Where Am I?
You are currently browsing stories tagged with Out of Towners
Tolerance
by Paul Vidich 06/08/2008Neighborhood: Times Square
I didn’t know I had a problem until the telephone call. It was 2:31 a.m. I know the exact time because we have a digital clock by our bedside phone. I lay in bed next to Linda in my mismatched pajamas because we’d come home slightly drunk at midnight from Balthazar and I couldn’t find [...]
Cats Are Prisoners
by Lesley Clark 05/25/2008Neighborhood: Upper East Side
Little yellow post-it sticky notes were posted all over the apartment. “Help yourself” was on the refrigerator, “coffee’s here” was posted on the silver Gevalia canister. In big red letters atop the post-it note was, “Warning- Caffeinated” and a postscript, “I know how you are on caffeine,” all this accompanied with a little bewildered looking [...]
Small Claims is a War of Attrition
by Sarah Miller-Davenport 04/06/2008Neighborhood: Lower East Side
It is a cool, dry August evening and I am in a windowless room at 111 Centre Street. I leave New York, the city of my birth, in less than a week. Yet, through a series of escalating events, I choose to be here, stubbornly clinging to the dream of winning back a minor sum [...]
Where We’re From
by Jeanette Thornton 04/06/2008Neighborhood: Upper West Side
It is rare, in New York, so I’ve noticed, that conversations pop up with strangers but I have experienced a few. I was in the bakery down the street from my apartment on the Upper West Side, the one with only two tables and a line out the door, and I was searching for the [...]
Young Russian Immigrants Turn to Heroin
by Anne Noyes Saini 03/31/2008Neighborhood: Brooklyn, On the Waterfront
Her daughter tried dozens of rehab clinics and treatment programs. After awhile, Olga says, they blurred into a familiar pattern: “program, back, program, back.” “Back” meaning: back on heroin. Olga, who asked that her and her daughter’s names be changed for this story, came to New York City with her family in 1997, refugees from [...]
The Bitches of Banner Elk
by Ryan Sloan 01/04/2008Neighborhood: Across the River, Queens
The trip from Greensboro, North Carolina to New York will be safe and superfast in our little plane. I climb in, pleased to find I have a seat alone. An elegant young couple sits across from me – they have a small, silent beagle in a carry-on case. The man’s probably thirty and has a [...]
Floor Pounding Polkas: A Croatian Wedding Story
by Joseph Scalia 10/28/2007Neighborhood: Across the River, Letter From Abroad
I should have known I was in trouble when I read the wedding invitation and saw that the reception was in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge someplace in New Jersey. The second clue was that the directions were in a foreign language! I was no stranger to ethnic couplings, having seen both the [...]
The Paper That Covers Straws
by Tom Diriwachter 08/31/2007Neighborhood: Times Square
My new play, “Asterisk,” recently opened. It was workshopped at The Crucible of American Theater, which planned to produce it in their first season, but went bankrupt after their first production. I had a show fold at The American Theater of Actors, when the director’s wife asked for a divorce, and he lost his job, [...]
Yawning Prohibition
by Hal Sirowitz 07/28/2007Neighborhood: Midtown
(This story took place on a stalled Amtrak train one hundred feet from Penn Station. Therefore, since the train didn’t get to New Jersey yet, I’m calling this a Manhattan story. Though, that can be argued about by those who say it’s not where you are that’s important – that’s just earth stuff – but [...]
Window Displays
by Kevin Nolan 07/20/2007Neighborhood: Midtown
Herald Square is not a good neighborhood in which to work. In fact, it’s not a neighborhood at all. It’s an area. On street level there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Office buildings empty into crowds of slow-moving shoppers who move in and out of the oxymoronic Manhattan Mall. They move about at [...]
A Flicker of Sadness in the Blue & Gold
by Tom Tierney 12/31/2006Neighborhood: East Village
Mossy stayed with me for a week in New York and never saw any of the sights. He left the apartment every day and found a breakfast for himself someplace and walked around the east village a little and eventually found his way to the Blue and Gold and started drinking. I’d meet him there [...]
Straggling at the Guggenheim
by Beth Schwartzapfel 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper East Side
It’s a freezing Friday night at the Guggenheim, 8:00, and technically the museum closed 15 minutes ago. Two gallery guides, as their bright red tags indicate they’re called, are following Cate and me down the spiral that swoops around the building’s atrium like some giant half-stretched slinky. In their early twenties, at times during our [...]
