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69 Years After

by 03/24/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Greenwich Village, Lower East Side, Uncategorized

In the spring of 1980 I was a cocky new teacher of English as a Second language, fresh from education grad school, with innovative pedagogy that I couldn’t wait to try out on students. My first job in New York was a gem: "Vocational ESL." It was funded by the feds and I'd gone to [...]

Stuff in Stockings

by 03/20/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Yorkville

Gabriella breezed into St. Stephen’s 6th grade as a new student, and left a battleship wake when she mysteriously disappeared after seventh grade. Gabriella was an adorable Hungarian immigrant with a low voice like Natasha on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Her hair was cut short and bobbed to show off her huge dark almond-shaped [...]

Yes To Carrots

by 03/06/2011
Neighborhood: East Village

I wanted Yes To Carrots lotion. I’d seen it in a magazine – something like Self, or InStyle. I liked how the packaging looked, and I am not normally a sucker for packaging. The bright orange capital letters and font were pleasing on my eyes. And I love carrots. I love lotion. I love saying [...]

The Three Women

by 02/28/2011
Neighborhood: Union Square

“There’s three women in your life that will always be there,” he said. He had just sold me three pairs of socks for my daughter, and after he took my five-dollar-bill was ruffling through his wad of money. We were on the sidewalk across the street from Manhattan’s Union Square, and it was a warm [...]

The Asian Bug

by 02/20/2011
Neighborhood: Across the River, Letter From Abroad

The Asian bug has bitten my younger son Jesse. I don’t mean the flu that comes around every several years and gets blamed on that continent. No, he has been smitten by the mysterious East, and, like Marco Polo, fallen under the spell of the Orient. He is dating an Asian girl. Not that there [...]

Getting to St. Martin

by 02/07/2011
Neighborhood: JFK/LGA

It was my biggest disappointment in recent memory. I slumped in a blue plastic seat at the JFK terminal to absorb the shock while my plane to sunny St. Martin took off without me. I couldn’t believe I had let my vacation slip through my fingers. I had remembered to pack everything—the sunscreen, the bikinis, [...]

Baby Doll

by 02/07/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Tribeca, Uncategorized

It was 1995. I was a junior in college, working full-time at a Fuddrucker’s restaurant on the Upper East Side. I wore a uniform three sizes too large, in custodial colors, bedecked with promotional buttons for mega-nacho platters and S.O.B. sundaes. (“Son of a bitch?” a customer asked me once, pointing quizzically at the pin [...]

The Fat Jiggling Machine

by 01/25/2011
Neighborhood: Upper West Side

One Sunday afternoon when my father suggested we go to his health club in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, I said, “No, why would I wanna go there?” I made a face. “Come on,” he said, as we walked through the lobby and stood under the awning outside our apartment building on West 76th [...]

Speed Shrinking for Love

by 12/24/2010
Neighborhood: East Village

On Friday night of Valentine’s Day weekend, I found myself on the exact same block where Slim and I saw a lesbian couples counselor for several months in 1995. What a weird déjà vu to be thrown back here alone, not for therapy but for a Speed Shrinking book party tossed by my straight colleague. [...]

The Honda Healing

by 07/31/2010
Neighborhood: Bronx

It was midnight and Jay and I were walking out of Brook Park in the South Bronx. We had been in the Puerto Rican version of a sweat lodge. Years ago I had attended a Lakota Indian version of the same purification ritual in upstate New York. But this experience was far more spiritual and [...]

A Sidekick for St. Patrick’s Day

by 03/17/2010
Neighborhood: Featured, Upper East Side

Walking the streets on St. Patrick’s Day in New York City is akin to walking into an insane asylum in which all the inmates have been starved for days, denied all their medications, punched about the head a few times, then painted green and released from their cells. Also, someone has pissed in all the [...]

Sitting Behind Cybill Shepherd

by 02/06/2010
Neighborhood: Featured, West Village

I took a Chaucer English Literature class in 1968 at New York University. I was told Chaucer used a lot of dirty words. An erotic film was made based on ‘The Canterbury Tales.’ I figured the professor wasn’t going to screen it in class but maybe I could take a female classmate to see it [...]