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You are currently browsing stories tagged with Art and Performance
Guns Guns Guns
by peter nolan smith 12/19/2010Neighborhood: Featured, Upper West Side
Kids in America are supposed to like guns. Our movie heroes majestically wield weapons on the silver screen and TV cops dance through primetime gun ballets. Armed with air rifles and plastic weapons my friends and I played WAR in the woods behind my house. Imaginary bullets tore holes through the make-believe Nazis and Japs. [...]
Son of Sam Got Me Out of Guitar Lessons
by Tom Diriwachter 12/19/2010Neighborhood: Staten Island
New Dorp Lane, even in 1976, was a traffic jam of cars in search of parking for the shops and restaurants up and down the strip. On the corner of Clawson Street, was Lane Music, its window drawn with a transparent yellow shade. Inside, guitars hung on one wall, while, opposite, were the doors to [...]
At Least You Have Pride
by Jennifer Paddock 04/15/2010Neighborhood: West Village
My first apartment in New York was on the second floor of a seven-story walk-up on MacDougal Street, between West Third and Bleecker. It was a three-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom with a view of a chain-linked pen where the building kept the trash, always bags and bags of it. I was twenty-five and feeling very lucky. I [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
