You are currently viewing the stories for “December 2002.”
Most parents have to be repeatedly prodded, coaxed and cajoled into attending any school meeting. Parents of Emotionally Disturbed Special Ed. students are required to attend annual meetings to evaluate their child's individual program and progress, or lack thereof. It is therefore no surprise that voluntary meetings, such as Open School Night, can be notorious for lack of parental attendance. [...]
It’s dawn and I’m fighting with a bobcat. For a raccoon, I’m doing pretty well. The sun is burning through the misty clouds, slowly warming up the forest - the forest, my home, that I love so well. Small birds sing loudly from the branches of trees, their lungs filled with sweet yearning. Crows, who kind of piss me off, [...]
Today, I walk the stairs up to the elevated platform, ready to join 3.5 million of my closest friends on the subway. Just a few days before a possible transit workers strike was to have happened. Being unable to get into Manhattan would have hurt my wallet but, I remind myself, there are bigger issues at stake. The N train [...]
Something like ten years ago, I was walking with a friend of mine down Westnedge Avenue, in Kalamazoo, MI. We were talking about rock music, and my friend, who’s about as brainy as they come, got onto the subject of the band Pavement. More specifically, he began deconstructing what he perceived to be the average Pavement fan. "College student," he [...]
The View From the Seventieth Floor by Sandy Gelpieryn Death Masks at Ground Zero by Kendra Hurley The Numbers by Bryan Charles The View From Silver Lake Park by Gabrielle Walter Don't Look Back by Kevin McLeod Scenes From The Brooklyn Bridge by Jim Merlis The View From Long Island Part Ii by Adam Baer Ob Gyn Wtc by [...]
It’s frustrating being over two thousand miles away from home and hearing about the death of the great Joe Strummer, the Clash singer, guitarist. As I read his obituary in the LA Times (on page 1 – nice to see he got the respect he deserves) all I want to do his to listen to his music, but I’m at [...]
"S-s-s-s-h-h-h-t. I love that sound," says the second-generation seltzer man Barry Walpow. He's at the Seaview Diner in Canarsie, simulating the joyful noise of seltzer squirting from a glass siphon bottle, before heading off to make an end-of-the-day delivery in Williamsburg. The tall 51-year-old, wearing a battered black baseball hat and glasses as thick as the bottoms of the seltzer [...]
It's been ten years, but I still keep it on the resume. I would venture to say it's gotten me every job I've had since college, not to mention a book deal and more than a few birds to die for--one of whom is currently on her third Cosmo and showing no signs of slowing down. "You were really good," [...]
It was 1985 at the original Ritz (East 11th Street; now it's Webster Hall), NYC's greatest-ever rock club. Blind Dates, my big haired happy-go-pop band, was the opening act for the then-popular Aussie group Eurogliders. The place was sold out and teeming with what we called "festive new wave nubiles"--the Rat Pack would have called them "hot chicks." My Grandpa [...]
When I first met Lance I was in an altered state. I was sixteen, back in 1963, when you could still buy a Benadryl inhaler, break it open and find a cotton wedge soaked with amphetamine. I'm not sure who first noticed this, but it might have been Jack Kerouac. I hope not, but it probably was. It was late [...]
When my husband Ted and I bought the parlor floor apartment in a 4-family co-op in Brooklyn, we developed an amicable relationship with Sharon, who lived with her cat in the basement apartment below us. We watched as she transformed herself from a 300 lb., caftan-wearing woman, to half that size in a matter of months. She was shrinking before [...]
My mother taught me to fear rats. She still shudders when she recalls the rat-infested tenement overlooking the Harlem River in the Bronx that my Czech refugee family called home when we first arrived in America, in 1970. Strange crunching sounds could be heard emanating from the hollowed walls of our apartment, and after a neighbor proudly showed my mother [...]
"Seats are left," the man assures me over the phone, "but please, hurry, hurry." Sunshine Travel Tours won't take reservations but he provides me with directions to the agency in Chinatown. A frequent traveler to Boston, I was happy to see the ad in the Village Voice offering one way tickets for $15 compared to the Greyhound/Trailways $40 seat. Once [...]
I would like to believe that I went out to Queens to leave the My Adidas sweatshirt in tribute to Jam-Master Jay, but I'd be lying. I've long gotten a superiority chuckle watching "mourners" on television who bring hand-painted signs, 99-cent store teddy bears, daily newspapers with 64-pt. headlines announcing the celebrity death, and acres of chrysanthemums, roses and white [...]
The more games the New York Knicks won the more they raised the ticket prices. I could only afford to see them at Madison Square Garden if they continued to have losing seasons. I’d buy a ticket from a scalper. Instead of charging more he’d sell it for a fraction of what it was worth, because no one wanted to [...]
Lately when I go for a walk I make a vow not to walk under any scaffolding, in protest of there being so much of it these days. Two minutes later I realize I'm walking under scaffolding. One day I stopped and looked at the scaffolding around the NYU tower at East 8th Street and Mercer and realized it had [...]
Everyone has bad days. But for some souls fate comes down hard and fast and delivers a load of bad luck so rotten that the events of that person's life from that point on have to be filed into two categories: before the bad day and after. Around dinnertime on a still, muggy June evening, not far from the arched [...]
I was at the bar of Florent very late Sunday night. A snow storm was raging outside. Pastis, that seat of slutty mayhem, sat up the block. There are now tastefully bright lights all over the meat packing district, where there was once just meat and the people who packed it. It was strange to sit at Florent, whose entrance [...]
First of all, and please note that this preventive axiom applies to many long and painful life detours, never take a job that you hate, particularly when it happens to be with a large company where people refer to working in their offices until 11:00 p.m. as “staying late” and recount it—“I could just relax. Everything flowed. I could have [...]
Once upon a time there was a drawing of a man and his dog. It was by William Steig. It was what the distinguished artist produced when we asked him to draw something that we at the Neighborhood could use as a, a, a.... (it's to the right)... something. A Logo is the word I am hoping to avoid. For [...]
The building, Morgan described, was a monolith of brick with a flat, black hole blasted out of the side. Standing at the edge of the entrance, he peered inside and swore that he saw someone moving. He shivered and stumbled to the curb, then quickly retraced his footsteps back up First Avenue, skirting the fringe of industrial Sunset Park, passing [...]
