You are currently viewing the stories for November, 2002
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Goes Shopping
by Jon Michaud 11/24/2002Neighborhood: Midtown
In the autumn of 1991 I came to New York to take a fiction writing class. I was 23, fresh out of graduate school, with no savings and little work experience save for two summers clerking in a bookstore in the Maryland suburbs. I wanted to be close to the rarefied air of New York […]
A Star Shines in Marie’s Crisis
by Virginia Vitzthum 11/24/2002Neighborhood: Greenwich Village
I don’t like show tunes and don’t really understand how any one does. But the idea of piano bars intrigues me the same way pick-up basketball games and gay sex clubs do, as a place where men get to play with strangers. So when my mus ical theater friends Jim and Andy invited me to […]
Hilda Still Lives Here
by Kate Walter 11/24/2002Neighborhood: West Village
I was waiting for the elevator on my floor when I saw a sign on the bulletin board that an elderly painter was going into a nursing home and her work was in the basement, free to residents. I live in Westbeth Artists Housing in the far West Village; the note was from the management […]
The Spirit of Scandinavia
by Lauren Grodstein 11/24/2002Neighborhood: Bronx
Ask Bronx resident Keshauna Sanders, 12, what the most remarkable thing about Finland is and she’ll tell you: it’s the pizza. “They put ham on it!” she says. “And pineapple!” Her classmate Priscilla Mercedes concurs. “The food is real weird there,” she says. “But the people are so sweet. When you’re in Finland, you get […]
The Pitch
by Joshua M. Bernstein 11/24/2002Neighborhood: Uncategorized
Blind Accordion Player Guy Who Bumps into Poles on Purpose, Angry Mute Midget, Classical Opera Whistler Dude, Man Who Imitates The Sound of Closing Doors, and Dirty Shoeless Guy Dressed in Rags That Crawls on the Floor. Each of these beggars (should I say Entrepreneurs?) preys on different emotions. For Blind Accordion, it’s sympathy–he’s driven […]
Boots and Saddles
by Susan Connell-Mettauer 11/24/2002Neighborhood: Letter From Abroad
The first time I saw Billy Brooks he was riding around Ojo Sarco, a sparse village of yellow adobe huts and longhouses grouped on either side of a ravine. It was 1971. Billy was on a tall horse the color of city mud and surrounded by varmints waving rifles like the banditos in “Treasure of […]
Brief Glimpses of Mekas
by Paul Felter 11/24/2002Neighborhood: Lower East Side
Late last year the 78-year-old filmmaker and archivist Jonas Mekas debuted his new diary film. The title, awkward but precise, is, “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty.” Its running time is around five hours, so it can only play once in an evening. On the first night of its […]
The Politics of Hair Removal
by Alicia Erian 11/24/2002Neighborhood: Manhattan
Last August, when the Russian woman who waxes my legs in Brooklyn went on vacation, I made an appointment at a spa in SoHo. I’d actually been meaning to switch for some time. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Vicki—I did. She was dirt cheap, and we shared an interest in politics. Even though her […]
Among The Thugs, Part Two
by Thomas Beller 11/23/2002Neighborhood: Letter From Abroad
Continued from Part One It’s tough playing to a half-empty house, but there is some consolation if the house you’re playing holds 60,000 people. It’s been a beautiful day in Oakland, and now, in the cool blue dusk, the crowd upfront is getting seriously pumped. As usual, Oasis are immobile. Arthurs is, for reasons no […]
What it Feels Like for a Mets Fan
by Daniel Nelson 11/21/2002Neighborhood: Queens, Shea Stadium
Men will ruin $500 suits scrambling for a $5 baseball. It’s an adage as old as the idea of men wearing suits to a ball game. It also happens to be true. Every person attending a major league baseball game — from the youngest child being indoctrinated into the ritualistic church of Baseball at the […]
War Games in Van Cortlandt Park
by Bram Gunther 11/15/2002Neighborhood: Bronx
I was waiting at the doorstep of the Ranger station in Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx. I had been an Urban Park Ranger for about three months now, and this was going to be my first tour of the Croton Aqueduct Trail. I was leading the tour with my fellow Ranger, Rich, who was a […]
The Cottonwood Cafe
by Victoria Reggio 11/15/2002Neighborhood: West Village
We met by way of the New York City Marathon; the roller skating marathon. It is little known Big Apple trivia, but in the Fall of 1980, there was a roller-skating marathon that covered the same mileage and territory throughout the five boroughs. One of the participants was my boyfriend T.J. A draft resister who […]