum as a performance piece called Status Quo Keeping.

Still our faces were near touching—the distance at which people stand at the end of a date, when the walk home has come to its inevitable end. I told her this was not the way I wanted to do this, that it had no value, now, except as the submission of one person to the persuasiveness of another, that it could constitute nothing but my own weakness, that this wasn’t at all about children who are hungry—it was about her and I and the erasure of one another’s personal space. I told her that she was a woman and that I was a man. I suggested, unattractively, that these things were not coincidental but essential reasons for what was happening, for the closeness of her eyes to mine. Her pen waited there, still, on the brink, possibly, of her daily quota.

She said she was good at what she did and that because of this goodness she would try not to be offended by what I was suggesting and I had the feeling that this was something for which I was meant to be grateful. She said that she was an actress and that she could have done something more lucrative to support herself while pursuing her craft but this was what called out to her as needing more than anything else to be done.

I told her that if I gave her my credit card number—which I seemed already to be in the process of doing, my hand entering my pocket—it would not be for any child in any country anywhere, but for her. And if that was the case, I asked, did she still want it? Her eyes blinked. She stepped back.

After a moment, she said, well, I think you’ll be happy once you’ve done it, that you’ve made a difference.

I said, no, I won’t, I will feel like a person who has caved in to carefully applied pressure—that, in fact, by taking my money then, she was depriving me of the good feeling that might have come from going home and making an online donation on my own initiative. But then I realized she was busily copying my credit card number onto her form—not really listening anymore, just nodding.

A couple weeks later another young woman stops me—this one with beautiful tattooed trees climbing up her arm. I tell her that I have already been got and she says, “you’re awesome! High five!” Walking on toward the train, I do not feel awesome, but I do feel satisfied at having solved the problem of how to deal with these people: give them what they want. If you do, some kid somewhere might even get to eat, and a struggling actress too. I wonder how she’s doing.

Mac Barrett's fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in Salt Hill Review, Hanging Loose, The Brooklyn Rail, on Anderbo.com, Salon.com, and on the radio for WBAI. He works at CUNY TV as a producer of book-related programming.

The usher ripped the ticket with a friendly, “Congrats on your beautiful daughter. Second floor. Elevator for your stroller is to the left.” Father and daughter bought the $8 child’s popcorn-and-soda combo (no symbolic significance, Dad just hates wasting corn), slathered it in Garlic and Parmesan salt, and headed up to theater #2. Father parked the stroller in the wheelchair-friendly back-row, put baby daughter on his lap, and munched popcorn as the lights went down for the afternoon’s movie.

Rabbit Hole.

Father was aware that the film, based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s play, was about Becca and Howie Corbett (deftly played by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart), a wealthy New York City couple attempting to put their life back together eight month’s after the death of their four-year-old son, Danny. Father was unaware that Rabbit Hole is a blunt, clinical, matter-of-fact, almost inert look at what the reality of living through that nightmare would be like. Father still ate all his popcorn. Father laughed when Daughter smiled, stuck out her tongue and gurgled, even though on screen, Becca and Howie were having a knock-down drag-out over her inadvertent erasing of a favored Danny video on his smartphone.

Throughout most of Rabbit Hole, Father didn’t feel the film’s impact. The laughing, crying, bottle-suckling, and no-care-in-the-world cooing of the seven babies in attendance (not too mention the eight caregivers, especially the one who did an impromptu diaper change on the stairs, so as to not miss a key scene) kept the movie strictly in the realm of make-believe. Until it didn’t. Father hugged Daughter that much tighter when Becca was getting rid of her dead son’s toys before an impending home sale.

Rabbit Hole ended and the half-dimmed lights came up. Chatter amongst the adults seemed to prove that many people attend movies without a clue as to their content. A brutal cinematic experience levied only by the notion that the group, and their tiny companions, had endured it together. Laughs were shared at the sheer fact that a row full of babies had indeed fallen down the Rabbit Hole.

Father specifically asked the lone fellow male caregiver/filmgoer what he thought. “We thought we were going to see The Social Network, for some reason...,” said Andres from London, Dad of 6-month-old Rafa. “Rabbit Hole was OK. Not great. Though I missed the end as my son had had enough of waiting for the White Rabbit. I had to take him out and sit with the guy who had fainted during 127 Hours.”

Stroller packed up, children’s combo remnants tossed, Father and Daughter exited the theater. On the way out, Father overheard an usher say, “Showing this movie at Rattle & Reel? That’s messed up.”

Rabbit Hole mercifully over, Father and Daughter ducked into the men’s room for a quick diaper swap. That mission accomplished--even without the benefit of a changing station--Father and Daughter left the Sunshine.

Outside, the sun itself, was still shining.

Patrick J. Sauer is a freelance writer for Fast Company, ESPN, Popular Science, Smith, AOL and Huffington Post Humor. He is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to the American Presidents and is featured in Mr. Beller's anthology Lost and Found. Originally from Billings, Montana, he now lives in Brooklyn where he spends his days following his baby daughter's orders. For more, check out patrickjsauer.com or follow him on Twitter @pjsauer.

Elizabeth was half Korean, with lustrous dark brown hair and large, mysterious eyes. Her smile was demure, but she tossed her head like an untamed stallion. She had the perfect posture and gait of a dancer, and indeed, by night she danced ballet, while by day she worked as a graphic artist for Family Circle Magazine. That summer Elizabeth would be prima ballerina in a production of Coppelia at Columbia University.

Then came bad news. My law firm was disbanding and I was being laid off. This could ruin my summer plans. I had to find another job.

My family lived in Washington DC where my father worked for the State Department. I called with the news, and to my surprise my father offered not just sympathy, but connections. He knew a lawyer at the Ford Foundation in New York City. The next day I received an invitation to lunch with Mr. Anthony Riolo. It was for Friday, the same day as opening night of Coppelia. A full and important day: first an audience with counsel for the Ford Foundation, and then in the audience for Elizabeth the prima ballerina.

Mr. Riolo and I chatted freely about our lives, and the ups and downs of living in New York City; so crowded, yet so much culture. He seemed to have everything. He worked for a prestigious foundation, owned a brownstone in the East Village, and drove a Lamborghini for God’s sake! Far from a stuffy, pinstriped corporate lawyer, he wore a trimly tailored off-white suit with bright red bowtie. Like Elizabeth he stood up straight, dancer-straight you might say. He couldn’t offer me a job, but gave me names of people to call.

On the way to Coppelia, I stopped at my neighborhood flower shop for a dozen red roses with baby’s breath. Elizabeth and I had just watched the first televised production of Swan Lake at Lincoln Center, with Natalia Makarova as Odette/Odile. At curtain call, Makarova was presented with a grand bouquet of roses, and I wanted the same for my ballerina.

Outside the theater I ran into Kitty, one of Elizabeth’s ballet friends who was helping out backstage.

“Roses for Elizabeth at curtain call,” I whispered, “Where do I take them?”

“How lovely,” said Kitty, “I’ll make sure she gets them.”

Elizabeth’s performance was enchanting. She danced with such elegance and grace, while her face captured the impish humor of the story. I was so proud that we were together. Then came curtain call, and the moment I had been waiting for. Kitty appeared on stage with my stunning bouquet of red roses. She presented it to Elizabeth, who beamed and took it under her left arm, then bowed graciously until the curtain came down, just as Makarova had done in Swan Lake.

A perfect moment, but over too soon. I wished the curtain would open again, so I could once more see her cradling my roses. The curtain did rise, but not for what I expected. Kitty appeared again, this time with another bouquet of red roses, identical to the first. Again Elizabeth smiled, gathering the second bouquet under her other arm. With her arms full of roses, she stood bowing for two, three, four curtain calls until the applause subsided and the house lights came up.

I wondered, Does she have another lover on the side? I dashed down the aisle, vaulted onto the stage, and slipped between the curtains to backstage, where I found Kitty.

“Who gave Elizabeth the other bouquet?”

“Oh,” she said. “That was Tony.”

“Tony? Who’s Tony?”

“Uh, that’s him,” she pointed over my shoulder. “Right behind you.”

Turning around, I found myself face to face with Mr. Anthony Riolo.

I gasped, “You know Elizabeth?”

“Oh yes,” he replied. “She’s my favorite.”

If this was her other guy, what would she want with me? Successful lawyer, brownstone in the Village, and drives a Lamborghini for God’s sake! Then I noticed what he was wearing. No tailored suit or red bowtie, but a dark green iridescent jump suit that zipped up in front. It was open down to his navel, partially exposing his bare chest.

He reached out and placed a firm hand on my shoulder. “She’s my favorite ballerina, and I’d marry her in a shot,” he said, “if I weren’t gay.”

* * *

Tony was a good friend to both of us. He died of AIDS on March 28, 1989. He was 46.

After thirty years as a public service lawyer in New York City, Cullen McVoy is semi-retired and doing what he always wanted to do—writing about his life. His first essay, With these Shackles I Thee Wed, won first prize in Literal Latte Journal’s annual essay contest, and is due to be published in the spring.

Judging by the number of people milling around on the platform, I could tell I hadn’t just missed one. I picked a spot towards the end where the back of the train would be if it ever arrived, careful not to stand under any of the mysterious fluids that dripped from the ancient overhead structures. I couldn’t imagine what I would do if I ever got nailed by a drip. I imagined it burning an immediate hole through my skin forcing me to be rushed to Methodist—something I did not want to experience.

I was trying to be patient and not stare into the tunnel willing the headlights of the oncoming train to appear. I was attempting to be all Zen-like but always found it hard to fight the impulse. Just then I heard a woman’s voice resonating off the underground structures, “Don’t cry for me Argentina…” I turned around to face the direction I thought the full-bodied tones were coming from. But the singing had stopped and I didn’t notice any divas in sequins and chiffon, standing around waiting to catch their breath, preparing for the next stanza.

As I turned back around, it came again. “The truth is I NEVER left you.” The voice was getting louder; the mystery singer was really belting it out, evidently caught up in the echo quality that was more than a few notches up from a normal singing in the shower experience.

Only now I thought I figured out whom the show tunes vocalist was. The strong, falsetto soprano was actually a slightly overweight, balding man with glasses carrying an unmarked shopping bag. He was neatly dressed; the kind of average guy that would go unnoticed had he not been singing at the top of his lungs in a high, extremely loud voice, that wasn’t too bad.

He stopped after each line, like he was savoring the reverberations of each sound. He didn’t want to rush through it. And while I could appreciate this desire to sing, given the acoustics provided by the underground tunnel, even in a voice atypical of one associated with a male, he had crossed some sort of line. He had entered into that area reserved for the not quite right. Those who should know better but can’t seem to help themselves. I knew I was being judgmental but we couldn’t all just go around doing whatever we felt the urge to do. I mean, I’d like to belt out “ROXanne,” or something similar, but I don’t because, well, I just don’t.

The train pulled into the station and as I boarded I glanced down the platform to see if the diva was headed my way. I was secretly happy to see that he was. I stood by the door, where I would be exiting at the next stop, Seventh Ave. He took a seat next to a man who appeared to be Pakistani. He said something to the Pakistani man that made him smile and nod in agreement. I watched, riveted, thinking, about how the world works--how one can never tell when they are talking to a man they think is “normal” or one who dreams of being Patti Lupone.

As he sat there with a wry smile on his face, I heard his falsetto softly starting to emerge. Was he using all his wits to keep from singing or was he just warming up? The train pulled into my stop and as the doors opened and I stepped off, I heard, “Don’t cry for me Argentinaaaaaaaa.”

Fran Giuffre is a freelance writer from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsday and this web site. She is currently teaching elementary education in Brownsville.

On a recent Sunday the crowd pressed to the right of the stairs in a long drawn-out amorphous ring, from the midst of which emanated deafening music. Even the two Jehovah’s Witnesses stationed stiff as wax figures to the left of the stairs gave up God’s business for the moment and joined the onlookers, since nobody seemed to be interested in their message.

The object of everyone’s rapt attention remained a mystery to the chance passerby until suddenly the wall of humanity parted a crack, revealing a tiny figure mistakable at first sight for a little boy, but soon recognizable—on account of the powerful shoulders—as an adult dwarf. With a black hat set at a dapper tilt, dark sunglasses and a tight black sequined jacket, he moved gracefully and rhythmically backwards, in the soft stepping, faked forward motion of Michael Jackson’s trademark cakewalk, transforming the filthy, chewing-gum-flecked, floor into his stage.

"So beat it, just beat it!” the familiar androgynous voice blasted from a somewhat battered boombox, as the dwarf abruptly grabbed his private parts, and with shoulders flung back, obscenely heaving his hips, dry-humped the air before him. Some snickered, others cheered. “Don’t wanna be a boy, you wanna be a man. You wanna stay alive, better do what you can. So beat it, just beat it!” echoed the shrill command. Whereupon, after lowering the jacket slowly, provocatively, first from the left shoulder, then from the right, to demonstrate with rippling muscles the amazing strength of his arms, he started trembling suggestively, ever more unabashedly, first with the chest cage, next with the stomach muscles, and finally with his entire body, consumed by a carefully choreographed orgasm. Some spectators laughed out loud. Others turned red, covering their children’s eyes.

But they did the dancer an injustice. For his dance was at once a great tribute and an extraordinary send-up, in which he invested his entire tragic being and a remarkable comic talent altogether worthy of Aristophanes and Harpo Marx. –“Showin’ how funky strong is your fight, it doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right. Just beat it, beat it!”

The crowd fell silent as the song came to an end, and the dwarf took a slow bow, his hat pushed back, his glasses pressed down over his nose, his sadly noble, strikingly handsome Latin Mestizo face held up like a hidden treasure with the pride of a true artist and the desperation of an eternal outsider. For a split second his size was forgotten. In that instant he also revealed a striking resemblance to the fallen popstar. Coins and crumpled banknotes flew through the air. Every injured soul saw himself reflected in that face. And as the spectators scattered, the two Jehovah’s Witnesses surreptitiously slinking back into their corner, the dwarf deftly swept up his take, whereupon with hat, glasses and expression once again set aright, he bit his lower lip and prepared to be born again in the next dance.

A writer in multiple modes, including fiction (A Modern Way To Die), drama (The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words) and translation (most recently, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist), Peter Wortsman is the recipient of the Beard's Fund Short Story Award and The Geertje Potash-Suhr Prize of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, and was a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. Also a widely published travel writer, his texts have appeared in The Best Travel Writing 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.